Homies

Homies grew out of artwork David Gonzales had been making since high school — a comic strip about characters from his Mexican-American neighborhood that ran monthly in Lowrider magazine. In 1998 he turned the crew into two-inch plastic figurines sold through supermarket vending machines in Chicano communities, starting with a first series of six: Eight Ball, Smiley, Big Loco, Droopy, Sapo and Mr. Raza. They detonated — a million Homies sold in four months — and the machines spread from the neighborhood grocery to seemingly every store entrance in America.

Success brought heat. Los Angeles police officials complained that the figures glorified gang life and pressured retailers to pull them. Gonzales answered by writing individual backstories for his characters on the Homies website — this one's a college student, that one coaches kids' boxing — insisting each figure embodied something positive from a real community. The controversy only made the toys more famous. Over 14 series Gonzales created more than 200 characters, expanding by 2005 to include female Homies and figures with Puerto Rican, Filipino and Japanese backgrounds, plus die-cast lowriders, school folders and a kid-focused spinoff line called Mijos.

For 2000s kids the appeal was simpler than any of the discourse: they were cheap, they were detailed, they looked like nobody else in the toy aisle, and the vending machine decided which one you got. The line is still in production today through Gonzales's HomieShop, and loose Homies still surface in junk drawers everywhere, arms permanently crossed.