2 days ago
People are only just realising what Pog stands for
They were one of the most popular toys of the 1990s.
In fact, few children's bedrooms in Britain were without 'pogs' 30 years ago.
The flat little cardboard disks – typically featuring the likes of Bugs Bunny or Bart Simpson on the front – came free in packets of crisps.
And they were some of the most hotly-sought tradeables in the school playgrounds nationwide.
But as pogs rack up some healthy sums on eBay, people are only just realising what the word stands for.
Pogs were actually a children's game, although arguably their primary use in the 1990s Britain was as a treasured collectable.
Players would take turns trying to flip as many of the little stacked cylinders as possible.
To do this, they'd use a 'slammer', a heavier disk usually made of thick plastic or even metal.
Although many people don't know it, the word 'pog' is an acronym.
An acronym is simply an abbreviation consisting of the first letters of other words, pronounced as a single word.
You probably would never have guessed it, but 'pog' stands for 'passionfruit, orange and guava'.
And although this may seem random, it gives a tantalizing glimpse into the toy's early history.
POG, or 'Passion Orange Guava', was a tropical juice drink created in Hawaii in 1971 by Mary Soon, a food product consultant who worked for Haleakala Dairy.
Throughout the 1970s, the company sold bottles of the juice drink with caps printed with the POG logo.
Gradually, children of Hawaii started to use the POG caps to play the game, which actually dates back to the 1920s or 1930s (when it was known as 'milk caps').
The bottle caps came to be called 'pogs' in Hawaii, but it wasn't until the 1990s when the pog craze really took off globally.
People are taking to X (Twitter) after discovering what 'pog' stands for - passionfruit, orange and guava
The use of the juice's caps to play the game preceded the game's commercialization, which turned pogs into a global phenomenon in the 1990s
The 1990s revival is credited to Blossom Galbiso, a teacher who taught at Waialua Elementary School in Oahu, Hawaii's most populated island.
In 1991, she introduced the game that she'd played as a girl to her students and it gradually spread around the island.
By 1992, Stanpac Inc, a Canadian packaging company that had been manufacturing the caps for Haleakala Dairy, was printing millions of milk caps every week for shipment to Hawaii.
Finally, the craze spread to the United States mainland, first surfacing in California, Texas, Oregon, and Washington before spreading nationwide and then across the world.
A generation later, pogs can be many times their original value, reflecting the public craze for any things retro.
If you still have pogs in your attic untouched since the 1990s, it might be worth taking a look at them to see if any are limited edition.
