In the 90’s if you didn’t have tazos you were nobody. That’s how it was. For 25 pesetas you could have a bag full of potatoes and the most coveted thing: a plastic round with drawings on both sides that was worth different points and that was useful to win fights in the schoolyard, expand the collection and be the king with a Portatazos full to the brim. However, the history of the tazos begins seventy years before and goes halfway around the world: yes, only in one country we had the Chiquitazos, fistro.

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This is the milk

Maui, Hawaii, 1927. Milk bottles have something very special apart from the food itself, which the manufacturers introduced as a mere necessity: a little cardboard circle that serves as a cap to protect the bottle, each one with a different brand. Children, sixty years before the NES and twelve years before television, had to have fun somehow: they collected these little circles, put them in a tower and played at knocking them down. You took the ones you knocked down, and it was the next one’s turn. A game of chance in which you could enter with forty and leave with eighty… or nothing at all. Take that, Las Vegas.

But the new bottling system made them a thing of the past, and in the 1940s they were lost, never to return… until 1971. That’s when Haleakala, a Maui milk brand, launched a new fruit drink called Pog (Passion Orange Guava) and, to promote it, gave away little cardboard circles like the ones of yesteryear with their logo printed on them. They became such a hit that they adopted the name of the drink itself: pogs. Incidentally, the drink in question is still on sale today, but without a prize.

Twenty years later (not even Doctor Who travels that far back in time), in Hawaii in 1991, a teacher on Oahu taught children to play pogs as a way of learning math and hoping that the kids would stop throwing balls at each other and move on to a non-violent alternative. Little did he know that he had just unleashed a typhoon that would reach Europe and South America in record time. To give you an idea: before it was exported out of Hawaii, the average number of pogs a child could have there was estimated at 1700.

From pog to tazo

In 1993, Pogs was no longer the only one selling them: it quickly became a smash hit around the world. Any company you can think of (like McDonald’s or Marvel) introduced them in the United States, causing a real fever that was called by different names around the world, like Flippos and, of course… Tazos.

Contrary to what you might think, Tazo was not a random word. Quite the contrary: in Mexico it was used as an apocope of “taconazo”, a game in which children opened bottles with their feet trying to send the cap as far as possible. And while in the United States they began to prohibit playing in school playgrounds because they considered it a form of gambling, in Spain in 1994 we children opened potato bags to find inside plastic roundels of Looney Tunes and, later, Tiny Toons and Tazmania: between the three of them there were 254 tazos, which were advertised as “the game that sweeps the world, just arrived from America”. Get them all. It was just the beginning.

We saw the pull of it right away. So much so, that we even put two obsessions together to bring out Fistros, a unique product based on Chiquito de la Calzada that had jokes on the back, Bocabits cut in half inside and a Chiquitazo inside (out of a total of 10, including “Meretérita”, “Fistro”, “¿Te das cuen?” or “¿Cómor?”). Pure history.

The year of the tazo

1994 was the year of the tazo. They were easy to produce and very profitable: As newspaper gave away Real Madrid ones, Dunkin chewing gum gave away ‘Mortal Kombat 3’, Panini joined the tazos to ‘The Lion King’ sticker collections and Vidal candies gave ‘Street Fighter II’. But nothing could compare with Matutano’s classics, which between ‘Dragon Ball Z’, ‘Barbie’ and ‘Pokémon’ quickly saw that it was time to evolve before being left behind.

Between 1994 and 1997, the tazos mutated: we had the Supertazos, which gave more points; the Megatazos, which were thicker; the Mastertazos, which were directly a plastic billet that could handle anything; the Macro Tazos, which came in big bags and were four times bigger than any other tazo, with Chester Cheetos as the main character; the Sticker Tazos, which had a sticker incorporated; the Magic Tazos, which varied the image when moved; the Flying Tazos, with slits to join it to another one and launch it through the air and 3D version, or even some with hexagonal shape, which, supposedly, could be better directed. And now they come up with the NFTs thinking they have invented something.

Little by little they dissipated, although there is always a company that wants to revive them with all kinds of bizarre collections. But times have changed: children no longer consume so many bags of chips, we have the latest generation of video game consoles and the Internet. Tazos are a thing of the past… Or are they? In the end everything comes back, and recently it was announced that in some Latin American countries Bad Bunny would launch the “Bad Tazos” in Sabritas bags (i.e. Matutano). What if it’s never too late to relive this momen-tazo?