May 19, 2025 • 9 mins
For a brief period in the 1990s, a simple game played with flashy paperboard discs ruled American playgrounds. Learn the history behind POGs in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/backyard-fun-games/pogs.htm
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. Hollywood has cashed in pretty hard
on our nostalgia for the nineteen nineties. There's the new
Jurassic Park movies, the Space Jam sequel, the Crow remake,
and rewatch podcasts for everything from Full House to Friends.
(00:23):
And that's not even getting into the video game remakes,
vinyl re releases, and near inexplicable return of extra wide
legged jeans. Less attention is now paid to another nineties
pop culture artifact, POGs. Remember those little paperboard circles and
the game you played with them. There's an episode of
(00:45):
The Simpsons from nineteen ninety five where Bart sells it
old Millhouse, who trades it away for a set of POGs.
In Milhouse's defense, they did have the character Alf on them.
But unlike the Simpsons and even Alf, POGs have pretty
much dropped off the radar since their nineteen nineties heyday.
If you weren't in grade school in the nineteen nineties,
(01:07):
there's a chance you've never even heard of POGs, despite
the phenomenon that they were so today, let's talk about them.
By some accounts, the story of POGs began a long,
long time ago, not in a galaxy far far away,
but in Japan. There's a Japanese game called Minko, thought
to have originated during the Kamakura period, which lasted from
(01:30):
thirteen thirty three to eleven eighty five BCE. Minko operates
under a simple premise. First, one player lays down a card.
This is the target. An opponent then tries to flip
over the target by throwing their own card at it.
If that player succeeds, they get to claim both cards.
(01:51):
Amenko wasn't always played with cards. Originally, players used discs
of baked play with colorful designs like portraits of famous
people reel or painted on one side. These were small,
about two inches or five centimeters across, but by eighteen
sixty eight, paper cards had replaced them. Another thing that
(02:12):
happened in the latter half of the eighteen hundreds was
that there was an influx of Japanese immigrants to the
Hawaiian Islands. There. Amenko may or may not have inspired
a similar game called milk Caps, popular in the early
nineteen hundreds. This was a children's pastime that could be
enjoyed on the cheap kids would stack up bottle caps
(02:33):
in a vertical pile. Then that take turns tossing a
harder object known as aikini or slammer at the stack.
Any caps that landed face up would go to the thrower.
Remaining caps would be restacked, and the next kid had
a chance to throw. We owe the word pog to
a beverage company originally called Halea Kila Dairy based on Maui.
(02:57):
In the nineteen seventies, they debuted a new do mixed
juice drink called Passionfruit Orange Guava or POG for short.
Today the brand is owned by Meadow Gold and their
beverages are sold in paper cartons and plastic jugs and
bottles sealed with screw on plastic caps. But at first
Pog juice was distributed in bottles sealed with cardboard caps,
(03:19):
and these lids were the perfect fit for a new
spin on the milk caps game. The game had pretty
much gone extinct by the early nineteen nineties, that is
until along came One Blossom Gelbizo, a teacher and guidance
counselor who's lovingly remembered as the mother of Pog's In
(03:41):
nineteen ninety one, while working at Wyalua Elementary School on Oahuo,
she reintroduced the old time waster to her students. Suddenly,
milk caps was all the rage again at Wyalua Elementary
and beyond, but a few changes were necessary. Milk bottles,
like the ones older generation had gotten caps from to
play with, weren't as common in the nineteen nineties. In
(04:04):
their absence, children turned to Pog juice caps. Galbizo later
told the press, the beauty of it is that the
students stopped playing the real rough games in the playground.
Both boys and girls can play, and it teaches rules.
A Galbizo may have been the mother of Pog's, but
(04:24):
it was one Alan Rapinsky who made them a global sensation.
Helia Khila Dairy didn't actually print its own bottle caps.
Those were manufactured by stan Pack, a separate company based
in Canada. Thanks to Galbizo, stan Pack realized it could
make a killing in the Hawaiian toy market by selling
its juice lids as game pieces. There A Rapinsk, a
(04:49):
California business owner, somehow caught wind of this. In nineteen
ninety three, he purchased the Pog brand name from the
dairy and founded the World Pog Federation. That's when things
really got serious with relentless marketing. The Federation turned POGs
into a multimillion dollar industry and the American Mainland's newest
(05:09):
playground craze. So why did the game catch on? Partly
because the game pieces were inexpensive and collectible, and partly
because the game itself has super easy rules. To play,
you need only some pog caps and a slammer. Pog
caps are paperboard discs about the size of a US
(05:30):
half dollar, around forty millimeters across that's one and a
half inches. Each cap has one side that's blank or
bears the Pog logo, and one side with an eye
catching illustration, printed photo, or other design, sometimes with fancy
features like holographic foil or glow in the dark ink.
