Vintage 1980s Crater Face Gross-Out Monster Pin 📌 Cratered Grimace Pinback Button, Weird Retro Collectible

Remember Crater Face? 🌕 Crater Face: Pitted Like the Moon and Twice as Ugly

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Crater Face Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! This poor fellow. He has a bald, lumpy head the color of old putty, pitted all over with little craters and pockmarks, droopy pink-rimmed eyes that do not quite match, and a wide snarl full of long, jagged teeth with green slime dripping off them. A purple border runs all the way around the edge, and CRATER FACE is printed in black along the lower left. You laugh first and cringe second, which is exactly how these were supposed to work.

The front is printed paper under a glossy clear cover, and the back is gray with a brass-colored safety pin.

🤢 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 Weird Balls line had characters called Sewer Face and Rock Slime, and Crater Face would have fit right in with them.

Crater Face 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, Creep Queen, Mad Marvin, Pufang, Cat Bat, Hog Head, Ocufungus, Pigulus and Sad Lad. Nobody put a maker's name on them, and I have never found who made the series. They are definitely neat.

🌙 The Man in the Moon

Crater Face is pitted like the surface of the moon, and people have been seeing a face up there for as long as anybody has looked up. What I love is how many different stories there are about who he is. An old European tradition says the Man in the Moon was banished up there for some crime. One version makes him the man in the Book of Numbers who was caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Some Germanic peoples said he was a woodcutter caught working on the Sabbath, a Roman legend made him a sheep thief, and a medieval Christian tradition said he was Cain, doomed to wander around the earth forever. Dante mentions that one in the Inferno.

The Haida people of the Pacific Northwest tell it as a boy who was sent out to gather sticks. His father told him the moon would light his way, the boy grumbled and made fun of the moon, and for his rudeness he was taken up and trapped there. In Norse myth the moon was Máni, who drives a horse-drawn carriage across the sky with the great wolf Hati chasing him. In China the goddess Chang'e drank a double dose of an immortality potion and ended up stranded on the moon, with a moon rabbit for company in some tellings, while a man named Wu Gang keeps chopping at a tree up there that always grows back. Japanese parents often tell their kids the markings are a rabbit making rice cakes.

The playwright John Lyly summed it all up back in 1591: "There liveth none under the sunne, that knows what to make of the man in the moone." My own theory is that the fellow on this pin is what the Man in the Moon looks like after a few billion years of getting hit by rocks.

📌 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 stargazer with a sick sense of humor, or anybody who grew up with Madballs.