Troll Dolls
Neon-haired, jewel-bellied good-luck trolls that clipped to pencils and crowded every desk and backpack. Invented by a Danish woodcutter in the 1950s, they rode a huge second wave of popularity in the early 1990s under names like Norfin.
The troll doll was created in Denmark by Thomas Dam, a woodcutter who carved the first figure for his children in the late 1950s; in 1959 he began mass-producing them in rubber through his company, Dam Things, switching to soft PVC plastic in 1961. The originals had wild sheep-wool hair and glass eyes, inspired by Scandinavian folklore about good-luck trolls.
The dolls became one of America's biggest toy fads in 1963–65, but a copyright-notice error left the design effectively in the public domain in the US, unleashing decades of competing troll brands — Wishniks, Norfin, Treasure Trolls. The neon-haired, jewel-bellybutton version most millennials remember came from a second craze around the early 1990s, when E.F.S. Marketing sold authentic Dam trolls under the 'Norfin' name and Russ Berrie produced its own troll variants; kids clipped them onto pencils and rubbed their hair for luck before tests.
Dam's US copyright was restored in 2003 under an international trade agreement, ending the free-for-all. In 2013 DreamWorks Animation acquired the troll IP and rebooted it as the musical Trolls film franchise beginning in 2016, introducing the good-luck-troll silhouette to a whole new generation.
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