There was a recent thread on FB where a person showed several that were fairly beat up, which he said he won at a carnival in Germany in 1984.
If they were indeed being given as carnival prizes, presumably in the thousands in Western European countries since the early 1980s, why didn't any collectors have them until the sudden eBay surge?
Surely they would have been found in shops or garage sales in the decades since 1984 and then posted on various forums like this one because of how curious they are?
I also notice many images posted on this thread are gone forever, so hopefully somebody stashed them.