Funrise, the company behind Gazillion Bubbles, hopes to rekindle the POG craze with a line of POG products that will be available at specialty stores across the nation in January 2006.  Targeted at kids ages 5 and up, the POGs, POG Games, and POG accessories will retail at prices ranging from $3.99 to $14.99.

Funrise kicked off its attempt to revive the Stack'Em and Slam'Em game in Hawaii, where it all began back in the 1930s when kids began flipping the cardboard caps used by the Haeakala Dairy in Maui to seal its popular Passion Orange Guava juice. What was a longstanding local tradition in Hawaii quickly became a fizzled fad in the rest of the U.S. when trading card companies, faced with falling sales, seized on the cardboard disks as market saviors and attempted to turn them into a 'collectible craze.'

Funrise, which has demonstrated some skill in mass-market retailing, may be able to get some kids interested in POGs, but the hobby/collectible card market will be a hard sell, at least for retailers who survived the first POG 'craze' in the 1990s, when POG inventories were the stuff of nightmares for dealers trying to ride out the collapse of the 'trading card boom.'