What Is It About Those Stackable, Whackable Discs That Has Kids Going . . . : Pog Wild
Depending on your age and your area code, you might be obsessed with Pogs, or blissfully ignorant of them.
The trend/fad/craze, which originated a couple of years ago with an elementary school teacher in Hawaii, crossed the Pacific and--fueled by tournaments, corporate sponsors and an official world headquarters--virtually consumed the grade- and middle-school crowd in Orange County.
While numerous schools there were banning Pogs, the stackable, whackable cardboard milk caps spread to pockets of 213, 310, 818 and 805, and Washington, Arizona, Texas, Florida and parts of the East Coast, picking up enemies--some parents and school officials--along the way.
But even though the discs are a hit with kids, people who make their living analyzing trends can’t agree on how to characterize this phenomenon. Pogs, they say, are no Hula Hoops. At least not yet.
So what are they? A nuisance, if you listen to teachers and parents in Los Angeles. Like their brethren in Orange County, they are upset because the game has turned some children into savvy high rollers, betting jewelry, clothes and lunch money along with their milk caps.
Several L.A. schools have banned the game in the aftermath of fights, heated arguments and kids stealing the glossy discs from younger ones.
For the uninitiated, the Depression-era game is played with silver-dollar-sized cardboard milk bottle caps. The caps--which cost from 10 cents to $1 each--are stacked either face-up or -down and then hit with a heavier, thicker disc called a “slammer” that goes for as much as $6.
The caps that land opposite-side-up are the player’s to keep. In the Los Angeles area, numerous variations--with such names as tornado, ABCs, crisscross, poison, rainbow, scorpion, outsiders and black magic--have cropped up.
Pogs--also known as Trovs, Hero Caps, SkyCaps and Tonx--are decorated with the images of products, movie stars, athletes, comic book figures, deities, ninjas, ghouls, cars and cartoon characters.
Three months ago, the Costa Mesa-based World POG Federation co-sponsored the “Go Pog Wild & Rollerblade Crazy” event at Disneyland. On slate for the WPF is the Southern California Pog Championships at Knott’s Berry Farm in September and a campaign in Canada with Coca-Cola and Wayne Gretzky.
“I haven’t seen anything like this since marbles,” said Rick Mitchell, who manages All Sport Card in Rancho Penasquitos, about 15 miles north of San Diego. He said he is busy filling cap orders for stores in Texas, Utah, Washington and Florida.
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Ground zero for the discs is in the small town of Waialua on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It was there a few years ago that teacher Blossom Galbiso taught her students a game she had grown up with.
“We called it ‘milk covers’ then,” she said in a telephone interview. When she heard in the fall of 1992 that the game was spreading across Hawaii, she kept a chart tracking its migration. To date, the game has made its way not only to the Mainland but to Canada and Mexico. Soon she was getting 30 to 50 calls a day from people wanting to know where to buy the caps.
One of those callers was a Southern California entrepreneur who soon learned that a Hawaiian dairy began marketing POG--which stands for passion fruit-orange-guava juice--in bottles with cardboard caps 25 years ago.
Alan Rypinski, founder and chairman emeritus of Armor All, is also president and CEO of the World POG Federation, which is helping fuel the frenzy.
Rypinski bought the POG trademark from the Haleakala Dairy in Maui in 1993 and has been running with it ever since. He has several licensing ventures in the works and wants to take Pogs to schools, both as a fund-raising device and an educational tool. “We’ve studied this carefully,” he said, “and it’s non-gender-specific. That’s unique. And there is no intimidation factor when you play this game. It’s just clean fun.”
Irma Zandl, president of the Zandl Group, a New York-based youth market consulting company, called Pogs a fad, not a trend.
“These kinds of fads travel much in the same way that jokes do. They sort of end up crisscrossing the country and fads tend to work that same way,” she said.
It makes sense that the fad first landed on the West Coast--and not anywhere else immediately--because the caps came from Hawaii, a favorite vacation spot for Californians, she added.
The caps, she said, are like the Vanilla Ice of hip-hop culture, popular only with certain segments and ages of the population where they are distributed. “With fads, the hotter it burns, the quicker it burns out.”
It has, however, caused trouble at some schools.
Diana Lorenz, principal of Mount Washington Elementary School in Los Angeles, decided to enforce a cap ban after she learned that some kids were selling them for more than $1 each.
“It was getting out of hand,” she said, adding: “I don’t have anything against the Pogs, but I found them educationally distracting.”
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Earlier this month, A.H. Glass, assistant principal at Nimitz Middle School in Southeast Los Angeles--the second-largest junior high school in the country--broadcast a no-Pog edict to the 3,600 students. His decision came soon after he discovered some pornographic caps a student had brought to school.
“Students were coming up to me to complain that someone had stolen or taken their caps. Other students were gambling with them. We had arguments. We had fights. Older students were threatening younger students. We decided to ban them on the basis of it being a form of gambling and a distraction on campus.”
Glass said he noticed the disc phenomenon on his campus about five weeks ago. In the mornings he would break up groups of 40 to 50 players “hunched over like they were shooting dice.”
But ban or no ban, the discs still manage to find their way into the pockets of some students at Nimitz.
Ruben, 13, who wouldn’t reveal his last name, pulled out a handful of Pogs and a couple of slammers from his baggy pockets to demonstrate the game one day last week.
“Don’t get me in trouble,” he warned as students gathered around him on their knees to cheer him on against his opponent, Danny Acevedo, 14, an eighth-grader at Nimitz.
After a few rounds that included some fancy tricks, Ruben scooped up his caps, returned them to his pockets and slipped out of the room unnoticed.
Danny said he started collecting his caps two months ago after his stepbrother showed him how the game was played. He now has more than 400 Pogs at home, which he purchased partly with the $3 daily allowance his mother gives him for lunch and snacks.
“I like to win,” he said. “I wanna win so bad that I get all hyper and everything.” And sometimes he says he wants “to play so bad that I’ll gamble.”
The most he’s won is $10 in one play. The most he’s ever lost is $5.
Danny told his friends that “my mom says ‘It’s the devil’s game.’ She would prefer that I not spend my money on Pogs.”
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At Danny’s house in Southeast Los Angeles, the Super Nintendo sits on top of a TV gathering dust because Danny is “outside all the time playing Pogs,” said his mother, Miriam Rivera. She is concerned Danny will “become addicted” to gambling. “I’m scared that if he starts playing with money like this that he’s going to like it and when he grows up he’ll like gambling.”
Dee Dee Urquhart, a West Hills mother, said her two boys, Kyle, 10, and Parker, 8, students at Welby Way Elementary in the San Fernando Valley, are Pog wild.
The boys spend their allowance, anywhere from $3 to $5 a week, on the caps. “My dad is the champion,” said Parker, who adds that playing with the discs “is the only thing to do ‘cause everything else is boring.”
Urquhart said her boys have outgrown the Sega and Nintendo. “Now, they’re on their hands and knees with their dad,” she said, adding that she’s had a talk with her children “about the gambling aspect of the game.”
She is upset, though, with other parents who “don’t know what these Pogs are all about. They’ll buy their kids anything and then ignore what the kids are doing with the stuff.”
And she agrees with Welby Way’s ban on Pogs “because a lot of arguments are created over (them).”
Galbiso, who never dreamed her childhood pastime would explode on an international scale, said she’s disappointed by schools that have banned the game.
“I think that some of the most teachable moments are when you’re having problems. When people fall down the stairs, do you take the stairs away? No, you make them safer or teach people to walk better. That can be used to a teacher’s advantage,” the 23-year teaching veteran said.
