The Funkos and The Bowling Balls
I have a soft spot for those little Funko Pop bobbleheads. So does my brother… he’s got hundreds on his walls. I have maybe a dozen. I don’t pick them up very often; when I do, it’s usually cause it’s got some personal significance to me. But that’s not the reason for my soft spot.
My soft spot comes from my appreciation of how they’re able to capture a character or actor’s essence sometimes with the littlest thing, like an accessory, hairstyle or… eyebrows.
It was this one, buried up on my brother’s wall, that really drove home how the Pops really can capture an essence. Even before I saw the title or the name, I saw the eyebrows and asked “Is that Shawn Levy on… oh yeah, it is”. Because they’d done such a job capturing them, they stood out. As someone with thick brows myself, I can certainly sympathize with what dominant features they are with Shawn and his legendary father.
Not everyone has such distinctive eyebrows though. Sometimes it comes down to a signature hairstyle, glasses or other prop that really brings someone to life. Like, Indiana Jones… or ZooTV-era Bono with his “The Fly” shades… Larry’s drumsticks are little things that give him away (if you know, you know)… but he’s not as distinct as the other two when it comes to casual observers. You’d probably recognize Indy even without the box telling you what it is, and probably Bono too.
So what’s this have to do with my bowling balls? Well, this was something I had to isolate over a decade ago when I started working on that Bowl For Kids Sake campaign for Big Brothers Big Sisters. It started with the pirate theme. What elements make a pirate uniquely identifiable as a pirate? And what elements exist in bowling that I can utilize to evoke them? The eyepatch is the most obvious one. And the skull and crossbones.
Check, and check. Other elements, like the mappish scroll with X marking the spot serving as a background for the event title added to it, but it was the patch and the crossbones that really sold it. And you could argue that just the patch alone made it a pirate.
More recently the agency decided to bring back the Bowl For Kids Sake after covid shut it down for four years. I needed a theme. They finally gave me one… carnival… circus. So, I started with just a fairly blank teaser, one that had nothing to do with the circus. It was just to announce that bowling was coming back. Then subsequent posts would embellesh upon that, to start pointing towards the them.
My initial idea was that I was going to go full-on creepy Heath Ledger “Joker”. So I started with the “lips”. And it immediately told the story of “clown”. Then for the next post I was going to start adding extra elements, like green hair, more shadows around the eyes, other clownish stuff. But, once I got the squirting flower and sad trampy bowler hat on him, I realized… this works as is. It doesn’t need more. These three elements… the lips, the flower and the bowler hat (you know what? “bowler hat”? I honestly did NOT consider that pun when I put it on him… it just fit visually… I will have to capitalize on that later).
In 2012, after I had other agencies express interest in the pirate theme, my entrepreneurial mind kicked into overdrive. “Hey, if I have people already interest in the pirate theme, what might they buy if I have more themes available?”… and I went on a tear, pouring hundreds of hours into capturing the essences of almost two dozen other characters and properties. Not all of them sold, but it was an exciting time to be engaged in a creative pursuit.
I would get specific requests for brand new themes that weren’t covered in my pre-design spree.
And one year, I pushed for “Bowl For Kids Sake Goes To The Movies”, which would end up being a catch-all clearing house for a ton of themes I’d created but had no real outlet for. All the headlines are mine… bad puns and all.
