Vintage 1980s Ocufungus Gross-Out Monster Pin 📌 One-Eyed Cyclops Pinback Button, Weird Retro Collectible

Remember Ocufungus? 👁️ Ocufungus: The One-Eyed Monster Madballs Never Made

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Ocufungus Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! Somebody looked at the real Madball Oculus Orbus, whose name is basically Latin for "eye ball," and thought, what if we put that eye in the middle of a face and let it grow mold? So here he is: a soft, lumpy tan face with dark shading around the edge, one big eye dead center with an orange-brown iris and red veins running through the white, a big bulb of a nose under it, and a wavy frown. Green fungus is creeping across his brow and around the eye. OCUFUNGUS arches in dark capitals along the top edge. Ocu for the eye, from the Latin oculus, and fungus for the rest. That is exactly what you get.

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 the work of AmToy, the toy division of the greeting-card giant American Greetings Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio, and they grew out of ideas from its American Greetings Properties creative team, among them Ralph Shafer, George Chanter, Mark Spangler, Jim Elliott, Kim Hammeren and Vint Gonser. The original eight reached North American stores in February 1986, though collectors often date them 1985: Aargh, Bash Brain, Dust Brain, Horn Head, Oculus Orbus, Screamin' Meemie, Skull Face and Slobulus, first in hard rubber and later in soft foam. A bunch of them were one-eyed horrors. Horn Head was a horned cyclops, Slobulus had one eye hanging out of its socket, and Oculus Orbus was nothing but a giant bloodshot eyeball. Kids loved them and parents did not, and the fad led to two direct-to-video cartoons, a comic book series and home computer games before it faded. Art Asylum brought them back in 2007, and Just Play did it again in 2017.

Garbage Pail Kids came first, from Topps in 1985, created with the artists Art Spiegelman, Mark Newgarden and John Pound as a sticker-card parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids. Original Appalachian Artworks, the company that owned the dolls, sued in 1986, and the settlement changed the look of the characters and the logo. Schools banned the cards, the 1987 movie flopped, and the playgrounds filled up with knockoff stickers and buttons like this one. The copycat balls came from all over: ERTL made Blurp Balls, The Mel Appel Company made Weird Balls, and Lanard Toys made Spit Balls.

Ocufungus was never one of the official Madballs, though. He belongs to a whole cast of named monster buttons that collectors trade together, with names like Biface, Bot Eye, Craterface, Creep Queen, Hog Head, Mad Marvin, Mummeye, Pigulus, Sad Lad and Cat Bat. Their names play off the licensed toys without copying them, the way Ocufungus plays off Oculus Orbus. No maker, copyright or country is marked anywhere on this button, and I have never found who made the series. They are definitely neat.

🏛️ The Legend of the Cyclops

That one eye goes back a lot further than the toy aisle. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus and his men get trapped in the cave of Polyphemus, a man-eating giant, and escape only by blinding him. Here is a fun one: Homer never actually says Polyphemus has one eye. The blinding only makes sense if he does, so everybody has assumed it ever since.

The Greeks had other Cyclopes too. In Hesiod's Theogony they are three brothers, Brontes, Steropes and Arges, who made Zeus his thunderbolt, Poseidon his trident and Hades his helmet of darkness. Later poets put them to work at the forge of the smith god Hephaestus under Mount Etna in Sicily, and another tradition said the Cyclopes built the huge walls of Mycenae and Tiryns. The classical Greeks figured nobody else could have lifted those boulders, which is why that kind of giant rough stonework is still called Cyclopean masonry.

From at least the fifth century BC the Cyclopes were tied to Sicily, and in 1914 the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel offered an explanation for where the one-eyed giant came from. Fossil skulls of dwarf elephants turn up on the Mediterranean islands, Sicily, Malta, Crete and Cyprus among them, elephants that had died out thousands of years before the Greeks ever got there. In the middle of each skull, where the trunk once attached, is one huge opening. To somebody who had never seen an elephant, Abel said, that hole would look just like the socket of a single giant eye. Plenty of scholars say there is no real evidence for it, but it is a great story, and Ocufungus is sitting right in the middle of it: one eye, dead center, above the nose, right where the old storytellers put it.

📌 Wear It or Frame It

Pin it on a jean jacket, a backpack, a hat or a lanyard, add it to a Halloween costume, or frame it in a shadow box with your other 1980s gross-out buttons. It's a perfect little gift for the mythology buff, the biology teacher or the eye doctor with a sense of humor.