POGS! POGS! POGS!

Do you guys remember Pogs?  I know I do!  Back in the early to mid 90's, Pogs (and the slammers you smacked them with) were all the rage to my 6 to 9 year old crowd.  Some people played Pogs a lot while others collected them, and wouldn't you know it - pre-teen me put all these guys in a binder instead of ever playing with them.  I did trade some, especially with my brothers who also collected, but my fascination with them was always more in collection cool looking Pogs than in battling with them.  I recently got hold of my old binder so I figured I'd show off a few of the cool Pogs I had back in the day!

They're all pretty random, so I picked small smatterings to show off.  Here are a few from around the world, and some featuring sports and comic heroes:

The top two are two of everyone's favorite places, Canada and Antarctica.  I loved Penguins as a kid o that one makes sense.  Canada....eh it's Canada...so there ya go.

The bottom Pogs are pretty epic - a young Shaq (the Pog says 1994 and he started in 1992 so this is a REAL young Shaq) and then Spiderman being called out by a villain.  Epic stuff.


The next round is...dated:

Top dudes are ZBots, Micro Machine produced mini robots from the early 90's.  My brothers and I actually owned a bunch of those guys including the two pictured above.

The next row features Lord Zedd of Power Rangers fame, which was similarly super awesome in the early 90's.  And then a nice little homage to Robocop by the Pog people - they sold their own brand once the things got big, and we had quite a few of them way back when!


When I did trade Pogs, I did it at school!  Here are 3 of my winners!

The three sports Pogs in awful shape?  HECK YEAH I TRADED FOR THOSE DURING LUNCH IN 4TH GRADE!  I also have a Steelers one which was super cool at the time but I don't like as much now since the Steelers are big jerks.  As for the Bad News card...well that's another one of those ones that companies put out way back when and I still think it looks kinda neat.


Another random four:

The top two are from Pog sets.  The No Drugs! thing actually came up on a bunch of Pogs back then - I forgot that they had a whole anti substance campaign through Pogs.

The bottom Pogs came from boxes of Cookie Crisp, during a time when the shoe Bobby's World and Cookie Crisp joined together to make a sweet Pog line.  I have a whole bunch of these still and they definitely bring me back to the days of Howie Mandel doing squeaky Bobby voices in cartoon form.


Of course the best part of Pogs was owning a Pog maker.  I had one called the Milkcap Maker, and man did we make a bunch:

The bottom left shows what the backs looked like, and the makers were literally just little plastic presses where you put a board piece in, peeled off the top to make it sticky, and then pressed something onto the top to make it stick.  I made Pogs of a lot of things I loved in the 90's, like 1992 Upper Deck Baseball apparently, or Suzy Q's, or the comic Foxtrot.


Closing this out with a bit more nostalgia and some randomness:

The monster on the bottom right just looks kind of cool, and the Alien Dude comes from a major set that featured him doing all sorts of stuff like flying around his ship or waiting for a bus.

The top left dude is Kid Vid from Burger King, back when they did the Kid's Club thing.  I remember the Kid's Club fondly from my childhood  (I was a card carrying member!) as they started in 1989, an though they kind of fizzled out in the late 90's, they lasted long enough to be on a bunch of sweet Pogs.  I think I have the entire set!

As for the bottom left, that's the classic Slush Puppie dog.  Apparently Slush Puppie originated in Cincinnati (I had no idea) and in the mid to late 90's that darn dog was EVERYWHERE, including Pogs.  But in 2006 ICEE bought Slush Puppie, and since then slushies have never been the same.  But I guess nothing lasts forever, even Pogs.