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

Remember Evileen? 😼 Evileen: Big Eyes, Little Fangs

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Evileen Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! She almost looks sweet. A pale cat-like face with enormous black eyes rimmed in green, green markings sweeping up from her nose like wild eyebrows, and little green spots where the whiskers should be. Then you get down to the mouth and there are the two fangs hanging over her lip. EVILEEN is printed in black along the top edge, and she earned the name.

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. ERTL's Blurp Balls had a Retch-A-Rat Tomcat, so Evileen was not the only nasty cat of the 1980s.

Evileen 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 Cat Sìth of the Highlands

Evileen reminds me of the cat sìth, the fairy cat of the Scottish Highlands. In the old stories it is a big black cat with one white spot on its chest, and when it thinks nobody is watching it walks on its hind legs. Some people said it was no fairy at all but a witch who could turn herself into a cat, and that a witch who changed nine times was stuck as a cat for the rest of her life. The legend may have grown out of the Scottish wildcat, or the Kellas cats, a wildcat and house cat cross found only in Scotland.

The cat sìth was believed to steal the soul of someone who had just died, before it could go on to the land of the dead, just by passing over the body. So before burial families kept a watch called the Late Wake, with music, games, dancing and catnip to keep the cat distracted, and no fire near the body, because the cat was drawn to the heat. Around Samhain folks left out a saucer of milk for it. Do that and the house had good luck for the year. Forget, and the cat sìth would dry up the milk of your cows.

And then there is the English folk tale The King of the Cats. A man comes home and tells his wife and their cat, Old Tom, that he saw nine black cats with white spots on their chests carrying a coffin with a crown on it, and one of them told him, "Tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum is dead." Old Tom jumps up, cries that he is the King of the Cats now, and shoots up the chimney, never to be seen again. I keep Evileen away from the fireplace, 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 cat lover with a dark streak, or anybody who grew up with Madballs.