Will Freeman looks at the playground craze that took the world by storm!
Will Freeman looks at the playground craze that took the world by storm!
When the Haleakala Dairy food product consultant Mary Soon invented a new drink combining passion fruit, orange and guava flavours in 1971, she likely had little idea she had set in motion a chain of events that would lead to a collectables sensation
The Hawaiian dairy’s drink was branded fairly simply; Passion fruit-Orange-Guava, or ‘POG’ for short. If you were a child of the 1990s - or had children of your own at that time - you may already be seeing where this is going. Pogs eventually became a playground game that felt for a few years like it had taken over the world.
In 1994, 350 million Pogs were sold in the US alone. But the worldwide sensation began life sometime before Soon inadvertently gave it its brand.
POG juice, like many products produced by the dairy, featured relatively sturdy cardboard disks as seals for the lids - perfect for a game that local children had already been playing for some decades. That game was ‘milk caps’, which involved stacking up circular disks found atop many bottled products through the 1920s and 1930s, tossing a heavier object or ‘slammer’ down at the pile, and scoring points depending on how the caps fell. It’s a simple game with more house rule variants than Monopoly, but it has a gameplay dynamic that can be compared to conkers, marbles and myriad other playground games.
Back in 1955, Haleakala Dairy had noticed how popular it’s cardboard seals were with youngsters who played milk caps. That year the firm moved away from using glass containers, but continued to manufacture the associated card seals to harness youngsters’ interest in collecting them to play milk caps. Orchards Hawaii is also credited with continuing to use card seals after moving away from glass bottles for the same reason.
For some time, however, milk caps appeared to remain a relatively local curio; popular, but far from sensational. There’s even some suggestion that the game largely faded in its popularity. Then, in 1991 Haleakala moved from its home in Maui to the more densely populated island of Oahu, increasing the potential to connect with more milk cap fans.
That same year, according to the legend, a local teacher and guidance counselor named Blossom Galbiso reintroduced the milk caps game she had played as a child to her students, in an effort to focus them on a less violent alternative to typical playground games that involved roughhousing and grazed knees. That decision sparked a craze that spread across the island of Oahu, then across Hawaii, and into the United states, where it built the momentum to go international.
The Haleakala Dairy were quick to notice the trend, branding their milk caps with the Pogs logo and various images such as mascot Poglodyte, later known as Pogman. Children started to collect them to play the game.
In no time at all, the milk caps were much more desirable than the drink itself (though it sounds very refreshing indeed). From there things snowballed, and by 1993 millions of caps were being printed; which is when marketers from around the world swooped on the opportunity that milk caps presented.
Ultimately, these small cardboard discs were cheap to manufacture, could be printed with almost any design, and affordably and simply placed in packaging. That meant a film could be promoted over a series of Pogs, given away as a freebie in a packet of sweets or similar, helping sales for all involved. Slammers, meanwhile, could be given away with larger items, at locations, or sold direct with packs of Pogs in toy stores.
As such, from the off Pogs
were sold as collectables. Gathering complete sets of a particular series of Pogs became perhaps as important to children as the game itself. And, while Pogs dominated as a brand, many other contenders emerged, such as Tazos, frequently given away in crisps, and commonly featuring small slots so they doubled in use as a construction toy. Then there were SkyCaps, SlammerWhammers, and endless other variations.
And because putting an image on a small card disk was fairly easy to do, countless off-brand variants emerged, making collecting Pogs today rather bewildering. That problem is compounded by the fact that ‘pogs’ is a common synonym for the milk caps game in general, leading to much legal wrangling over the word, and common misuse.
Milk caps as a contemporary collectable are largely very affordable, even though they bring much of the appeal of more aggressively pocket draining categories such as trading cards. Most individual Pogs, for example, will cost in the pennies, rather than the pounds. They are usually sold in bulk, and typically only clear the ‘pound-per-Pog’ rate if they feature brands that appeal to other collectors. It can feel like most family movies and toy brands of the 1990s featured on Pogs, meaning that there are sets for Disney fans, Pokémon catchers, comic book obsessives and much more besides. If you can imagine it on a Pog, it is probably out there. Indeed, completists beware, for the challenge of Pog collecting is not one of cost, but scale. It is likely impossible to put a number on the variants produced.
There are a few especially rare Pogs out there. Misprints sell for slightly higher prices, and there is a set associated with a cult video game EarthBound for which almost all merchandise is collectable. They have sold for over $200 in the US, though we recently saw a set misdescribed by the seller shift for $2. And much more commonly, you see job lots of various milkcap toys in the 1000s go for a few hundred pounds.
Perhaps the most interesting milkcap collectable category, then, are the ‘pre-POG’ examples, and those early examples emblazoned with the word ‘POG’ that were only ever intended to seal juice in bottles. Frequently between £5 and £10 each, Hawaiian milk caps from 1971 and before are wonderful items, and usually have a staple through their centre; part of the original packaging. There is a pog for every taste, but here at Collectors Gazette, it is the milk caps actually designed to be caps for milk that we find the most beguiling.
And if you were wondering, you can still get POG juice in Hawaii, though the dairy that created it rather got left behind when its product seal turned marketing sensation became a global phenomenon. It sold the POG trademark to The World POG Federation in 1993, just before the craze really bedded in.