I have only mentioned POGs in passing lo these many years.
This is not an accident. I have a hard time deciding what to say about POGs.
POGs, in case you’ve forgotten (voluntarily or
involuntarily) were milk-bottle caps. Actually, they weren’t really milk-bottle
caps but instead the cardboard lids put on containers of
passionfruit-orange-grapefruit juice in Hawaii (hence, the POG). Only the POGs that
almost everyone knew had less contact with a passionfruit than I‘ve had with
Jon-Erik Hexum.
In their original incarnation POGs were used to play a game.
Your buddy stacked a bunch of his POGs face-up, and then you hit them with a
“slammer” – either another POG or something heavier. You kept any POGs that
landed face-up, and then you switched roles.
As games go, it’s no rock-paper-scissors, but you could make
15 minutes seem like an hour playing it. The only problem? Less than one-tenth
of 1 percent of POGs were actually used to play the POG game.
So to sum up, POGs were a milk-bottle cap that never capped
a bottle of something that wasn’t milk used to play a game that nobody played,
and it’s junk like that that makes it hard for me to say something coherent
about POGs. The original collectible was so esoteric and so far removed from
the final product that flooded the market in 1994-95 that POGs 2.0 literally
had no reason for being other than to separate collectors from their money a
dollar at a time.
Contrast that with baseball cards. The baseball cards of
1994-95 would have been instantly recognizable as baseball cards to the
collectors of 1952. A modern POG would have been unrecognizable to a collector
of vintage POGs – only there were no vintage-POG collectors. See? Junk like
that.
I mention POGs today because of my continued perusal of The Brill Report, one of several faxed
newsletters that attempted to chronicle changes in the fast-paced collectibles
business in the pre-internet days. It seems like such a platypus of a
publication now, like we couldn’t just read an email newsletter or check a news
feed and get this stuff pronto, but we couldn’t. This was the news feed – and the fact that it was ad-free, minimally
laid out and printed on someone else’s paper gave it a modicum of speed. You
could have an event happen yesterday – early yesterday, but yesterday – and see
news of it in The Brill Report the
next day. Presuming Bob Brill was there. And decided to write about it. In time
to meet his own self-imposed deadline.
(Actually, this particular edition of The Brill Report was called Brill-iant
Ideas, a misnomer if ever was and one of those fillips of the business I’ve
conveniently forgotten with the passage of time. It reminds me of the Wisconsin
Dental Association’s newsletter that collects all the lighthearted aspects of
Wisconsin dentistry, many of which involve breaking off an endodontic file deep
in the roots of a back molar. It’s called Tongue
‘n’ Cheek, and yes, it makes Constant Reader fwow up.)
Anyway, the article that caught my eye was headlined “POGs
Continue to Hop-Scotch [sic] the Nation.”
I wanted to read about POGs hopscotching the nation because the headline
suggested there were POG-free areas around the country, and I wanted to know
where they were. I know it wasn’t New London, Wis., because my Hawaiian
partner, Darren Lee, was moving out Valiant Comics POGs
as fast as they came in. And I know it wasn’t San Clemente, Calif., because my
buddy Mike Speakman had taken over an old racquetball court and filled it with
POGs, and was literally shoveling out POGs with a grain scoop to meet orders.
There were days, he told me, when the racquetball-court-cum-warehouse was full in
the morning and empty at night, and in the course of emptying it out a million
POGs had come and gone in 24 hours.
Figure the POGs were coming in the door at
a penny each and leaving at a nickel each. That’s a nifty return for spending a
few hours in a racquetball court.
According to the story, POGs had slowed down in Dallas but
had picked up in Houston.
However, a Dallas show had a POG tournament, presumably with actual
participants slamming actual POGs.
POGs were up-and-down in the New York area, with some shops
doing $400 a week and some shops doing bupkis. Even so, Brill said, “the
history of the product is an indication the tri-state area is in for a good POG
ride before the price falls.” And who doesn’t love a good POG ride, regardless
of the price?
My favorite whistling-in-the-graveyard character in this
saga is Jim Mitchell, owner of Safe-Co Plastics and manufacturer of mucho POGs.
“I don’t believe [POGs] are a short-term thing,” he told Brill. “It’s the
marbles of the ‘90s and we’re making quality collector caps.”
What Mr. Mitchell was suffering from, among other things, is
a misunderstanding of marbles. No marble-maker ever made marbles looking over
their shoulder, scanning the horizon for the end of their marble ride.
Marble-makers made marbles secure on the knowledge that someone was going to
buy their marbles.
The marbles of the ‘90s were marbles – and not by accident,
since the marbles of the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s were
marbles. See, the thing with marbles is you don’t have to play the game of
marbles to have a hell of a lot of fun with marbles. Got an inclined plane or a
mortal enemy? Swell! Then you’re fixed for fun stuff to do with
marbles. Macaulay Culkin never used POGs as a boobytrap in Home Alone, nor could he. What was he going to do – fill a laundry
chute with them? Launch them from improvised catapults? Have the dog eat them
and throw up over the burglars? Give me a good boulder steelie anyday.
