Vintage 1980s Hog Head Gross-Out Monster Pin 📌 Buck-Toothed Pig Face Pinback Button, Weird Retro Collectible

Remember Hog Head? 🐷 Hog Head: The Gross-Out Pig Who Only Wants to Grin

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Hog Head Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! Where most of the monsters in this bunch want you to gag, Hog Head just wants to grin at you. He has pale pink skin, sketchy brown brows, heavy lids over big green eyes, a wide pink snout with two black nostrils, and an open grin with two square white buck teeth. HOG HEAD is printed in black capitals up the lower right edge, and the word CHINA runs along the top of the rim, the only hint anywhere on these buttons about where they were made. He is the friendliest monster I own.

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!

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 brought in $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 started six-inch figures in 2020.

The official line even had its own hog. The second series of eight Madballs included Swine Sucker, an ugly drooling wild boar, who 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 you. Hog Head, with his soft pencil shading and dopey eyes, was drawn to be liked.

Topps put out Garbage Pail Kids in 1985 as a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, created by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman with Mark Newgarden and John Pound. Spiegelman had helped create Topps' Wacky Packages parody stickers in the 1960s, and he went on to win a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for Maus, the first graphic novel ever to get one. In 1986 Original Appalachian Artworks, which held the Cabbage Patch Kids rights, sued Topps for trademark infringement, and the settlement made Topps change the characters' look and its logo. Schools all over the country banned the cards as a classroom distraction. A live-action movie opened on August 21, 1987, made about $1.58 million, and still holds a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Mexico has banned Garbage Pail Kids imports since 1988. The copycat balls came from all over: ERTL made Blurp Balls, The Mel Appel Company made Weird Balls, and Lanard Toys made Spit Balls.

Hog Head was never one of the official Madballs, though, and he is not one of the sixteen AmToy put out in its first two series. He belongs to a whole cast of named monster buttons, each 1 1/2 inches across, that collectors trade together: Biface, Bot Eye, Cat Bat, Craterface, Creep Queen, Evileen, Mad Marvin, Mummeye, Ocufungus, Pigulus, Pufang and Sad Lad. There is no company name, copyright line or license anywhere on the pin, and I have never found who made the series. They are definitely neat.

🐗 The Legend of the Boar's Head

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 they tell at Queen's is that a student walking in nearby Shotover Forest, reading his Aristotle, was charged by a wild boar. He rammed the book down the animal's throat with a cry of "Graecum est" and choked it with philosophy. Scholars trace the feast back even further, possibly to the Germanic Yule custom of the sonargöltr, a boar offered at midwinter in honor of the Norse god Freyr.

🛢️ Hog's Head or Hogshead? The Barrel Lore

Say his name out loud and a cooper hears a barrel. A hogshead is a big cask, first standardized by the English Parliament in 1423. A wine hogshead holds 63 U.S. gallons, and in the British and American colonies tobacco traveled 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. The 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 older Dutch cask words still, hukeshovet and hoekshoot. Nobody has settled it, which suits Hog Head just fine.

📌 Wear It or Frame It

Pin it on a denim jacket, a backpack strap, a hat or a battle vest, frame it in a shadow box with your other 1980s monster buttons, or stick it on a barbecue apron or a smokehouse corkboard. It's a perfect little gift for the pig collector, or for anybody who traded Garbage Pail Kids at recess.