Retro 2000s Bunny Toothpick Holder 🐰 Amber Yellow Figural Rabbit in Magic Hat, New Old Stock in Original Box, Bandwagon Item K4670

Is It the Alessi Magic Bunny? 🐰 Retro 2000s Bunny Toothpick Holder, a Rabbit in a Magic Hat, Bandwagon Item K4670

Size: 6" x 3" ~ New old stock, never used, still in its foam ear wrap and original K4670 carton.

In 1998 Stefano Giovannoni designed the Magic Bunny toothpick holder for Alessi - a rabbit that rises out of a top hat and leaves the toothpicks waiting inside, still in production and still sold today as a design classic. These aren't that. They're a Bandwagon bunny toothpick holder in frosted, translucent amber-yellow plastic, with no Alessi mark on them, a 2000s cousin made in the spirit of that famous design. The plain kraft carton is stamped ITEM#: K4670, BUNNY TOOTHPICK HOLDER, MADE IN CHINA.

🔍 The Object

Two pieces. The rabbit is one molded figure - a round head with two long upright ears and painted eyes, a slender neck, and a round foot that drops down into the hat. The hat is a tall brimmed cylinder, open at the top. Push the rabbit down and only its eyes and ears show over the brim; lift it out by the ears and the toothpicks underneath are right there. The plastic is frosted, so light glows through the amber-yellow. Mine come with a foam sleeve over the ears, bubble wrap, and the original carton.

🏭 Bandwagon, Inc., and a Truckload From Massachusetts

I bought these in 2007, straight off a semi-truck load of Bandwagon, Inc.'s unsold stock out of Massachusetts. Bandwagon is a gifts-and-novelties importer, a Massachusetts corporation working out of 54 Industrial Way in Wilmington, and it claims the BANDWAGON name as far back as 1969, in a trademark filing it made in 2022. Its earliest registered mark is CEDAR SCENTER, aromatic wood chips, first used in 1983, and it filed for DENTAPICKS toothpicks too, so a bunny toothpick holder sits right at home in its range. Most of what it sold came in from China and Taiwan, which is the MADE IN CHINA on the carton. That ITEM#: K4670 is Bandwagon's own kind of number, a letter and four digits, and its numbers climb with the years: a K4801 color wheel is molded "© 2001 BANDWAGON, INC.," so a K4670 just below it is a 2000s Bandwagon piece. That makes this bunny younger than Alessi's 1998 Magic Bunny, and plainly in its spirit.

🎩 The Famous Bunny It Follows

Stefano Giovannoni was born in La Spezia in 1954 and graduated in architecture from Florence in 1978. In the mid-1980s he and Guido Venturini opened a studio they called King-Kong Productions and began designing for Alessi; their Girotondo family, started in 1989, has sold more than seven million pieces and is still, by Giovannoni's own studio's account, the best-selling "family" in the history of design. He kept designing playful plastic for Alessi - the Lilliput salt and pepper shakers, the Merdolino toilet brush, the Mary Biscuit box - and in 1998 came the Magic Bunny, model ASG16, 14 cm tall, made in Italy. Retail write-ups say he applied what he called the "Children Code" to it, taking the awkwardness out of reaching for a toothpick and turning it into a small game. The design became such an icon that in 2014 a version was milled by robot from pink onyx and lit from inside.

🏭 Alessi, and the Town That Made It

Alessi started in 1921, when Giovanni Alessi and his brother opened a workshop in Omegna, on Lake Orta in Piedmont, processing brass and nickel silver sheet with a foundry attached. Giovanni's son Carlo joined in 1932 and designed most of the firm's output from the mid-1930s to 1945; the founder's grandson Alberto joined in 1970 and, in the early 1990s, opened the Centro Studi Alessi to work with young designers - which is how the catalog grew past steel into wood, glass, porcelain, ceramic and plastic, Giovannoni's pieces among them. Omegna itself was first recorded in 1221 and named a city in 1939; for generations it was Italy's main center for pots and small household appliances, the industrial world the Alessi workshop grew out of.

📜 Who Pulled the First Rabbit

Louis Comte, born in Geneva in 1788, was a celebrated Paris magician who performed for Louis XVIII at the Tuileries and was later made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor - which earned him the nickname "conjurer to three kings." In 1814 he became the first magician on record to pull a white rabbit from a top hat. Magic legend credits the same trick to John Henry Anderson too, the self-styled "Great Wizard of the North," who claimed Sir Walter Scott gave him that name. Anderson's luck ran hot and cold: on March 5, 1856, fire broke out at London's Covent Garden Theatre in the closing hours of a masked ball he'd staged there, destroying the building and his stage properties with it and bankrupting him for the second time. He died in 1874, the year Harry Houdini was born, and in 1909 Houdini - who counted Anderson among his own inspirations - arranged for the upkeep of his grave.

🦷 An Old Habit, a New Piece of Theater

The toothpick is the oldest dental tool there is. Evidence of its use goes back some 1.8 million years to early humans at Dmanisi, Georgia, and a Neanderthal upper jaw found near Oliva in Valencia, Spain, carries grooves worn by a toothpick its owner used against sore gums. It went to the machine in the 19th century - Marc Signorello built the first toothpick-making machine in 1869, and Silas Noble and J. P. Cooley patented another in 1872. A rabbit that lifts out of a hat to reveal them turns the oldest habit at the table into a bit of theater.