A certain time in recent American history: Tommy jukes down a dim elementary school hallway wearing in a green Starter Jacket, the sullen bass intro of Ice Ice Baby burbling
from a boombox on his shoulder. He passes a boy in
a faded Voltron T-Shirt. The boy mutters under his breath and probes
compulsively at the rubber basketball pump on the tongue of his scuffed
white shoe.

Tommy smiles and continues down the hall, planting his tongue in his cheek and snapping the boombox’s power off. He
turns and enters the peaceful white commons area, where a group of snickering children
kneel together in the center of the room. And the vast echoing place is
filled with a sound…this amazing, wonderful sound. The gentle
sound of cardboard softly clicking. The dawning of a new age.

Pog:
Silver dollar-sized pieces of circular cardboard with plain cardboard
on one side and a “bodacious” or “sweet” picture on the other
side. I don’t know where pogs came from, and frankly I don’t care. You
shouldn’t either. Because if I were to attempt to explain the history
of pogs here, it would be unlikely that any reader would be able to
maintain a state of wakeful awareness, no matter how many poorly
photoshopped pictures of Tony Danza were to accompany said history.

Here’s
my theory though: Some Taiwanese Toy Company just had a bunch of junk
cardboard lying around their factories and so they decided to print
ugly pictures on with poisonous chemical ink it and sell it to dumb
Taiwanese children as a toy. And it worked. Not only did the dumb
Taiwanese children love pogs, but soon the dumb (and substantially
wealthier) American children were also on board. Someone ought to recognize
these people for outstanding achievement in business. Because for a toy
that didn’t do anything and cost almost nothing to manufacture, pogs
sure were popular. They were also overpriced. But to be fair, the only
way they wouldn’t have been overpriced is if they were been free. And
even then, it’s a stretch.

This
will be the most difficult part of your assignment, being that there is
actually no such thing as a cool pog. The very first pogs followed
standard Generic Asian Toy Design Theory. All your favorites were
available: The Misshapen Cartoon Goat Pog, the Infringement Upon Any
Number of Copyrights Pog, and even that old Asian staple, The Overtly
Racist Pog.

But then, for some unknown reason, pog
manufacturers suddenly stopped printing these styles of pogs and
inexplicably began to simply print billions of pogs which featured
8-Balls in various situations. What was the meaning of this? Were
8-Ball pogs really so
popular? Perhaps this was some gutsy attempt to corner some
perceived 8-Ball fetishist market. We may never know, but so many
8-Ball pogs were printed in such a short period of time that pog
designers began running out of ideas. Towards the end of pogs’
lifecycle, it is my opinion that the higher-ups began pumping dangerous
amounts of high-grade LSD mist in through the heating vents of the Pog
art
department in order to help them come up with fresh 8-Ball pog ideas
like some of the horrifying ones I saw. I would provide some examples but I looked and I couldn’t find any.
Apparently there aren’t many people posting images of pogs to the
internet these days.

Needless to say, if you want to buy any slammers (or pogs in general
for that matter) these days you’ll have to do it online. But try this
for a laugh: go into a
comic book or trading card store and ask to see their selection of
slammers. The clerk will stare at you like you just took a dump on his
floor; he won’t know what to think. And even if, for some insane
reason, the store did carry slammers, you would not be impressed by
what you found. As far as I can remember, 90s slammers
were usually just ragged sections of cut pipe with a hologram pictures
of
a unicorn on
them, and I don’t imagine that pog slammer technology has made any
real leaps forward in recent years either. But I guess I’ve been known
to be wrong. From time to time.

3. Drop The Slammer On The Pogs

Well here’s where it all comes together. The game (as I learned it) goes like this: You and your
opponent combine pogs from your collections (50-50) into a pile. You
stack the pogs picture side up, blank side down. Then, whoever’s turn
it is gets to drop their
slammer on them. The stack should fall, and if any of the pogs
flip over and land white side up, the person who dropped the slammer keeps those pogs.

These rules officially made Pogs
the lamest and most pointless game I had (and have) ever played. It’s the
equivalent of saying:
“Hey Joey! Lets play a game: We’ll each put 15 quarters into this
bucket, and I’ll go up to the top of these steps. Then, I’m going to
throw the whole bucket of quarters down the stairs.
Whichever ones land heads up, I get to keep!”

 I honestly don’t know what you would even do next. Back when I was playing, we
never even got past a
single turn of “real” pogs because nobody ever wanted to play “for
keeps”. And who can blame them? I know I sure as hell wouldn’t want to risk
losing my
Donatello Rides a Jetski pog to some pudgy kid wearing Zubaz.

I suppose now would be as good a time as any to
reveal that: I do not know the official rules of pogs. I don’t think I ever knew. I don’t think I knew anyone who knew. Maybe there aren’t any
real rules to the game of pogs! Pogs probably don’t even exist! OK,
obviously that’s a little far out. But it
wasn’t uncommon, as in the title of this section, for children to try
and apply their own rules to the formless chaos that was Pog.

Some
kid would
bring a random objects to a match and say: “Hey here’s a new slammer I
bought at the store, it’s new, it’s the best kind!” And someone would say,
“That’s not a slammer, that’s just an old rotten tennis shoe you fished
out of the gutter!”
and the kid would scream, “Shut up! Shut up!” and spastically hurl the
shoe at the pile of Pogs, spilling them out across the floor like the
crimson blood of so many brave veterans was spilled on foreign shores to give us
the freedoms we enjoy today.

Hmm? Oh,
I apologize. I admit none of that probably made any sense to you, but
you
have to understand that I come from a time and a place wh- Well
nevermind. Just try to imagine the search for the rules of pogs as the
search for meaning in our lives. What is the meaning of life? Nobody
really knows; just as none of us kids knew the rules of pogs. So
what did we do? Some of us saw meaninglessness and created our own fun.
Some children simply chewed on the pogs. Some of us read the
instructions, but there was always
some uncertainly there. Which manual contains the true rules to pogs?
What if we chose the wrong pog instruction book? We might have
been playing the wrong version of pogs all along…

Yeah, I guess I don’t either. And I’m sure if I did a search right now I could find the “official” rules
of pogs. I could find out what we were doing wrong; learn about the game we should
have been playing. But honestly, I don’t want to know. I would rather
remember
the pogs “scene” as it existed in the
90s: A jumbled collection of vague ideas, hastily-constructed foreign
crap, and legions of gape-mouthed children in neon pink shirts pawing
greedily
through buckets of cardboard chits in the dank aisles of comic book
stores all across the country.

Oh what time it was.