We call this second side the face. Slammers are slightly larger,
(05:54):
thicker discs made of plastic, hard rubber, or metal. They're
about seven times heavier than pogcap and are often decorated
with engravings, anadized patterns, or bright stickers. Participants meet over
a flat surface where they can pile their caps into
a single stack, face down. Everyone has to chip in
the same number of caps. Player one chucks their slammer
(06:16):
at the top of the stack, they'll get to take
all of the caps that land face up. If you
miss the stack completely, that still counts as your turn.
The players restack the remaining caps and the second player
gets a throw. The process repeats until all of the
caps are gone, at which point the game ends, the
winner being whoever claimed the most caps. I'm merely saying
(06:38):
that POGs caught on feels like a severe understatement. In
February of nineteen ninety three, the Federation through the first
ever US National Pog Tournament. Within a year, the game
had made its way to the East Coast infiltrating playgrounds
from Maryland to California. Rapinsky realized that his core products,
(06:58):
the Pog caps, were basically collectible business cards. The Federation
struck licensing deals with just about every brand you can
think of, McDonald's, Teenage Mutant, Ninja Turtles, Pega, Genesis, Bugs, Bunny,
the National Hockey League. Even the Catholic Church wanted a
piece of the action. In nineteen ninety five, the Diocey
of Camden, New Jersey ordered fifty thousand POGs with Pope
(07:21):
John Paul the Second's face on them. Other designs made
use of more generic nineties pop culture imagery like eight balls, flames, skulls, aliens, dinosaurs, skateboards,
and mildly rude or gross cartoons. If you remember the
vibe of Spencer's or gadzooks, think that if you don't,
try to imagine a uvy lit day glow wonderland of
(07:45):
what thirteen year olds thought was edgy at the time.
For a minute there, POGs were omnipresent. But the pog
bubble had to burst sometime. Rapinskiing Company may have oversaturated
their own market with too many variants, and by the
mid nineteen nineties parents were starting to complain. When kids
(08:07):
played POGs for keeps at recess or between classes, you
could easily lose your favorites to another student. That sometimes
caused fights. Many teachers considered the game and its pieces
disruptive and way too similar to gambling for comfort, so
POGs started getting banned in various schools around the country.
(08:27):
By the turn of the twenty first century, POGs were
decidedly out. The magazine Boy's Life was already dismissing POGs
as a bygone fad in nineteen ninety eight. The fads
can't last forever, and after all, people had beanie babies
to buy. Today's episode is based on the article You're
(08:50):
definitely a kid of the nineties if you played POGs
on housetuffworks dot com, written by Mark Mancini. A brain
stuff is production of Iyheart Radio in partnership with Houseifforks
dot Com and is produced by Time They're playing. Before
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. Hollywood has cashed in pretty hard
on our nostalgia for the nineteen nineties. There's the new
Jurassic Park movies, the Space Jam sequel, the Crow remake,
and rewatch podcasts for everything from Full House to Friends.
(00:23):
And that's not even getting into the video game remakes,
vinyl re releases, and near inexplicable return of extra wide
legged jeans. Less attention is now paid to another nineties
pop culture artifact, POGs. Remember those little paperboard circles and
the game you played with them. There's an episode of
(00:45):
The Simpsons from nineteen ninety five where Bart sells it
old Millhouse, who trades it away for a set of POGs.
In Milhouse's defense, they did have the character Alf on them.
But unlike the Simpsons and even Alf, POGs have pretty
much dropped off the radar since their nineteen nineties heyday.
If you weren't in grade school in the nineteen nineties,
(01:07):
there's a chance you've never even heard of POGs, despite
the phenomenon that they were so today, let's talk about them.
By some accounts, the story of POGs began a long,
long time ago, not in a galaxy far far away,
but in Japan. There's a Japanese game called Minko, thought
to have originated during the Kamakura period, which lasted from
(01:30):
thirteen thirty three to eleven eighty five BCE. Minko operates
under a simple premise. First, one player lays down a card.
This is the target. An opponent then tries to flip
over the target by throwing their own card at it.
If that player succeeds, they get to claim both cards.
(01:51):
Amenko wasn't always played with cards. Originally, players used discs
of baked play with colorful designs like portraits of famous
people reel or painted on one side. These were small,
about two inches or five centimeters across, but by eighteen
sixty eight, paper cards had replaced them. Another thing that
(02:12):
happened in the latter half of the eighteen hundreds was
that there was an influx of Japanese immigrants to the
Hawaiian Islands. There. Amenko may or may not have inspired
a similar game called milk Caps, popular in the early
nineteen hundreds. This was a children's pastime that could be
enjoyed on the cheap kids would stack up bottle caps
(02:33):
in a vertical pile. Then that take turns tossing a
harder object known as aikini or slammer at the stack.
Any caps that landed face up would go to the thrower.
Remaining caps would be restacked, and the next kid had
a chance to throw. We owe the word pog to
a beverage company originally called Halea Kila Dairy based on Maui.
(02:57):
In the nineteen seventies, they debuted a new do mixed
juice drink called Passionfruit Orange Guava or POG for short.
