Red capitalized text below an illustration of a green alien-like creature with large feet, large eyes, angry eyebrows, and yellow glasses.  

The big-glasses frog over the bold “FEARLESS LEADER” caption is a tongue-in-cheek praise for whoever’s “in charge.” It’s a mash-up of two pop-culture lines: the sci-fi gag “take me to your leader” (made famous by a 1953 New Yorker cartoon) and “Fearless Leader,” the dictator character from The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show (1959–64). Put together, “take me to your fearless leader” took off later as a snarky joke in office talk and on novelty merchandise. The airbrushed blue gradient, chunky halftone dots, and a simple, high-contrast cartoon fit the late-’70s/’80s wave of mass-market novelty buttons designed to be read from a few feet away.

Mr. Button Products, Inc. is an Indiana company that’s been around since 1973. They make custom pin-backs and also sell the tools and parts to create your own. The company also makes button machines, dies, magnets, and other accessories in lots of sizes. The company is a long-running, still-active operation.

Bold, navy text at top and normal navy font below on a sky background.

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Uneven middle text in red and blue text above and below on a white background.

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A white background with black text alongside an illustration of a man holding three flowers and wearing a blue jacket, a red and white striped tie, and green checkered pants.  

"Don't Laugh, Your Daughter Loves Me" is a variant of the phrase teenagers of past scrawled on their old cars that may have needed a few repairs: “Don’t laugh, your daughter may be inside.” Some of the earliest occurrences of the phrase are in newspapers and prints from the 1930s. Though the expression has been more often used in the United States and Canada, it initially became popular in Australia. Its usage is generally meant as a reminder to onlookers that their opinions are of no importance and it is typically directed at those who wish to implement more traditional values onto others.

White text on a purple background.

“The devil made me do it” is a phrase associated with Geraldine Jones, a character created by comedian and variety television show host Flip Wilson in the late 1960s. Born Clerow Wilson in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1933, Wilson was known by the nickname “Flip,” from “flip out.” He became one of the most popular African-American comedians in history and influenced later entertainers such as Arsenio Hall and Keenen Ivory Wayans.

Wilson got his start in the mid-1950s in San Francisco while working as a hotel bellhop. After performing in small clubs and theaters across the country, he went to New York, where he appeared on the Tonight Show, the Ed Sullivan Show, and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. He was given his own television show, the Flip Wilson Show, in 1970. Geraldine became one of his most popular stock characters and was known for phrases like “the devil made me do it” and “what you see is what you get” (the source for the commonly-used Internet acronym “wysiwyg”). Wilson retired from show business in 1974 to spend more time with his family. He died in 1998.

Flip Wilson. (1999). In Contemporary Black Biography. (Volume 21). Detroit: Gale.

A shriveled and deformed face with long blonde hair that is getting brushed with text centered below it on a red background with dandruff particles.

This button is one of many in a series of "Weird-O's" monster buttons created for distribution in bubblegum machines by the Green Duck Button Company in the 1960s. While this one features a shriveled-up shrunken head, other buttons in the series featured such classic monsters as Frankenstein, the Mummy, Dracula, and Wolfman -- all sporting equally humorous and pun-laden quotes.

Black text below an illustration of a green Godzilla-like monster wearing sunglasses, yellow button-up shirt, red bow tie, white pants, and red and yellow sneakers.  

Bob Zilla is a character created by video producer, animator, and cartoonist John Charles Lamb (Lamb also works under the pseudonym Bob Sweeney). John Lamb first made a name for himself in the 1970s with his invention of the Lyon Lamb Video Animation System, a rotoscope animation system for which he won an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement. Many of Lamb’s animations highlight surfing culture, and there is a permanent exhibit dedicated to his work at the California Surf Museum. In the 1980s, Lamb founded John Lamb Productions, which licensed merchandise like apparel, buttons, mugs, and greeting cards based off of Lamb’s cartoons. John Lamb Productions operated through the 1990s. 

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Color illustration of a smiling bum smoking a cigar below blue hand-drawn overlapping text on white background. 

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