Some of you may recall the ‘Punch Buggy’ or ‘Slug Bug’ game. Some of us still play it (with your kids perhaps). Well, wherever you learned it, that game has been going on for decades now and it turns out there are variants, ‘official’ rules, cultural references, and more out there.
Yes, ‘Slug Bug’ is well-documented apparently. Starting with an official Wikipedia page entry (there are people that are extremely dedicated to cataloging everything on Wikipedia).
Punch buggy (also called punch bug, punch car, punch dub, piggy punch, slug bug, or beetle bug[1]) is a car game generally played by children in which participants punch each other on the arm upon first sight of a Volkswagen Beetle while calling out “Punch buggy!” or “Slug bug!” in reference to the Beetle’s nickname, the Bug. The color of the Beetle is also stated.[2]
You would think a simple game with the simplest of rules would not require documented rules, but someone has gone through the trouble nonetheless. As the author notes:
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site I’ve been playing Punch Buggy for
at least Thirty-Fourover Forty-Two Years. That makes me somewhat of an expert on the subject, at least in my opinion…Regarding the game of Slug Bug the rules are the same. Slug Bug is simply Punch Buggy by another name. It’s rather like ‘tonic’ ‘soda’ and ‘pop’. What you call it depends on where you grew up. Personally I refuse to grow up, but that’s neither here nor there…
There may be other car punching games out there, but this is The Original.
Punch Buggy even showed up on a Simpsons episode in a humorous clip:
So, the next time you overhear your kids in the back of the car playing this age-old game, remember that for some people, this is not a game at all, but serious business.