Today the brand is owned by Meadow Gold and their
beverages are sold in paper cartons and plastic jugs and
bottles sealed with screw on plastic caps. But at first
Pog juice was distributed in bottles sealed with cardboard caps,
(03:19):
and these lids were the perfect fit for a new
spin on the milk caps game. The game had pretty
much gone extinct by the early nineteen nineties, that is
until along came One Blossom Gelbizo, a teacher and guidance
counselor who's lovingly remembered as the mother of Pog's In
(03:41):
nineteen ninety one, while working at Wyalua Elementary School on Oahuo,
she reintroduced the old time waster to her students. Suddenly,
milk caps was all the rage again at Wyalua Elementary
and beyond, but a few changes were necessary. Milk bottles,
like the ones older generation had gotten caps from to
play with, weren't as common in the nineteen nineties. In
(04:04):
their absence, children turned to Pog juice caps. Galbizo later
told the press, the beauty of it is that the
students stopped playing the real rough games in the playground.
Both boys and girls can play, and it teaches rules.
A Galbizo may have been the mother of Pog's, but
(04:24):
it was one Alan Rapinsky who made them a global sensation.
Helia Khila Dairy didn't actually print its own bottle caps.
Those were manufactured by stan Pack, a separate company based
in Canada. Thanks to Galbizo, stan Pack realized it could
make a killing in the Hawaiian toy market by selling
its juice lids as game pieces. There A Rapinsk, a
(04:49):
California business owner, somehow caught wind of this. In nineteen
ninety three, he purchased the Pog brand name from the
dairy and founded the World Pog Federation. That's when things
really got serious with relentless marketing. The Federation turned POGs
into a multimillion dollar industry and the American Mainland's newest
(05:09):
playground craze. So why did the game catch on? Partly
because the game pieces were inexpensive and collectible, and partly
because the game itself has super easy rules. To play,
you need only some pog caps and a slammer. Pog
caps are paperboard discs about the size of a US
(05:30):
half dollar, around forty millimeters across that's one and a
half inches. Each cap has one side that's blank or
bears the Pog logo, and one side with an eye
catching illustration, printed photo, or other design, sometimes with fancy
features like holographic foil or glow in the dark ink.
We call this second side the face. Slammers are slightly larger,
(05:54):
thicker discs made of plastic, hard rubber, or metal. They're
about seven times heavier than pogcap and are often decorated
with engravings, anadized patterns, or bright stickers. Participants meet over
a flat surface where they can pile their caps into
a single stack, face down. Everyone has to chip in
the same number of caps. Player one chucks their slammer
(06:16):
at the top of the stack, they'll get to take
all of the caps that land face up. If you
miss the stack completely, that still counts as your turn.
The players restack the remaining caps and the second player
gets a throw. The process repeats until all of the
caps are gone, at which point the game ends, the
winner being whoever claimed the most caps. I'm merely saying
(06:38):
that POGs caught on feels like a severe understatement. In
February of nineteen ninety three, the Federation through the first
ever US National Pog Tournament. Within a year, the game
had made its way to the East Coast infiltrating playgrounds
from Maryland to California. Rapinsky realized that his core products,
(06:58):
the Pog caps, were basically collectible business cards. The Federation
struck licensing deals with just about every brand you can
think of, McDonald's, Teenage Mutant, Ninja Turtles, Pega, Genesis, Bugs, Bunny,
the National Hockey League. Even the Catholic Church wanted a
piece of the action. In nineteen ninety five, the Diocey
of Camden, New Jersey ordered fifty thousand POGs with Pope
(07:21):
John Paul the Second's face on them. Other designs made
use of more generic nineties pop culture imagery like eight balls, flames, skulls, aliens, dinosaurs, skateboards,
and mildly rude or gross cartoons. If you remember the
vibe of Spencer's or gadzooks, think that if you don't,
try to imagine a uvy lit day glow wonderland of
(07:45):
what thirteen year olds thought was edgy at the time.
For a minute there, POGs were omnipresent. But the pog
bubble had to burst sometime. Rapinskiing Company may have oversaturated
their own market with too many variants, and by the
mid nineteen nineties parents were starting to complain. When kids
(08:07):
played POGs for keeps at recess or between classes, you
could easily lose your favorites to another student. That sometimes
caused fights. Many teachers considered the game and its pieces
disruptive and way too similar to gambling for comfort, so
POGs started getting banned in various schools around the country.
(08:27):
By the turn of the twenty first century, POGs were
decidedly out. The magazine Boy's Life was already dismissing POGs
as a bygone fad in nineteen ninety eight. The fads
can't last forever, and after all, people had beanie babies
to buy. Today's episode is based on the article You're
(08:50):
definitely a kid of the nineties if you played POGs
on housetuffworks dot com, written by Mark Mancini. A brain
stuff is production of Iyheart Radio in partnership with Houseifforks
dot Com and is produced by Time They're playing. Before
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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