Vintage 1980s Cat Bat Gross-Out Monster Pin 📌 Green Fanged Vampire Face Pinback Button, Weird Retro Collectible

Remember Cat Bat? 🦇 Cat Bat: Dracula's Hairline, a Cat's Eyes and a Mouthful of Fangs

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Cat Bat Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! Every piece of this guy's face was borrowed from a legend, and I love him for it. He is green all over, with a slicked black widow's peak, bushy black eyebrows pulled into a scowl, yellow-orange cat eyes with thin slit pupils and a broad flat nose. Then there is that grin, huge and curling, packed with fangs top and bottom around a red tongue, with webbed green folds pinching in at the corners like the edge of a bat's wing. CAT BAT is printed in small black capitals along the lower left edge. The hairline is Dracula's, the eyes are the cat's and the wings are the bat's.

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!

Madballs were created by AmToy, a toy division of the American Greetings Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio, and dreamed up by a creative team at American Greetings Properties that included Ralph Shafer, George Chanter, Mark Spangler, Jim Elliott, Kim Hammeren and Vint Gonser. The first eight reached stores in the United States and Canada in February 1986, though collectors often date them 1985: Aargh, Bash Brain, Dust Brain, Horn Head, Oculus Orbus, Screamin' Meemie, Skull Face and Slobulus. They started out in hard rubber and moved to soft foam, and the fad led to two animated cartoons in 1986 and 1987, a comic series from 1986 to 1988, and video games for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64. Art Asylum revived the line in 2007 and 2008, and Just Play brought it back again from 2017 to 2019.

Topps released Garbage Pail Kids in 1985, with Art Spiegelman, Mark Newgarden and John Pound among the creators. The stickers were such an obvious send-up of the Cabbage Patch Kids that in 1986 the doll's owner, Original Appalachian Artworks, sued Topps for trademark infringement, and the settlement made Topps change the characters' look and the logo. Schools all over the country banned the cards as a classroom distraction, which only made kids want them more. A live-action movie came out on August 21, 1987, and it still holds a 0% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. The copycat balls came from all over: ERTL made Blurp Balls, The Mel Appel Company made Weird Balls, and Lanard Toys made Spit Balls. A button like Cat Bat let a kid wear the whole rebellious joke on a jean jacket for pocket change.

Cat Bat was never one of the official Madballs, though. He belongs to a whole cast of named monster buttons that collectors trade together, with names like Mummeye, Craterface, Creep Queen, Pigulus, Hog Head, Sad Lad and Ocufungus. There is no company name, copyright line or country of origin anywhere on the front or back, and I have never found who made the series. They are the playground cousins of the licensed toys, telling the same jokes with characters of their own, and they are definitely neat.

🧛 The Vampire Legend Behind the Face

The story goes that the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas watched bats lapping blood from sleeping animals and named them vampire bats, after the creatures of European legend they already knew. The legend came full circle when scientists named a giant extinct vampire bat of Central and South America Desmodus draculae, in honor of Count Dracula, "the greatest human vampire of folklore." It was about 30% bigger than today's common vampire bat.

The face is pure Hollywood. The Hungarian immigrant Bela Lugosi played Count Dracula on Broadway in 1927 and then in Tod Browning's 1931 Universal film, and his accent, cape, pale skin, slicked black hair and widow's peak, his own natural hairline sharpened with makeup, became the picture of a vampire for everybody after him. Half a century later the gross-out artists were still drawing that hairline on their monsters, and Cat Bat wears it proudly.

📌 Wear It or Frame It

Pin it on a denim jacket, a backpack strap, a hat or a battle vest, add it to a Halloween costume or a horror-movie night outfit, or frame it in a shadow box with your other 1980s monster pins. It's a perfect little gift for the horror fan, the vampire lover or anybody who grew up on Madballs.