Pog wild: Funrise hopes the game is ready for a comeback.

Guess the year: Steve Martin starred in a hit comedy, Americans were at war in Iraq, and the pog craze that had boys and girls coveting slammers was just kicking off.

If you said 1991, you'd be right. But, with local toy companies angling to bring back pog, 2006 might soon be an equally correct response.

Woodland Hills-based Funrise Toy Corp. acquired the license to use the pog name from Los Angeles-based Pacific Capital Group Inc. last year and has recently begun to peddle the milk cap-inspired game pieces at specialty stores. With a little encouragement from its executives, the company is gunning to be at the center of the latest fad.

"Today, in the market, the collectible craze is at a peak with all the Pokemon cards, and pog is such an easy and simple game to play," said Gerhard Runken, a Funrise brand manager. "One challenge is just to make sure you can keep the product hot because there is so much competition."

Here's Funrise's formula for sparking pog frenzy: sell in opaque foil packs with one series card, five caps and one slammer. For those ensnared in pog mania, the aim will be to collect full sets. Each series will have 60 designs and a new series will be released every six to eight weeks.

Funrise's series come in two versions: those with the company's own proprietary characters and those with licensed characters. The company already has licenses with Marvel Entertainment Inc. and the National Hockey League. At $4.99, foil packs with licensed characters cost a dollar more than foil packs with proprietary ones.

Funrise is making its pog products available to small stores first, hoping to pump demand before hitting mass-market outlets. And there are video games and other pog accessories, including apparel, in the offing if pog moves into the mainstream again.

However, other companies aren't letting Funrise deter them. Los Angeles-based Imperial Toy Corp. is reviving a version of pog, called slammer whammers, that it originally distributed beginning in 1994. In case pog get wildly popular, Art Hirsch, president of Imperial, said the company wants to have its own items in the marketplace.

But Imperial isn't taking the same tack as Funrise. It's going for the mass-market first, selling slammer whammers cheaper, at $2.99 for a total of 24 caps. The company can keep the price down by using all its own designs, rather than licensing them.