Little Orphan Annie Dress, ca. 1930
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GUEST:
I was Daddy Warbucks in our school play, “Annie,” and, um, my parents were at a private estate, and they saw this piece, and they purchased it for me for our collection of different Annie things and for all the different plays that I've been in and stuff.
APPRAISER:
Well, that's great. Well, as you know, Little Orphan Annie...the Annie play was one of the most successful ever produced on Broadway. It started in 1977. But before Little Orphan Annie ever sang "The sun will come out tomorrow," she was too busy fighting Nazis and capturing villains to ever have time to actually sing any songs. Um, originally, it was based on a poem by a local person, a Hoosier here, James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote the poem about Little Orphant Annie in 1885, and Harold Gray, in 1924, who was an illustrator and cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune, invented Little Orphan Annie, and she was incredibly popular. Um, she was very heavily licensed. There was a lot of commercial product based on Little Orphan Annie. There were decoder rings and buttons and clubs and games. And what you have, actually, we all think is a Halloween costume, which came from the late '20s, early '30s, and it probably also had a Little Orphan Annie mask with it. Um, this is in fabulous, fabulous condition, and tell me a little bit about what your parents paid for it.
GUEST:
Um, I think they paid around $1,000.
APPRAISER:
Wow, that probably seems like a lot of money to you.
GUEST:
Yeah.
APPRAISER:
Well, I think you'll be happy to find out that Little Orphan Annie memorabilia is very, very sought after, and something like this would sell for between about $2,500 to $3,000.
GUEST:
Wow.
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