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

Remember Pufang? 😵 Pufang: A Baby Face Only a Mother Could Love

Size: 1 1/2"

A 1980s Pufang pin, straight out of the Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids craze! Meet Pufang. He's a pale, bald, lumpy little baby head with one eye squeezed shut and the other one bulging wide open, rimmed in pink and staring right through you. His mouth is full of crooked baby teeth with a pair of little fangs, and green slime is drooling down over his chin. PUFANG runs up the right edge in small black letters. It's gross, and I think he's adorable.

The picture is printed paper under a glossy clear front, and the back is gray metal with a brass-colored safety pin.

🤢 Gross Was In

Madballs were huge in the '80s, coming hot on the heels of the Garbage Pail Kids. AmToy, the toy arm of the greeting-card giant American Greetings, put the foam monster heads in stores in 1986 with the slogan "Freaky fun for everyone!" Then came the copycats - Whacky Ghoulies, Ugly Balls, ERTL's Blurp Balls, Mel Appel's Weird Balls, Lanard's Spit Balls. Moms, dads and teachers could not stand these!

Pufang is one of a whole cast of named monster buttons collectors trade as a group, alongside Mummeye, Craterface, Creep Queen, Mad Marvin, Cat Bat, Hog Head, Ocufungus and Pigulus. None of them were official AmToy Madballs, and nobody put a maker's name on the buttons, so I still can't tell you who made the series. They are definitely neat.

The way collectors remember it, these were vending machine buttons. You'd drop a quarter in the machine by the grocery store doors on the way out, and out came a monster with his name printed right on his face. There were about a dozen of them to chase, and Pufang was one of the ugliest.

👶 The Babies Who Started It All

A slimy baby face like Pufang's is a joke on one thing: the Cabbage Patch Kids. As the story goes, a 21-year-old art student in the North Georgia mountains named Xavier Roberts came across the craft artist Martha Nelson's Doll Babies, which came with a birth certificate and adoption papers. Roberts hand-stitched his own dolls, called them the Little People, and told customers they were not for sale. They could only be adopted, for anywhere from $60 to $1,000, at Babyland General Hospital, an old medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia that he and his friends turned into a toy store.

Fisher-Price already owned the name Little People, so they became the Cabbage Patch Kids, and the licensing agent Roger Schlaifer wrote them a legend: little flying BunnyBees pollinate a secret cabbage patch behind a waterfall with magic crystals, and the babies are born right out of the cabbages. Coleco started making them in 1982 and shipped 3.3 million dolls in 1983. By that October parents were fighting in the aisles to get one, in what the papers called the Cabbage Patch riots, and in December a Cabbage Patch Kid made the cover of Newsweek.

Then in 1985 Topps put out the Garbage Pail Kids, sticker cards of babies that were drooling, oozing, exploding and worse, drawn in a way nobody could mistake. The idea came from Art Spiegelman, who was working for Topps at the time and later won a special Pulitzer for Maus, and John Pound drew the first run. Kids loved them and schools hated them; plenty of schools banned the cards outright as a classroom distraction. Roberts's company, Original Appalachian Artworks, sued Topps for $30 million. By then Topps had sold more than $70 million worth of the cards, and it settled for $7 million and kept right on printing them. Babyland General is still going, too, in a newer building on the edge of Cleveland, Georgia since 2010.

📌 Show Him Off

Pin him on a denim jacket, a backpack or a baby bag if you have a sense of humor, or line him up in a shadow box with the rest of the monster crew. He makes a great little gift for anybody who had a Cabbage Patch Kid and a stack of Garbage Pail Kids in the same bedroom. The supply is finite - once these last 1980s Pufang pins are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.

Like everything here, he's been kept in the dark at a steady 72°F and under 40% humidity, so what you see is the age he came to me with.