It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s — it actually is a bird this time. But not just any bird.
The University of Delaware is the latest school to have its beloved mascot memorialized as a bobblehead by the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
A limited-edition YoUDee bobblehead will be released for National BobbleHead Day on Jan. 7, and diehard Delaware fans who bleed blue and gold can get their hands on one.
The officially licensed bobbleheads are available for pre-order at the organization’s shop at store.bobbleheadhall.com and cost $35 each plus $8 for flat-rate shipping. Shipping is expected in March.
Each YoUDee bobblehead will be individually numbered. Only 2,023 are available. So Blue Hen devotees better act fast to avoid being left with ruffled feathers.
“We’re excited to be releasing this Bobblehead of one of the best and most unique mascots in college — YoUDee,” said National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum co-founder and CEO Phil Sklar. “We think this will be a very popular bobblehead for Delaware alumni, fans, students, faculty, and staff.”
Now with its own miniature rendering, YoUDee stands among other university bobblehead mascots like Cocky of the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, Rameses of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tar Heels, Spike of the Gonzaga University Bulldogs and more.
It’s the second time in less than a year the Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum has had a Delaware-themed statuette. In February, Judy Johnson, the Baseball Hall of Famer raised in Wilmington, was included in the Negro Leagues Field of Legends Bobbleheads.
There have been Blue Hen bobbleheads available for more than 20 years. But this is the first produced by the hall of fame and museum. Sklar said they sought to create a new version that better captured and recognized YoUDee, which it had on a list of iconic and inimitable collegiate characters.
Having won first place eight times in the UCA National Mascot Championship, there’s much more to Delaware’s beloved bird than its award-winning charm.
For those who don’t know, the Blue Hen moniker has ties to the American Revolution. A company of the Delaware Regiment led by Captain Jonathan Caldwell of Felton in Kent County was a fan of cockfighting and brought blue hens along for his time in the Revolutionary War.
Some stories say Caldwell’s men charged at the enemy yelling “we’re sons of the Blue Hen and we’re game to the end” while others say he brought Blue Hens onto the battlefield. In the end, the regiment shared attributes similar to the blue hens – which are known for their ferocity and success in fights – and became known as the Blue Hens’ Chickens.
The Fightin’ Blue Hens of UD have been around since 1911 when the school published its yearbook titled “The Blue Hen.” While students often donned various versions of a Blue Hen costume to support UD teams, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the YoUDee seen marching around Newark today came onto the scene.
The only other college with Hens in the nickname is Southern California’s Division III Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens. Triple-A minor-league baseball has the Toledo Mud Hens.
In an effort to rebrand the school’s “infamous mascot” as a highly regarded fan favorite, YoUDee was first “hatched” at the Delaware-Lehigh football game in Delaware Stadium on Sept. 4, 1993, after being created by Tom Sapp of Real Characters Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia.
YoUDee’s younger sibling Baby Blue, who “hatched” on Nov. 23, 1999, at the Bob Carpenter Center, was also created by Sapp.
Since then, the pair has been rockin’ the Air YoUDee’s, the official shoe of the mascots, all over the school’s red-bricked campus.
During school-sanctioned events, YoUDee and Baby Blue are sure to be somewhere in the crowd taking pictures, hanging out with students and having lots of clucking fun shaking their tail feathers.
The pair is famously known for busting out the moves on the sidelines during sporting events, getting into shenanigans with fans and keeping Blue Hen morale soaring high in the student section.
Aside from the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum’s YoUDee release, they have a few other Delaware-themed knick-knacks available.
Joe Flacco, current NFL quarterback for the New York Jets and former Blue Hen quarterback, can be seen in bobblehead form, along with Too Fly of the Delaware State University Hornets and bobble versions of the pets of the First Family, including first cat Willow and the first dogs Commander, Champ and Major. Ten percent of all sales of Champ and Major bobbleheads are donated to the Delaware Humane Association (now merged with Delaware SPCA and known as Humane Animal Partners), where Major was adopted in 2018.
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