I have been getting emails asking me about pricing on various makers of figures and I am more than happy to share my knowledge with anyone who asks but you must remember pricing is subjective and just because I may feel a figure is worth x number of dollars the person selling might take a very different approach to the value.
I have had to deal with families adding on dollars because of sentimentality. This can usually be overcome when you explain that sentimentality only has a value to the one person who is selling. It does not add value to the dummy.
Then there is the figure that has a provenance. This is many cases will add some value because you can then give the history of the figure from the purchaser on down. I love when a dummy has this provenance. I list this information with the figures when I list them in the Ventriloquist Central Collection. Not only does it make the figure a bit more valuable but the history is always an interesting read.
Also one has to take into consideration the functions that a figure has. If the dummy has only mouth movement it certainly isn’t going to be worth the same as a figure that has a multitude of functions. That just makes sense.
A lot more work goes into producing a dummy with those extra functions. The extra functions don’t mean the ventriloquist will make the dummy perform better because learning to use all the controls is a large task, but that is another subject. Just remember that in pricing the more functions the higher the price.
Dan
www.ventriloquistcentral.com
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Dan Willinger is a ventriloquism enthusiast and ventriloquist figure collector. He has been collecting for over 25 years. He created the Ventriloquist Central Collection. It now has over 100 ventriloquist figures and over 50 of them are Frank Marshall figures. Because of his love for the art of ventriloquism, Mr. Willinger created the website Ventriloquist Central. For more information about the website, go to: http://www.ventriloquistcentral.com
Copyright 2012 by Dan Willinger
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$275 and if fully loaded $400 for pro size figure on 1950’s timeline.
It certainly can be confusing. I know when I first started shopping around for my first figure and because there is absolutely nowhere in Australia to buy one I had to rely on the internet.
Looking around I found new figures of varying value of course. Standard animations (raising eyebrows, side to side eyes, slot moving mouth) with figure makers charging from US$600 to US$1800. That’s a pretty huge difference. Therefore (as someone new to the market at the time) I had to begin researching the figure makers themselves and rely on what I read about them to decide whether I would spend more or less.
Then my decision came down to what figure appealed to me the most. I still tend to think that some figure makers out there charge way too much and in some cases should make the animations mentioned above standard rather than charge 100’s of dollars for them to be added, but we must remember our figure is our instrument and we want to have it for years and years so my advice is to think carefully, do your research and invest what you can in the figure that appeals to you the most.
Sentimentality doesn’t add squat to the figure’s value, and if the owner has so much sentimentality for it anyway, one wonders why he would be selling it?