Don’t be fooled by imitators: the giant rubber duck touted as the “World’s Largest Duck” that’s on view in eastern Long Island in New York this weekend is not the work of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman.
It’s allegedly a copycat rubber duck that has been making the rounds as the rival to Hofman’s Rubber Duck, which began traveling the world in 2007. It’s a monumental, inflatable version of the classic children’s bath toys.
The knockoff duck, affectionately known as Mama, was born at the 2014 Tall Ships festival in Los Angeles. Organizer Craig Samborski was looking for something to set the event apart and landed on the idea of a giant rubber duck floating next to the ships.
Naturally, he brought Hofman on board, paying him €50,000 ($57,000) for the designs for Rubber Duck. But Samborski contends that he only received basic drawings and had to design his own 61-foot-tall inflatable for the project.
Giant Rubber Duck, a giant yellow vinyl duck by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman during the parade of tall ships at Tall Ships Festival L.A. in the Port of Los Angeles in 2014. Photo by Jeff Gritchen/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images.
“Hofman did not contribute to the original duck. I’m not sure what he would get credit for—he actually does not own, nor has he ever owned a duck,” Samborski told me in an email.
At the time of the 2014 event, news outlets including the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine identified the duck as a Hofman sculpture. Then, in June 2015, Samborski reused the L.A. duck for the Philadelphia Tall Ships festival, this time calling it “Mama Duck.”
“They don’t have permission to show my duck again,” he told Philadelphia Magazine.
That didn’t stop Samborski, who filed for a “World’s Largest Duck” trademark that same month. He claims that Hofman did not take advantage of the public comment period to issue an objection to the eventually successful application.
Florentijn Hoffman, Rubber Duck, outside the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
The dispute was back in the headlines during Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 2017, when the government of Ontario sent Mama on a six-city tour of the province.
Hofman cried foul (pun intended), issuing a press release decrying Mama as a counterfeit. (Canadians also complained the bird wasn’t Canadian enough.)
“Mr. Samborski has been using our patterns, our design, and our intellectual property to profit off of what was supposed to be a public art installation,” his spokesperson, Kim Enbers, said at the time.
Hofman also told the Wall Street Journal that he hadn’t been paid and that he had the copyright for his rubber duck inflatable sculpture in the U.S.
“The real issue is not the common small rubber duck, but the theft of my idea to enlarge a rubber duck, let it float around the world, and the unauthorized use of my specific patterns and designs,” Hofman told me in an email. “This is a clear case of IP theft.”
“[Hofman] threatened legal action, but when our trademark attorney confronted him with the fact that he doesn’t own a trademark on a duck, he had nothing to sue for and went silent,” Samborski said. “He doesn’t own a duck and has not built one. He just has drawings of an inflatable duck that he tries to sell.”
Hofman has also tried to crack down on unauthorized Rubber Duck merchandise that has popped up as the sculpture traversed the globe. Ahead of a 2013 appearance, Pittsburgh cartoon artist Joe Wos received a cease and desist order when he sold a t-shirt featuring a rubber duck drawing and a phrase referencing the local Pittsburghese dialect.
“We simply do not view [the rubber duck] as a copyright issue,” Wos told City Paper at the time. “This is a figure that has long been in the public domain as a universal symbol—which is probably why [Hofman] used it.”
Maryland’s Eleanor Shannahan first patented a rubber duck bath toy in 1931; sculptor Peter Ganine filed for a patent for the famous squeaky version in 1947.
Peter Ganine’s 1947 patent application for the rubber duck bath toy. United States Patents.
“While small rubber ducks can be considered a common concept, similar to Duchamp’s urinal, my creation transformed this object into art,” Hofman said. “I developed an inflatable design with unique patterns, overcoming technical challenges over years of research.”
Rubber Duck has also garnered its fair share of criticism, including a 2014 takedown by writer Kriston Capps. He argued that the work had minimal artistic value and that its global popularity was largely due to the preexisting fame of the rubber duck thanks to the enduring 1970 Sesame Street hit “Rubber Duckie.”
“[Rubber Duck] reproductions do not infringe on an intellectual copyright that Hofman can’t legitimately claim as his own,” he wrote in Bloomberg.
“Despite sending legal notices and involving attorneys, the complexities of international IP law and the prohibitive costs of legal action have hindered my efforts to protect my intellectual property,” Hofman said. “It is disheartening to be unable to fully defend my creation, but I remain committed to highlighting the importance of protecting intellectual property and the integrity of original art.”
The original sculpture continues to be wildly popular to this day. A month-long exhibition of two of the works for Taiwan’s Wonderland Festival earlier this year drew an estimated nine million visitors while generating NT$14 billion ($431.83 million) in tourism dollars, the Kaohsiung Department of Tourism told Focus Taiwan.
“People flock to and gather around these big sculptures. Then, they start conversing with each other,” Hofman told the Korea Times last year. “A generation grew up with that image and they really wanted to reconnect with it, and (by doing so) reconnect with themselves, with each other.”
Mama Duck, the “World’s Largest Rubber Duck,” with the USS Iowa. Photo courtesy of Craig Samborski.
Mama, meanwhile, is currently crisscrossing the U.S., with six upcoming tour dates between now and early October. On Long Island, Mama will be on view at Splish Splash Water Park. And if you miss her there, she’ll be back in the metro area with a stop at Rye Playland August 16–18.
And, if you’re a duck lover, Mama’s trip out east represents the opportunity for an incredible duck double header. Splish Splash is less than a 15 minute drive from one of Long Island’s most beloved, if bizarre, landmarks, the Big Duck. (A novelty building shaped like a duck, it is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.)
You can even make it a trifecta of sorts by ending your day with weekend night games for the Long Island Ducks baseball team, about 45 minutes west in Islip. The team is currently sitting at .500 for the season, and there are postgame fireworks Saturday.
World’s Largest Duck will be on view at Splish Splash Water Park, 2549 Splish Splash Drive, Calverton, New York, August 2–4, 2024; and Rye Playland Park, 1 Playland Parkway, Rye, New York, August 16–18, 2024.