Vintage 1980s Mummeye Pin 📌 Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired

Remember Mummeye? 👁️ Mummeye: A Bandaged Mummy With One Bloodshot Eye

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Mummeye Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! This one cracks me up. A mummy's head is wrapped up tight in old tan bandages streaked with red, and right in the middle one big bloodshot eyeball has pushed its way out through a gap and is staring straight at you. Where the wrappings have slipped you can see wrinkled green skin underneath. MUMMEYE is printed in small black capitals along the top right edge. A mummy plus an eye, and somebody decided that was the name. I love it.

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. Two of the originals could be Mummeye's parents. Dust Brain was a mummy with rotting teeth and wrinkly teal skin, and Oculus Orbus was one giant bloodshot eyeball.

Mummeye 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 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 Mummy Behind the Joke

Every bandaged mummy in a cartoon owes something to Boris Karloff. Universal Pictures released The Mummy on December 22, 1932, with Karloff as Imhotep, an Egyptian high priest buried alive and brought back by archaeologists who read a scroll they should have left alone. Make-up artist Jack Pierce studied photographs of the mummy of the pharaoh Seti I to design him. On Karloff's first day Pierce started at 11 in the morning, building his face out of cotton, collodion and spirit gum, putting clay in his hair and wrapping him in linen bandages that had been treated with acid and burnt in an oven. He finished at 7 that evening. Karloff shot until 2 a.m., spent two more hours getting it all off, and called it the most trying ordeal he had ever endured.

The film was inspired by the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 and the legend that came with it, the curse of the pharaohs. The story goes that Howard Carter's pet canary was killed by a cobra, the symbol of Egypt's kings, on the very day the tomb was broken into. Then Lord Carnarvon, who paid for the dig, was bitten by a mosquito, nicked the bite while shaving and died of the infection. The novelist Marie Corelli had warned in print of "dire punishment" for anyone who disturbed a sealed tomb, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, suggested that spirits set by Tutankhamun's priests had done it. The newspapers loved every word.

And here is the one that really gets me. For about two hundred years painters used a color called mummy brown, made from real ground-up Egyptian mummies mixed with pitch and myrrh. The Pre-Raphaelites loved it. In 1881 Edward Burne-Jones found out what was actually in his tube and gave it a proper burial in his garden. In 1964 Time magazine reported that C. Roberson, the London colorman who was the last to sell it, had run out of mummies a few years before.

📌 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 or anybody who grew up with Madballs.