Souvenir that turns heads

Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006 | 7:43 a.m.

Is there a better gauge of the American public, at least the part of it that visits Las Vegas, than the fact that at the most popular vending spot for personalized bobblehead dolls the most popular doll sits sans pants on the toilet, awaiting its chance to resemble you or a loved one?

Yours for only $124, available in both male and female models. Allow four to six weeks for shipping.

Other popular models ride motorcycles (with or without partners), get married and strut their stuff in nothing more than bikini underwear (both genders). The least popular model wears a full-length kimono. Skin sells, even when it's plastic.

Local photo-in-a-cube hawker Cashman Enterprises sells the wobbly-noggined plastic semilikeness at its six in-casino locations on the Strip, the most successful one being in the Mandalay Bay across from the entrance to Shark Reef. Cashman sells about 6,000 of the dolls a year, said General Manager Christana Hunt.

Hunt has her own bobble likeness atop her desk. Yes, the toilet model, the one with the unrealistic half-starved Barbie doll on it. (All of the female dolls are impossibly slender.)

"Some people don't like the way their head looks on the doll. I think my cheeks look too fat," Hunt said. "But people can recognize me."

Only the dolls' heads are made to resemble an individual; the bodies come in 137 models. The heads can be swapped between any of the bodies.

"Sometimes when somebody's mad at me," Hunt said, "I'll come in and my head will be on the sumo wrestler body."

But revenge is only a swap away for Hunt. All of Cashman's bobble-division employees have their likeness floating around, so that prospective customers can compare them to the real person.

Once a customer has decided that $124 (average price) is not too much to pay for a hydrocephalic likeness, he either has to provide Cashman with two pictures of himself, portrait and profile, or he can sit down in front of a stereo camera rig and its two cameras will take 12 photos from multiple angles, said Daniel Gorin, a salesman at the Mandalay Bay concession. The second technique is cheaper and more accurate, but the former can be done by mail.

Cashman then e-mails the photos to a supplier, 3D Clone Inc., who uses a computer program to render the photos into a model head. The dolls are manufactured in China and shipped to their buyers.

One buyer, Hunt said, was a secretary who came in to buy 15 bobbles of her boss so that he could give them to employees as gifts.

"How'd you like to work for him?" Hunt said.

(We checked: It wasn't Mayor Oscar Goodman. He buys his bobbleheads in bulk through two local advertising firms.)

Other customers buy likenesses of their children and teenagers sometimes buy them for themselves. But about half of the business is adults buying bobbles of themselves.

"The sexy ones sell really good," Hunt said. "The girls want to be in bikinis; the guys want to be athletes."

Kari Wolfe, Hunt's officemate, has her head on a bobble babe in a black one-piece with sexy cutouts on the sides.

"I love it. I just think it's unique," she said, before adding, "I mean, my boyfriend loves it. I'm surprised it's not on his desk."