SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: Cabbage Patch Kids: Must-Have Toy of the Century

28:50And this guy is, like, unhinged. Have you seen footage of him? Yeah, I saw him last year. Okay. You've got to see him again. I've got to describe him again because he struck a chord with me this year that he didn't last year. But he's holding a baseball bat very famously. But if you listen to what he's doing, he's shouting at the customers. He's like, shut up, listen to me. And he's like waving this baseball bat. And there's this crowd of people filling every available inch of this department store wanting cabbage patch kids. And this guy decides that the way to satisfy the need is to just start tossing them into the crowd.

29:28So the crowd is like jostling, going crazy, trying to catch these cabbage patch kids, while the manager of the department store is screaming at them holding a baseball bat. Yeah, it's one of the worst forms of crowd management anyone's ever attempted, ever. And it was caught on film, and you got to see it yourself. Yeah, he wasn't doing his best work that day. I think we can all agree on that. He really wasn't. Agreed. A lot of times the problems were so big that they didn't even want people in the stores. So they would say, like, we can't have another fistfight in here. So what you do is you can arrive and get a coupon, and then you go around back to the loading dock, and we'll distribute them there.

30:11The secondary market started booming. There were actual stores that were buying them up and then marking them up. And then there was the black market that really, really marked them up. Right. And this was not WKRP in Cincinnati, but it was very much in that rich tradition of DJs kind of conning people into acting like fools. And this happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when some local DJs there said there's going to be a B-26 bomber plane, and it's going to drop$2 ,000 over the Brewers baseball stadium. and all you got to do is show up with your baseball glove to catch these babies and hold up your credit card so the pilot can take a picture and charge you for it.

30:55And, of course, this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard, but that still didn't stop. A couple of dozen people from showing up with their baseball glove and credit card. Yeah, and negative seven degree wind chill, which is very cold if you're in the centigrade parts of the world. That's very cold. They're used to it. I guess so. But the fact that people would do that is like I double check to make sure that that wasn't an urban legend. And it definitely is not. Like that really did happen in Milwaukee in 1983. That was like the level the craze reached. And what's really, to Coleco's credit, is they managed to keep the party going for a full another year.

31:38Because in Christmas 1984, Cabbage Patch Kids were again the must-have toy. And in just 1984 alone, not 1983 Christmas season, 1984 that year, they sold$2 billion worth of Cabbage Patch Kids in 1984 money. Yeah, I mean, this was, I think, one of the things that made it truly unique is, like I said, the Rubik's Cube was really hot for a few years. But generally, as these things go, it's sort of like you can count on the one Christmas season. If you're overlapping to the next Christmas season, that is a grand slam home run as far as toys go. Absolutely. So one of the outcomes of that, of being a toy that manages to span two Christmas seasons that thoroughly, is they become, you know, iconic.

32:30And they start popping up in other places. Like there was one named Christopher Xavier, who's a very famous Cabbage Patch Kid, I guess as Cabbage Patch Kids can be famous. And he actually rode on the space shuttle on a genuine, legit NASA space shuttle mission in 1985. And that reminds me, Chuck, have you seen the mini doc about the Challenger? No, not yet. Is it good? Oh, boy. It is really good. I mean, it's a high-caliber documentary to begin with, but then, like, the emotionality that it manages to dredge up is really—it's a really well-done documentary in every way. I highly recommend it. Where's that showing?

33:16That one's on Netflix, I believe. I'm almost positive. And I think it's just called Challenger and then probably colon something. But it's good. It's by—I think J.J.—isn't Bad Robot, J.J. Abrams' production company? Yeah. they did it. They were one of the companies that handled it. But it's very good. I did watch Enola Holmes on your recommendation. Yes. What did you think? I liked it a lot. It was good. It was just a good, breezy, light, fun movie to watch, which is just what we needed the night we watched it. For sure. But it was smart, too, wasn't it? Yeah. It was smart enough. And she's just great.

33:55Millie Bobby Brown, she's got a lot of personality and lovable charisma. So she's great to watch. And it's fun to see her outside of playing Eleven with all her personality able to come out like that. Right. Yeah. Well, I'm very glad that you liked it because I think we would have had some sort of awkward wedge between us for the rest of our lives. Had you not. You haven't seen the octopus talk yet? No? I did. Oh, okay. So I think if we're going to talk about octopus, my octopus teacher, you should just turn down your volume for about a minute and you won't have it spoiled. All right, fair enough, fair enough.

