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Size: 1.5 inches
In the mid-1980s American kids spent their allowance on things built to make parents groan. AmToy's Madballs put hideous faces on foam balls, and Topps turned the Cabbage Patch craze inside out with Garbage Pail Kids stickers. Around those two hits grew a crowd of unlicensed cousins that nobody catalogued, and Hog Head is one of them: a pinback button with a pink pig face, droopy green eyes and two giant buck teeth, his name printed along the edge. Where the official monsters wanted you to gag, Hog Head just wants to grin at you.
A round pinback button, 1.5 inches across, with the printed art under a glossy clear front. The pig's face fills the whole circle: pale pink skin, sketchy brown brows, heavy lids over big green eyes, a wide pink snout with two black nostrils, and an open grin showing two square white buck teeth over a red tongue. HOG HEAD is printed in black capitals up the lower right edge, and the word CHINA runs along the top of the rim. The back is grey plastic with a brass-colored safety pin set through two slots.
Two of the photographs show construction and scale rather than this exact pin: a close-up of a grey plastic button back, and three button backs lying beside a US quarter.
Hog Head belongs to a cast of named monster-face buttons, each 1.5 inches across, that collectors sell together as Madballs-style buttons: Biface, Bot Eye, Cat Bat, Craterface, Creep Queen, Evileen, Hog Head, Mad Marvin, Mummeye, Ocufungus, Pigulus, Pufang and Sad Lad. There is no company name, copyright line or licence anywhere on the pin, and Hog Head is not one of the sixteen Madballs AmToy released in its first two series. These buttons are the playground cousins of the licensed toys, telling the same joke with characters of their own.
The official line did have its own hog. The second series of eight Madballs included Swine Sucker, a pig-faced ball that shared the shelf with Wolf Breath, Fist Face, Lock Lips, Snake Bait, Bruise Brother, Freaky Fullback and Splitting Headache. The first eight had been Screamin' Meemie, Slobulus, Aargh, Horn Head, Dust Brain, Oculus Orbus, Skull Face and Bash Brain. Swine Sucker was sculpted to disgust; Hog Head, with his soft pencil shading and dopey eyes, was drawn to be liked.
Madballs were made by AmToy, the toy arm of the American Greetings Corporation, the greeting card company then based in Brooklyn, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, and now in Westlake, Ohio. The characters came out of its design and licensing division, Those Characters From Cleveland, which had already turned Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears into fortunes: Strawberry Shortcake generated $500 million in retail sales in 1981, and the Care Bears $2 billion in their first two years. Collector histories credit Madballs to a team there that included Ralph Shafer, George Chanter, Mark Spangler, Jim Elliott, Kim Hammeren and Vint Gonser. The fad led to two Nelvana cartoons in 1986 and 1987, a Marvel Star Comics series that ran from September 1986 to June 1988, and a 1988 Ocean Software game for 8-bit home computers. Art Asylum revived the line in 2007 and 2008, Just Play brought it back from 2017 to 2019, and Premium DNA Toys began six-inch figures in 2020.
Topps released Garbage Pail Kids in 1985 as a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, created by cartoonist Art Spiegelman with Mark Newgarden and John Pound. Art Spiegelman, who had co-created Topps' Wacky Packages parody stickers in the 1960s, went on to win a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for Maus, the first graphic novel ever to receive one. In 1986 Original Appalachian Artworks, which held the Cabbage Patch Kids rights, sued Topps for trademark infringement, and the settlement forced Topps to change the characters' look and its logo. Schools across the country banned the cards as a classroom distraction. A live-action movie opened on August 21, 1987, earned about $1.58 million, and still holds a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Mexico has banned Garbage Pail Kids imports since 1988.
A pig's head has carried legends for centuries. Every December The Queen's College, Oxford carries a boar's head through its hall at the Boar's Head Gaudy while the Boar's Head Carol is sung, a carol printed by Wynkyn de Worde in his Christmasse Carolles of 1521. The story told at Queen's is that a student walking in nearby Shotover Forest with his Aristotle was charged by a wild boar, rammed the book down the animal's throat with a cry of "Graecum est," and choked it with philosophy. Scholars trace the feast back further still, possibly to the Germanic Yule custom of the sonargöltr, a boar offered at midwinter in honour of the Norse god Freyr.
Say the name out loud and a cooper hears a barrel. A hogshead is a large cask, first standardised by the English Parliament in 1423. A wine hogshead holds 63 US gallons, and in the British and American colonies tobacco travelled in hogsheads 48 inches long and 30 inches across that weighed about 1,000 pounds when packed. Why a barrel should be named for a hog is a riddle the word books still argue over. Philologist Walter William Skeat pointed to the Dutch oxhooft, the Danish oxehoved and the Old Swedish oxhuvud, all naming a cask as an "ox head," and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica suggested hogshead began as a corruption of oxhead. Other scholars point to still older Dutch cask words, hukeshovet and hoekshoot.
Unused old stock: bright, unfaded colors, a clean glossy front and a safety pin that works.
No. The pin carries no maker's name or copyright, and Hog Head is not one of AmToy's first sixteen Madballs. It is a 1980s gross-out button from the same craze.
Yes. Swine Sucker, a pig-faced ball, came in the second series of eight.
1.5 inches across, about one and a half times the width of a US quarter.
HOG HEAD up the lower right edge, and CHINA along the top of the rim.
Nobody has settled it. The best-known theory, from Walter William Skeat, ties the word to Dutch, Danish and Swedish cask names meaning "ox head."
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