Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. Hollywood has cashed in pretty hard
Speaker 1: on our nostalgia for the nineteen nineties. There's the new
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park movies, the Space Jam sequel, the Crow remake,
Speaker 1: and rewatch podcasts for everything from Full House to Friends.
Speaker 1: And that's not even getting into the video game remakes,
Speaker 1: vinyl re releases, and near inexplicable return of extra wide
Speaker 1: legged jeans. Less attention is now paid to another nineties
Speaker 1: pop culture artifact, POGs. Remember those little paperboard circles and
Speaker 1: the game you played with them. There's an episode of
Speaker 1: The Simpsons from nineteen ninety five where Bart sells it
Speaker 1: old Millhouse, who trades it away for a set of POGs.
Speaker 1: In Milhouse's defense, they did have the character Alf on them.
Speaker 1: But unlike the Simpsons and even Alf, POGs have pretty
Speaker 1: much dropped off the radar since their nineteen nineties heyday.
Speaker 1: If you weren't in grade school in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: there's a chance you've never even heard of POGs, despite
Speaker 1: the phenomenon that they were so today, let's talk about them.
Speaker 1: By some accounts, the story of POGs began a long,
Speaker 1: long time ago, not in a galaxy far far away,
Speaker 1: but in Japan. There's a Japanese game called Minko, thought
Speaker 1: to have originated during the Kamakura period, which lasted from
Speaker 1: thirteen thirty three to eleven eighty five BCE. Minko operates
Speaker 1: under a simple premise. First, one player lays down a card.
Speaker 1: This is the target. An opponent then tries to flip
Speaker 1: over the target by throwing their own card at it.
Speaker 1: If that player succeeds, they get to claim both cards.
Speaker 1: Amenko wasn't always played with cards. Originally, players used discs
Speaker 1: of baked play with colorful designs like portraits of famous
Speaker 1: people reel or painted on one side. These were small,
Speaker 1: about two inches or five centimeters across, but by eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, paper cards had replaced them. Another thing that
Speaker 1: happened in the latter half of the eighteen hundreds was
Speaker 1: that there was an influx of Japanese immigrants to the
Speaker 1: Hawaiian Islands. There. Amenko may or may not have inspired
Speaker 1: a similar game called milk Caps, popular in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds. This was a children's pastime that could be
Speaker 1: enjoyed on the cheap kids would stack up bottle caps
Speaker 1: in a vertical pile. Then that take turns tossing a
Speaker 1: harder object known as aikini or slammer at the stack.
Speaker 1: Any caps that landed face up would go to the thrower.
Speaker 1: Remaining caps would be restacked, and the next kid had
Speaker 1: a chance to throw. We owe the word pog to
Speaker 1: a beverage company originally called Halea Kila Dairy based on Maui.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, they debuted a new do mixed
Speaker 1: juice drink called Passionfruit Orange Guava or POG for short.
Speaker 1: Today the brand is owned by Meadow Gold and their
Speaker 1: beverages are sold in paper cartons and plastic jugs and
Speaker 1: bottles sealed with screw on plastic caps. But at first
Speaker 1: Pog juice was distributed in bottles sealed with cardboard caps,
Speaker 1: and these lids were the perfect fit for a new
Speaker 1: spin on the milk caps game. The game had pretty
Speaker 1: much gone extinct by the early nineteen nineties, that is
Speaker 1: until along came One Blossom Gelbizo, a teacher and guidance
Speaker 1: counselor who's lovingly remembered as the mother of Pog's In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, while working at Wyalua Elementary School on Oahuo,
Speaker 1: she reintroduced the old time waster to her students. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: milk caps was all the rage again at Wyalua Elementary
Speaker 1: and beyond, but a few changes were necessary. Milk bottles,
Speaker 1: like the ones older generation had gotten caps from to
Speaker 1: play with, weren't as common in the nineteen nineties. In
Speaker 1: their absence, children turned to Pog juice caps. Galbizo later
Speaker 1: told the press, the beauty of it is that the
Speaker 1: students stopped playing the real rough games in the playground.
Speaker 1: Both boys and girls can play, and it teaches rules.
Speaker 1: A Galbizo may have been the mother of Pog's, but
Speaker 1: it was one Alan Rapinsky who made them a global sensation.
Speaker 1: Helia Khila Dairy didn't actually print its own bottle caps.
