Send in the clowns! Always exciting to stumble upon completely unproduced prototypes. The “small face” clown (clown #1) (green, yellow, blue face + yarn hair) originally showed up with the Picasso teddy lot. It fell into a famous black hole collection with a collector who has a penchant for oddities and “weird” Ty items. Changed hands once, then ended up back in the original collection. This piece brings out polarizing reactions – from WILD to TERRIFYING. Little known fact, two additional clown prototypes exist. Similar bodies, but with different ‘large” faces – more human like. One with pink hair, and one with rainbow mane hair. All three have pax hang tags. Clown #2 and Clown #3 have surfaced once or twice over the past 20 years in extraordinarily impressive collections. Pictures below give you an idea of the collections these extraordinarily pieces have been in and out of – impressive company, indeed. The small head clown has detailed notes from a Ty design engineer for Mr. Warner. These three pieces were originally graded by Peggy – certificates below for reference. But have since been regraded by True Blue Beans and all reside in the same super collection.
Rarity Rank: 1.5. We would put the rarity ranking for these pieces at around a 1.5 – totally unproduced pieces. VIVID WILD INSANE details and colors, all pax tags, and pieces that visually stop you in your tracks. Famous pieces – earmarked by their crazy colors and unprecedented designs not seen on Beanies (or anything close) to this point. Perhaps this was the precursor to the eventual Beanie Kids line Ty introduced in 2000 – we believe the pax dates on these clowns falls somewhere in the late 90’s (1997-1998?).
Rarest Beans 