Pogs

Fads and toys go hand in hand.

Often times, they're not mutually exclusive. When a toy becomes popular enough, it becomes a fad, and after a while it eventually recedes from the spotlight to be replaced by either another fad or just a standard toy. Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s like I did, I saw a ton of fads created by toys. Pokemon Cards, Beanie Babies, Tamagotchis and more. And, as stated, eventually the popularity of these things waned. ranging from slightly (Pokemon, seeing as it's still an enormous franchise even if the cards are no longer very popular) to entirely (Tamagotchis). But perhaps one of the most confounding, befuddling and some other synonym for weird toy fads I can come up with are Pogs.

And perhaps that's partially because I have a hard time seeing Pogs as toy to begin with.

Pogs, or Milk Caps as the fad was originally called, began in Maui, Hawaii between the 1920s to the 1930s. It's a simple enough game, played with flat circular cardboard milk caps. Players make a stack of these caps, and take turns to drop a heavier "slammer" object onto it, causing the caps to be disrupted. Each player keeps any face-up caps and is to restack the face-down caps, repeating the process until none land face-down, at which point the player who collected the most caps wins the game of Milk Caps. Now, get ready, cause I'm about to infodump the Wikipedia article on y'all:

After new packaging made cardboard milk caps obsolete in the 1950s, manufacturers such as Haleakala Dairy then used the caps to successfully promote the 1971 introduction of their fruit drink POG, which led to a surge in similar promotions and milk-cap collecting. Then, in 1991, Haleakala expanded to the more populated Oahu island, which led to a revival of the game. With this revival, the Pog name began being used generically for the game. This 1990s revival is credited to Blossom Galbiso, a teacher and guidance counselor who taught at Waialua Elementary School in Oahu. In 1991, Galbiso introduced the game she had played as a little girl to a new generation of students, soon incorporating milk caps into her fifth grade curriculum as a way of teaching math and as a non-violent alternative to other popular schoolyard games, such as dodgeball. 

The game quickly spread from Oahu's North Shore, and by early 1992, STANPAC Inc., the small Canadian packaging company that had been manufacturing the milk caps distributed by Haleakala Dairy on Maui (the same caps that were collected by Galbiso for her class), was printing millions of milk caps every week for shipment to the Hawaiian island chain. The game soon spread to the mainland, first surfacing in California, Texas, Oregon, and Washington before spreading to the rest of the country. By 1993, the previously obscure game of milk caps, which had almost been forgotten, was played throughout the world.

Milk caps returned to popularity when the World POG Federation and the Canada Games Company reintroduced them under the Pog brand name in the 1990s. The Pog fad soared, and peaked in the mid-1990s. Pogs were being handed out for opening bank accounts and in McDonald's Happy Meals. With the end of the Pogs fad, Canada Games went out of business in 1997. 

And you can see, right in there, it's called a fad outright, so I don't feel too bad about using the terminology myself, frankly. But perhaps the most interesting part about Pogs isn't the history - though that is pretty cool I must say - or the fad itself, but the fact that it was so prevalent that it reached the heights of having big name companies attached to it. You wanted Disney pogs? They existed. You more of a Marvel Comics fan? They're here. Anything that could be used as imagery on a pog was, and as a result, a lot of pogs are pop culture heavy. Star Wars, WWE, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, their likeness was eventually all used on the pog brand. Every single Saturday Morning Cartoon was put onto a pog, and I know this because about a decade ago my father left me an enormous pog collection, and it's somewhat remarkable, I must admit, the amount of franchises that wound up on these tiny little cardboard circles. Hell, pogs were even referenced more than once on The Simpsons in its golden years. If that doesn't tell you they were at the forefront of pop culture, what does?

Pogs have a weird history, no doubt, but it really does come from a time period where kids used anything to play in the street, reminiscent of another toy called Jacks, Pogs were simply a way for a kid to pass the time that then became overly commercialized to a fault. Hell, for a while, schools saw pogs as a form of gambling and forbade them to be brought onto the property. Course, schools never want kids to have fun, so that's not too surprising.

Either way, Pogs are one of those toys that are both ridiculous and mesmerizing. They were owned by everyone, referenced by many and remembered by few. These days, you can buy a bundle of pogs on eBay for dirt cheap - likely because they were so mass produced - so it's a pretty good hobby if one is interested in collecting something. And for what it's worth, some of the original art presented is pretty wild. It wasn't all movies and comic book and cartoon characters. A lot of times it was also just actual artwork made by weird designers or other such underground artists, and a lot of that artwork I think deserves to be seen and recognized for the solid stuff that it is.

So that's pogs. Perhaps not the most interesting entry into the blog thusfar, but hey, it was one that was worth a look, I think, especially because of its history. I played pogs a few times as a little girl, and I quite enjoyed it, and frankly I bet it'd be just as fun today, really. Maybe I'll bust out my collection, get some more online and make my girlfriend play with me. She's as into lame shit as I am.

As I said, a lot of toys become fads, but sometimes that's not a bad thing. Sure the fad may not last long, but they do leave a never ending impression, and that's worth more in the long run I'd say.