If you went to an American elementary school in the late ’80s or early ’90s, you probably remember Weepuls. Or at least, you remember something suspiciously close to Weepuls: tiny, fluffy, googly-eyed creatures with adhesive feet and an aura of manufactured whimsy. They were the kind of thing a six-year-old would cherish like a sacred talisman for approximately 48 hours before inevitably losing it in the bottom of a backpack or having it violently stripped from existence by an overzealous vacuum cleaner. But before that—before they succumbed to entropy—Weepuls mattered.
For reasons that remain unclear, the primary vehicle for obtaining Weepuls was not a toy store, nor the back pages of Boys’ Life magazine. No, the only way to secure one of these bad boys was through the morally ambiguous economy of the elementary school magazine drive—the annual event that turned every third grader into a door-to-door salesman peddling Reader’s Digest to unsuspecting neighbors.
The stakes were simple: sell a few subscriptions, get a Weepul. Sell a lot of subscriptions, get an entire Weepul army. Sell an absurd amount—more than any child reasonably could, unless they had the backing of a very pushy grandmother—and you’d ascend to the god-tier rewards: neon slap bracelets, a cheap plastic camera, or (if you were an absolute legend) a day at a local amusement park with the school principal. But let’s be real: most of us never got beyond Weepul-level rewards.
And yet, we wanted them. Desperately. Weepuls were the ultimate low-stakes, high-emotion currency of childhood. Each one had a personality (as dictated by the arbitrary addition of tiny felt accessories, like cowboy hats or tiny graduation caps). Some even had printed banners that read things like “I’m a Reading Superstar!”—which, despite its overtly patronizing nature, still felt like a legitimate flex when affixed to your pencil case.
But why? Why did we care so much about these tiny, functionally useless creatures? Looking back, it feels like Weepuls occupied that weird liminal space between “prized possession” and “absolute junk.” They had the aesthetic appeal of a Happy Meal toy but were somehow even cheaper. They were not action figures. They were not game pieces. You couldn’t even do anything with them, apart from sticking them to random surfaces and eventually peeling them off when the adhesive turned into a disgusting, gray lint magnet. And yet, in the moment, they felt important.
Maybe it was because Weepuls weren’t just toys; they were earned. You had to work (or at least coerce your parents into working) for them. You had to participate in the strange micro-economy of the elementary school fundraising-industrial complex, where the grand prize was usually a BMX bike that nobody ever won, and the real prize was a cheap pom-pom with eyeballs.
It’s easy to laugh at it now, but the truth is that Weepuls—much like Pogs, Lisa Frank stickers, or the rush of hitting the final boss in Battletoads—were just one of those strange, collective cultural artifacts that tether an entire generation to a weirdly specific moment in time. They were proof that sometimes, the dumbest, most inconsequential things end up feeling weirdly significant in hindsight.
So yeah. Weepuls. Anyone else remember selling Time Magazine subscriptions to their neighbors for these guys?
Or was it just me?