And along those lines, no self-respecting marble-maker ever
said anything as ludicrous as, “We’re making quality collector marbles.” Heck,
no: They’re making marbles. If people want to collect them, eat them on
toast, spread them on stairs, drop them from a great height on the heads of
squirrels, plant them in their garden and try to grow their own, it’s all fine
– as long as they buy lots of marbles. The day a marble-maker started making
collector marbles would be Day 1 of their demise.
Brill concluded his piece with, “Many dealers thank their lucky
stars, because in a slow period POGs kept many afloat.” Hey, dealers: That
should have been a clue to your fate. When you start relying on
non-milk non-bottle non-caps to feed your family, to keep the lights on and the
wolf away, that’s a good time to find another line of work – unless you really want to wait for the Beanie Baby
rip-offs with player names and numbers to drive that last nail in your coffin.
Good as that story was, it wasn’t Brill-iant Ideas’ only memory-jogging example of obsolete
technology being employed in the collectibles arena to keep the larder full
between POG runs. There was also a story on phone cards.
I realize that phone cards still have limited uses in
international commerce and communication, but in the mid-‘90s some marketers
saw phone cards as … well, it’s hard to give you a modern comparison to the
phone card as they conceived it. Imagine you needed to scan a special card
every time you watched a movie via Netflix, and this card could only be used
for Netflix movies. That’s not so far-fetched – right? Okay, now make it so
that this Netflix card only got you about as far as the part where the
indestructible dude throws Tony Stark through a skylight, and then you have to
dig up another one of these cards to watch the rest of the movie, and
hope it gets you through the part where Gwynneth Paltrow throws the
self-destruct switch without having to produce a third card from down
in the sofa. That was a phone card.
Phone cards initially had a nondescript image on the front –
a globe, say – and a reasonable amount of long-distance talk time – somewhere
between 100 and 1,000 minutes. As marketers realized that phone cards could be
sold on their utility and retained for their collectibility the variety of
front images increased and the amount of minutes on each card declined, so that
by the end of the phone-card era it was like making a long-distance call from an
old pay-phone booth, only instead of plugging dimes into a slot you were
plugging phone-card numbers in response to prompts. The cards looked absolutely
bitchin’, though.
Naturally Upper Deck was all over collectible phone cards.
If it was semi-illegitimate and could hold a picture of Ken Griffey Jr., Upper Deck
was on it. UD led in late ’94 with a Mickey Mantle phone card, then announced
in January 1995 that it had inked a deal in conjunction with phone-time
reseller GTS to produce a series of five phone cards featuring current major
leaguers, with second and third five-card series in April and May.
The first five cards featured Griffey (natch),
Frank Thomas, Cecil Fielder, Fred McGriff, and Tony Gwynn, with nary a Scott
Klingenbeck to be found.
The cards were not cheap -- $12 for 15 minutes – and they
came out at a time when baseball was being threatened by a labor dispute, hence
the plaintive (and only slightly out-of-whack) statement from GTS President Tom
Silverstein: “We hope for the return of baseball in the spring and the
excitement that the first MLB/MLBPA Player PhoneCards will generate among all
fans.”
Uh, no. Didn’t work out that way. The previous year’s
strike dragged into the season, teams played a truncated 144-game
schedule, Dante Bichette led the NL in homers with 40,
and MLB/MLBPA Player PhoneCards fell into the collectible sump, never to
re-emerge, not even to make a phone call.
Licensed phone cards were not the worst idea. They do
combine utility with collectibility, and Silverstein was right to hope that
they would generate excitement. But the funny thing about hope is that sometimes
it gets crushed – especially when Upper Deck’s involved.
And here is the best part, the I-can’t-make-up-this-crap
surprise ending that ties everything together. In the gutter of Brill-iant Ideas, just below the news
that Hank Aaron, Jerry Rice, the Brady
Bunch kids, and the four surviving cast members of Gilligan’s Island will be appearing at an Atlanta show, was the
announcement that all subscribers will receive a “1st Anniversary
Brill Report Phone Card.”
You know what this means: The phone-card aliens got to Bob Brill, the
torch-bearer for poorly titled hobby journalism delivered via fax! Is no one
safe?
Actually, we all are. Phone cards, POGs, The Brill Report, even Zubaz – they all
passed from the scene. Now I see that Zubaz are coming back. Embrace them.
Consider the alternative.
At
least, I think they were Valiant Comics POGs. Maybe they were Valiant Comics
and POGs. Whatever they were, they needed to leave New London now.
That’s
Houston for you – a dollar short and a day late. Dallas got Dallas and J.R. Ewing; Houston got Matt Houston, with Lee Horsley in a
Roman-helmet hairdo and a Dave Wannstedt mustache – and in California, of all
places.
Some did, and it was.
Must be the PEDs and the altitude.
