Funko Unboxing Videos and the Appeal and Limitations of Single-minded Obsessions

If left to his own devices,  I suspect my seven year old son Declan would choose to drop out of school so that he could devote every waking hour to watching Funko Unboxing YouTube videos from one very dedicated collector. 

Every single day this baby-faced man-child, who looks he could be anywhere from 18 to his late 30s, posts new videos to YouTube chronicling his life’s work buying lots of Funko pops and then sharing his soul-consuming passion with the world. 

EVERY single day. You might imagine that a guy like that would run out of things to say about Funkos. You would be wrong. For him, Funkos are every bit as worthy of obsessive chronicling as the plays of William Shakespeare or the music of Bob Dylan. 

It is, as you might imagine, incredibly annoying yet weirdly compelling all the same. I am a man of many obsessions. If nothing else, I am impressed by the single-minded intensity of the man’s fixation with tacky little pieces of plastic for children. 

Watching my son be utterly mesmerized by some random dude doggedly pursuing his hobby made me envious on multiple levels. I wished my son were as fascinated by me as he is a guy compulsively buying and displaying Funkos. 

Watching this dude go on and on and on about the intricacies of Funko collecting made me wish that I could have one overriding passion that I could devote the entirety of my career to. There’s something about the purity of just being into one thing, and being into that one thing with your whole body and soul, that I find innately fascinating. 

Then I realized that my life and career and the work of this YouTuber have more in common than I had initially thought. Like this Funko collector, my career is devoted overwhelmingly to obsessions others might find odd, off-putting, stupid, pointless, childish or a goddamned waste of time. 

Only my career and this website isn’t devoted to just one passion. Instead it is devoted to a series of obsessions. I have, for example, written a column about flops for FOURTEEN YEARS, with a two year break from 2013 to 2015 when I worked for The Dissolve. 

That is a whole lot of time and energy to devote to something. I am obsessed with flops, and synonymous with them, but that’s not all that I am synonymous with. I’ve been to forty-something Phish shows and wrote a book about the band and its fans. Yet there are Phish fans infinitely more devoted to the group than I am. 

I remember being struck by Harris Wittels saying that he devoted at least two hours to studying Phish every day. For the late, beloved podcaster, musician and writer, Phish fandom wasn’t passive but rather something he had to actively work at by listening to concerts, going to shows and discussing the band online with equally obsessive fans.  

I love Phish but I would never go that far. Of course You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, the book I wrote about Phish wasn’t just about Phish: it was also about Insane Clown Posse, another group that inspires a level of fandom some find deeply unsettling. 

I have myriad obsessions beyond that, as reflected by this website. I am, of course, perhaps the world’s preeminent “Weird Al” Yankovic historian, having written his coffee table book and a five hundred page guide to this music and television shows and now a coloring book. 

But I’m also uniquely fixated on the overlapping careers of Face/Off stars Nicolas Cage and John Travolta and a whole bunch of other stuff as well. 

Sometimes I wish that I was like this Funko Unboxing YouTuber and devote my career to just one thing but I suspect that would get boring after a while, for you and me both. 

It’s healthier ultimately to have a series of obsessions rather than just one. So while I am the “Weird Al” Yankovic guy, I’m also the Manic Dream Girl dude, a professional Juggalo, a devoted Phan, a Nicolas Cage die-hard, a very public proponent of John Travolta and a whole bunch of other things as well. 

More than anything, I am a fan, an enthusiast, someone who has found himself as a writer and a human being by embracing my many pop culture obsessions rather than being ashamed of them. 

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