34:32And actually, I think that guy is terrible. I think he's a terrible human being for not rescuing his companion friend on two different occasions. Really? Yes, and I know that he's a documentarian, so they're not supposed to interfere. I've seen Drop Dead Gorgeous. I know the rules. But this is different. He crossed the line. He crossed boundaries when he became friends with that octopus. He stopped being a documentarian. It started being its friend, and then he, as its friend, wasn't there for his friend when it was attacked not once but twice. And I really dislike that guy for that reason. Oh, interesting.

35:08Well, I don't concur, but I guess that's part of the beauty of that movie. You can have different takes. But there's not a gulf between us, a wedge between us now, is there? I mean, did you hate the documentary? No, I otherwise thought it was amazing. All right, well, then there's no gulf. It was amazing. It really was great. Except for that one thing, times two. All right. No wedge. So let's see. Back to Cabbage Patch Kids. There was another kind of landmark they reached in 1992 when they became, I think maybe Christopher Xavier became the official mascot of the U.S. Olympic team and got to go to Barcelona with them.

35:45Yeah, I mean, this is... Which is pretty impressive. This is 10-plus years after these things were the hot ticket, you know, Which is crazy, crazy time. They were on a postage stamp. Eventually, of course, though, his star – well, not his star. It was more than Christopher Xavier. But their collective star was going to fade like all toys and all dolls. We've all seen Toy Story. We know what happens in the end. It never completely went away, though. You know, Coleco eventually was like, you know, we've got to offload these guys. We're going to sell it. We're in the video game industry like big time.

36:25And so we got a – Have you heard of Pac-Man? Well, the video game industry starts tanking. So they're trying to, I guess, recoup some money on their investment. So they sell the Cabbage Patch Kid license. And then, you know, this is not before trying a few things. They tried like talking Cabbage Patch Kids and stuff like that. But eventually they went bankrupt in the 80s. and the license moved on to different people over the years. Mattel, Hasbro, Toys R Us. And then right now it's owned by Playalong Inc., which it just seems like those are, it seems like there's a lot of toy companies named weird things like that now.

37:05I agree. I agree. And I find it unsettling. Like their slogan should be, we're watching you. It just seems like we talk about those a lot. Like, there's still the giants like Hasbro and Mattel, but I feel like when we've done our toy podcast, it seems like the newer ones, they don't have these sort of name brands that you think of as toys. No, I know. They all sound like Russian fronts. It's really weird and unsettling and kind of off-putting. And all the C's are K's. It's really strange. It's very sinister. So, yeah, along the lines, like all of these companies were like, we've got to figure out a way to capture lightning in a bottle again a second time.

37:48That just doesn't happen. It's hard enough the first time. And so they tried different things. Like you said, Coleco tried that talking one. Didn't work. I think Hasbro had one that swam, which is kind of impressive. And then Mattel had one that they had to withdraw. It was called Cabbage Patch Snack Time Kids. and they, these things would like eat, like they came with like French fries or something and you'd put like the French fry in their mouth and they'd start chewing and the French fry would go down their throat and actually come out the back of their head and fall into their backpack and then you could feed it to them again, which is great and fine.

38:25But if you're a little kid and you get your fingers in there, your hair in there, that Cabbage Patch doll is just going to keep eating and eating and you're going to start screaming and your parents are going to be like, I don't want this doll anymore. Give me my money back. Yeah, and these things also declined in quality. I think in the mid-'90s, Mattel shrunk them even more down to 14 inches, and they were like, forget these cloth bodies even. We're going to make the whole thing vinyl. And people didn't like that at all, and it took, I think, the 20th anniversary in 2003, it took Toys R Us, who took over the rights at that point, to jack these things back up to 18 inches.

39:06They had cloth bodies. I think they had an 18-inch and a 20-inch. And then they finally brought back those cloth bodies, which were a big deal. And they debuted them at their flagship store in New York City. And they sort of recaptured the magic a little bit. And it's about this time, and I think a year later is when Play Along licensed it. But it's about this time that people started buying them again a little bit for nostalgia, Like kids that grew up with them were now buying them for their kids. And I think, you know, they sold okay. It's nothing like they were at first, but they're still around.

