Celebrity Dolls Part 2: Sports Celebrities

This is another sub-group of "Dolls for Boys" which I don't have represented very well on this blog or in my own collection. There are many athlete / sports celebrity dolls that I like, such as the original Wayne Gretzky doll by Mattel, or the Canadian made Bobby Orr doll by Regal, but they always seem to allude me. As such I unfortunately don't have any photos from my own collection to add here, but I still wanted to include this info somewhere on the blog.

Below is a partial list of Sports Celebrity dolls! Sport character dolls such as Mattel's Real Men are not included, as this list is based only on actual celebrities.

Sport Celebrity Dolls

1971 - Mego produces a 12 inch "Broadway Joe Namath" doll along with several sets of clothing accessories, based on football player Joe Namath. A decade later in 1982 the Mego company went bankrupt, but was relaunched around 2011. To celebrate the Mego company's history, an 8 inch doll of Joe Namath was among the first assortment of dolls to be made by the new Mego company.

1975 - Canadian toy company Regal produces their 12 inch Bobby Orr doll and soon updates the head, making two distinct variations. Bobby Orr is a hockey player for Boston Bruins.

These two images were found online.

 

It seems that Sears didn't quite know how to sell sports character dolls. An American 1975 Sears Christmas Wish book advertised the Bobby Orr doll in between Ken and Barbie, even though the same catalogue had separate pages with various Mego superhero dolls and Kenner's Six Million Dollar Man dolls.

This is where I found the image: http://modernkiddo.com/how-sears-made-our-christmas-awesome/

 

Circa 1979 - An unknown manufacturer produced a 12 inch doll of Lou Holtz, coach for the Arkansas Razorbacks from the University of Arkansas. The doll was made between 1977 - 1982.

In Sept 2024 I finally added a Wayne Gretzky doll to my collection!

 

1983 - Mattel produces the first 12 inch doll based on "The Great" Wayne Gretzky. The doll uses a Ken doll body (borrowed from Sport nd Shave Ken) and is wearing an Oilers jersey. It comes with plastic hockey gloves, skates and a hockey stick. Three additional outfits were made which were sold separately. The doll is shown below out of the box.

1990's - In the 1990's Hasbro made a huge collection of 12 inch sports dolls as part of their Starting Lineup series, which also included smaller sized action figures. Hasbro had recently relaunched their G.I.Joe 12 inch dolls and used the same doll bodies for the Starting Line Up series. Celebrities from Hockey, Football, Baseball, Basketball and even race car drivers were included in the series. Someday I'll update this page to include a detailed list of these dolls. Among them was another Wayne Gretzky doll, however it wasn't nearly as nice as the one shown above. Football player Bret Favre from the Green Bay Packers was also made as a 12 inch doll for this collection.