Vintage 1980s Bot Eye Gross-Out Pin 🥃 Bulging Bloodshot Bug-Eyes and Manic Grin, Pin-Back Button in the 80s Gross-Out Spirit

Remember Bot Eye? 👀 Bot Eye: Eyes Bulging Right Out of His Head

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Bot Eye Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! This guy is having way too good a time. He has a tan face with two big blue-violet eyes bulging right out of his head, the whites all shot through with red veins, a big bulb of a nose, and a huge toothy grin under bright red lips. BOT EYE is printed in black up the right edge. He looks thrilled about something, and I am not sure I want to know what.

The front is printed paper under a glossy clear cover, and the back is gray with a brass-colored safety pin. The close-up of a button back and the last photo, three backs lying next to a quarter, are there to show the construction and the size.

🤢 Madballs, Garbage Pail Kids and the Knockoffs

Madballs were a huge hit in the 1980s, and they came right on the heels of the Garbage Pail Kids. They spawned a bunch of others including Whacky Ghoulies, Ugly Balls, Burp Balls, Weird Balls, and Spit Balls. Parents and teachers hated these things so much!

Topps started it in 1985 with Garbage Pail Kids, a gross-out parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls dreamed up by Art Spiegelman and drawn at first by John Pound. The doll company sued in 1986 and schools all over the country banned the cards, which of course made every kid want them more. Madballs followed from AmToy, a toy company owned by the American Greetings Corporation: foam balls with disgusting faces, first in stores in 1986. The copycats came fast. ERTL made a line of Blurp Balls drawn by the artist James Groman, The Mel Appel Company made Weird Balls, and Lanard Toys made Spit Balls. The real Madballs had Oculus Orbus, one giant bloodshot eyeball, and Lanard's Spit Balls had one called 20/20, so eyeballs were clearly a big seller.

Bot Eye was never one of the official Madballs, though. It belongs to a whole cast of named monster buttons that collectors trade together, with names like Mummeye, Craterface, Creep Queen, Mad Marvin, Pufang, Cat Bat, Hog Head, Ocufungus and Pigulus. Nobody put a maker's name on them, and I have never found who made the series. They are definitely neat.

🧿 The Evil Eye

With eyes like that, Bot Eye has to be the one that gets the evil eye story. It is one of the oldest beliefs in the world: a curse carried by a jealous glare. Amulets to protect against it have been found from around 5,000 years ago, and writers of the classical world from Hesiod and Plato to Plutarch and Pliny the Elder all wrote about it. Once glass beads started being made around the Mediterranean in about 1500 BC, eye beads spread with the Phoenicians, Persians, Arabs, Greeks, Romans and Ottomans.

The blue and white eye charm you see hanging in homes and cars today is the nazar, most common in Turkey, and the idea is that the staring eye bends the bad look right back at whoever sent it. In Greece the evil eye is simply called mati, the eye, and it gets cast out with a secret prayer handed down from an older relative, usually a grandparent. In southern Italy folks carry a little horn called a cornicello. In Mexico and Central America babies are thought to be most at risk, so they get an amulet bracelet with an eye-like spot painted on it, and one traditional cure in Latin America has a curandero, a folk healer, sweep a raw egg over the person to soak up the curse. And in places where light eyes are rare, people with green eyes, and especially blue eyes, were thought to pass the curse along whether they meant to or not.

Bot Eye has big blue ones and he is staring right at you, so you might want a nazar handy.

📌 Wear It or Frame It

Pin it on a denim jacket, a backpack or a Halloween costume, or put it in a shadow box with your other gross-out buttons. It's a perfect little gift for the eye doctor with a sense of humor, or anybody who grew up with Madballs.