Blue Ridge Designs, Inc. - Jingle Bell Rock Baxter

Here's one of the more later and obscure Blue Ridge Design characters, but personally my favorite of them all. I've had this for awhile but haven't uploaded it due to reasons I'll get to after I talk about how nice of a piece this is. First off, stating the obvious I guess, the movement on this guy is so smooth and satisfying. The way he moves his head up, down, and side-to-side while patting his hand on his leg all simultaneously to the beat of the song, just wow. This looks like a miniature theme park ride animatronic, and being that his design is very Disney-like I could definitely see that being the inspiration. Speaking of which, for those who might not know, Baxter The Bear is a original character created by BRD similar to how Telco made Frank E. Post and such. There's this one, and a year-round version that's in a fisherman outfit which plays "Sitting On The Dock of the Bay". Both were made in 2001 and have the same movement. I found this one laying on a cart at Goodwill a few months back right as they put him out. He had a issue with his snout, as some of the original flocking texture was flaked off. I figured it was best to just clean off the flocking from the snout entirely to at-least make it even. In short, I scrubbed most of it off but doing so made it look even worse. I got discouraged at that point and put it in a box until I could recollect my thoughts. Fast forward to last week, and I took him back out with a new idea. That idea? Rip the entire snout off and boil it in water. Im not even kidding. I boiled and used about every chemical I could to get it all off. Lastly, I glued the snout back on and this is the final product. The process took me about 3 hours but I couldn't be happier with the result. I'm so glad I was able to redeem what was lost and I didn't have this item ruined for me. If anyone ever gets one of these, be careful with it as all the limbs are covered in fragile 20 year old flocking. That problem aside though, this is a great item that I'm happy to have in my collection. Thanks for Watching!