Speaker 1: Those were manufactured by stan Pack, a separate company based
Speaker 1: in Canada. Thanks to Galbizo, stan Pack realized it could
Speaker 1: make a killing in the Hawaiian toy market by selling
Speaker 1: its juice lids as game pieces. There A Rapinsk, a
Speaker 1: California business owner, somehow caught wind of this. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, he purchased the Pog brand name from the
Speaker 1: dairy and founded the World Pog Federation. That's when things
Speaker 1: really got serious with relentless marketing. The Federation turned POGs
Speaker 1: into a multimillion dollar industry and the American Mainland's newest
Speaker 1: playground craze. So why did the game catch on? Partly
Speaker 1: because the game pieces were inexpensive and collectible, and partly
Speaker 1: because the game itself has super easy rules. To play,
Speaker 1: you need only some pog caps and a slammer. Pog
Speaker 1: caps are paperboard discs about the size of a US
Speaker 1: half dollar, around forty millimeters across that's one and a
Speaker 1: half inches. Each cap has one side that's blank or
Speaker 1: bears the Pog logo, and one side with an eye
Speaker 1: catching illustration, printed photo, or other design, sometimes with fancy
Speaker 1: features like holographic foil or glow in the dark ink.
Speaker 1: We call this second side the face. Slammers are slightly larger,
Speaker 1: thicker discs made of plastic, hard rubber, or metal. They're
Speaker 1: about seven times heavier than pogcap and are often decorated
Speaker 1: with engravings, anadized patterns, or bright stickers. Participants meet over
Speaker 1: a flat surface where they can pile their caps into
Speaker 1: a single stack, face down. Everyone has to chip in
Speaker 1: the same number of caps. Player one chucks their slammer
Speaker 1: at the top of the stack, they'll get to take
Speaker 1: all of the caps that land face up. If you
Speaker 1: miss the stack completely, that still counts as your turn.
Speaker 1: The players restack the remaining caps and the second player
Speaker 1: gets a throw. The process repeats until all of the
Speaker 1: caps are gone, at which point the game ends, the
Speaker 1: winner being whoever claimed the most caps. I'm merely saying
Speaker 1: that POGs caught on feels like a severe understatement. In
Speaker 1: February of nineteen ninety three, the Federation through the first
Speaker 1: ever US National Pog Tournament. Within a year, the game
Speaker 1: had made its way to the East Coast infiltrating playgrounds
Speaker 1: from Maryland to California. Rapinsky realized that his core products,
Speaker 1: the Pog caps, were basically collectible business cards. The Federation
Speaker 1: struck licensing deals with just about every brand you can
Speaker 1: think of, McDonald's, Teenage Mutant, Ninja Turtles, Pega, Genesis, Bugs, Bunny,
Speaker 1: the National Hockey League. Even the Catholic Church wanted a
Speaker 1: piece of the action. In nineteen ninety five, the Diocey
Speaker 1: of Camden, New Jersey ordered fifty thousand POGs with Pope
Speaker 1: John Paul the Second's face on them. Other designs made
Speaker 1: use of more generic nineties pop culture imagery like eight balls, flames, skulls, aliens, dinosaurs, skateboards,
Speaker 1: and mildly rude or gross cartoons. If you remember the
Speaker 1: vibe of Spencer's or gadzooks, think that if you don't,
Speaker 1: try to imagine a uvy lit day glow wonderland of
Speaker 1: what thirteen year olds thought was edgy at the time.
Speaker 1: For a minute there, POGs were omnipresent. But the pog
Speaker 1: bubble had to burst sometime. Rapinskiing Company may have oversaturated
Speaker 1: their own market with too many variants, and by the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen nineties parents were starting to complain. When kids
Speaker 1: played POGs for keeps at recess or between classes, you
Speaker 1: could easily lose your favorites to another student. That sometimes
Speaker 1: caused fights. Many teachers considered the game and its pieces
Speaker 1: disruptive and way too similar to gambling for comfort, so
Speaker 1: POGs started getting banned in various schools around the country.
Speaker 1: By the turn of the twenty first century, POGs were
Speaker 1: decidedly out. The magazine Boy's Life was already dismissing POGs
Speaker 1: as a bygone fad in nineteen ninety eight. The fads
Speaker 1: can't last forever, and after all, people had beanie babies
Speaker 1: to buy. Today's episode is based on the article You're
Speaker 1: definitely a kid of the nineties if you played POGs
Speaker 1: on housetuffworks dot com, written by Mark Mancini. A brain
Speaker 1: stuff is production of Iyheart Radio in partnership with Houseifforks
Speaker 1: dot Com and is produced by Time They're playing. Before
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