Weepuls?

These guys had a name?

These guys... I LOVED these guys when I was a child.  Well, the smaller one's because they were the only one's that existed in my small world.  They were HUGE in the early - mid 1980's and were all over the place.  Girls would have them stuck to their Trapper Keepers, they ended up in Easter baskets, came with Valentine gifts.  Just everywhere I went someone had at least one.

And then they were gone.  For so long that I had completely forgotten about them until I was in Michael's craft store yesterday evening.  My sister (who was really into them as well) had forgotten about them until I showed her the package I was intending to purchase.

Is that to avoid copy-rights or am I safe in assuming no one knew they had names?

So, we get a little nostalgic and happy.  I purchase them intending to give away one with each of my valentines.  Then we head to Target and we get to the Valentine candy section and their huge promotional sign is these guys.  'What?  Here too?  Are they making a come-back?'  While leaving the store I noticed ALL of Targets promotional signs had these guys on them; they were all over the store.  When I came home they were making a come-back on my Facebook page, which is where I snagged that first picture and found out they had a name.  

So, straight from the horses mouth (with that horse being Wikipedia), I present you with the 'official' short story of these little guys...

Weepul

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The weepul (also known as a weeple, wuppie, or wuppet) is a small, spherical, fluffy toy, with large, plastic googly eyes, and no limbs. 
Weepuls come in various colors. Usually weepuls possess antennae and also large paper feet, with an adhesive layer on the bottom, 
which, protected by a layer of plastic that is peeled off before deployment.

According to Rick Ebel, the weepul was created in 1971 by the Oklahoma City promotional firm, Bipo Inc. It was named by customer 
Tom Blundell after a stuffed doll his parents had tried and failed to market several years earlier. Blundell figured the little-people 
stick-on would only be a flash in the pan, “but it just got a life to it, and it still isn’t ready to die.”^[1]

In the Netherlands the weepul was introduced as a marketing tool in the 1980s by the name of wuppie. The wuppie was created 
by a promotion salesman, who had been inspired by weeples which he discovered during a trip in the US in the 1970s. The wuppies 
became popular after Father Abraham featured the Wuppies in one of his songs. Wuppie is actually an acronym for World Unique 
Promotional Product Identity & Emotion^[2]

The wuppies became extremely popular in the summer of 1981. Twenty-five years later, they made a come-back in the Netherlands. 
In June 2006 the Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn re-introduced the Wuppies in a new campaign connected to the FIFA World 
Cup 2006 under the motto Wup Holland Wup, a variation of Hup Holland Hup (Go Holland Go), a Dutch patriotic song.^[3][4] 
The wuppies, produced in orange, red, white and blue were used as a kind of saving stamp. Three saving stamps together with 2,49 
euros could be exchanged for one Mega Wup. Albert Heijn's Wuppie campaign with the World Cup Wuppie Song (With a Wup 
we will win the World Cup) proved to be immensely popular, especially the "Mega Wups". Dutch media reported that cars which
had a Mega Wup on their dashboards were broken into.^[5] A classroom of an elementary school in The Hague was burglarized 
which had a lot of wuppies exposed in the classroom.