Vintage 1980s Creep Queen Pin 📌 Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired

Remember Creep Queen? 👑 Creep Queen: A Doll Face With Fangs

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Creep Queen Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! She is the one that gets people. From a distance she is a pale little doll face with big green eyes and a scowl, and then you notice the red cracks spreading down her forehead like a china doll that got dropped, and the mouth full of fangs. CREEP QUEEN is printed in black up the right edge. Queen of the creeps is a fair title.

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 real Madballs even had a queen of sorts: the 1986 cartoon Madballs: Escape from Orb added a girl Madball named Freakella, modeled after the Bride of Frankenstein, who only ever appeared in the cartoon.

Creep Queen 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, 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.

🎎 Robert the Doll, Key West's Haunted Doll

With that cracked doll face, Creep Queen always puts me in mind of my favorite haunted doll story. Robert the Doll belonged to Robert Eugene Otto, a painter and writer from a prominent family in Key West, Florida. The doll was reportedly made by the Steiff company of Germany, and Otto's grandfather bought it on a trip to Germany in 1904 and gave it to the boy for his birthday. The little sailor suit it wears was probably one of Otto's own. Otto grew up, studied art in New York and Paris, married Annette Parker in Paris in 1930, and brought her home to the family house on Eaton Street, where the doll stayed until Otto died in 1974. In 1994 Robert was given to the East Martello Museum in Key West, and he has been drawing a crowd ever since.

Now the legend. Folks say Robert moves around on his own, changes his expression and giggles. One story says young Otto blamed all his childhood mishaps on the doll, and that is what woke him up. Visitors are told to ask Robert's permission before they take his picture, and the wall around his case is covered with letters of apology from people who did not ask and blame him for car wrecks, broken bones, lost jobs and divorces. In 2008 he left Key West for the first time in 104 years, for a paranormal convention up in Clearwater, and in 2015 a horror movie loosely based on him came out, called simply Robert, with four sequels after it.

I would ask Creep Queen's permission before you take her picture too, just in case.

📌 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 horror fan, the doll collector with a dark streak, or anybody who grew up with Madballs.