39:43No. Yeah. And Play Along Inc., if that is their real name, was very wise to basically recreate the original 1983-style Cabbage Patch kids. Like they're basically indistinguishable from the ones that the people who are buying them now for their kids had when they were kids. And it's like you said, it's all nostalgia. And they're doing pretty good trade on it without having to reinvent the wheel. That's right. A little quick stat before we take a break that is remarkable. Over the past 32 years, there have been 130 million of these babies born, which if they were real little people, it would make them the 10th most populous country in the world with one being born every 6.8 seconds.

40:29But having said that, we're going to take a little break. And right after this, we're going to tell you the true origin story of the little people.

40:51Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that, or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health.

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43:26Okay, Chuck, I'm curious. Why did you say true like that? Well, if you listened to the show a year ago, it's already ruined, but we didn't go into that much depth. Here's what really happened, though. Xavier Roberts ripped off a lady. That's the easiest way to say it. There was a very kind-hearted, soft-spoken folk artist named Martha Nelson Thomas. Went to art school in the 70s. She experimented with the same exact German soft sculpture molding, And she created what was called Little Doll Babies. If you Google Martha Nelson Thomas, Little Dolls, and you see this very now famous picture when it, you know, hasn't been swept under the rug by Xavier Roberts people and maybe Coleco's people.

44:14This black and white picture of this woman surrounded by what are clearly and obviously Cabbage Patch Kids. Yes. And there's actually, funny enough, there's another famous picture of Xavier Roberts taken probably about 10 years after that. And he's surrounded by straight-up Cabbage Patch Kids, you know, with the vinyl heads and everything. But the fact that that picture was taken of Martha Nelson Thomas in 1975 is photographic documentary evidence that she is the person who came up with Cabbage Patch Kids. not cabbage patch kids but what cabbage patch kids were based on and if that were it if that were the photo if that was the only evidence whatsoever you'd be like that's a I don't know people can have similar ideas you know there's only one you know old German technique called needle molding other people could have found it but that is not the only evidence and in fact In fact, Xavier Roberts has gone on public record saying that he was inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas, but he changed it enough.

45:21But if you go and look at the actual story and the facts along the way, and there's actually a pretty good 16-minute long Vice documentary on this whole thing, that you will see that it went way beyond him just being inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas' work. And in fact, like you said, he basically ripped her off. Yeah. So he, from what I could tell, and there's a bunch of different sort of versions of this online, but from what I saw is they actually did have an agreement early on that he would sell these for her. He said, hey, these are great. Can I take some of these to my gift shops and sell them for you?

45:58And I think I could sell a lot more than you could. And for a little while, they did have an agreement. But as it turns out, he ended up marking them up and charging too much money. And she wasn't happy about that. She was like, no, these shouldn't cost$40. It's, you know, it's 1978, for God's sake. And that's a doll. And he's like, yeah, but they're— What do you think this is? Unicoi State Park? They're handmade. And, you know, you should put a value on your talents. And they had a disagreement about that. And she said, you know what? Forget it. I don't want you to sell these anymore. He follows up with a letter saying, well, you know what?

46:34if you don't let me sell your dolls, he basically said, I'm just going to start making my own. And that's exactly what he did. Supposedly, he wrote her a letter, and I don't remember who mentions it in the Vice documentary, but basically they said that in the letter, he said, if I can't sell your dolls, I will sell something just like them. And she apparently was like, whatever, just went her own way. She was satisfied to have her dolls back and probably thought she was done with the matter. And then supposedly one of her friends said, hey, I saw your little doll babies for sale at the Atlanta airport.

47:07Way to go. She said, I'm not selling these at the Atlanta airport. And apparently that's when she knew she had a big problem on her hands and found out that Xavier Roberts had come up with the little people dolls that were just the spinning image of her little doll babies. Yeah. So she filed a lawsuit that went on for years. I think by the time they were selling out in stores in 1983, she was about seven years into this lawsuit. And for her, it wasn't – she asked for I think a million dollars, but she said it wasn't about the money. She was like, I don't want to see this as a commodity and I don't want to be ripped off and I don't want this guy to come along and basically not have the same respect for these little dolls that I had.

47:51And if you look at the court case, you think, you know, open and shut. She's got this picture from 75. They had a prior relationship. She's got this letter that says – where he basically says he's going to rip her off. But she didn't copyright these things. And you would have had to copyright because they were all handmade and they were all, I guess, unique unto themselves. You would have had to copyright and sign or stamp each doll. And she didn't want to do that. And he had no problem doing it. Ours, little Chuck, has an Xavier Roberts hand signature on his butt if he pulled down his little corduroy shorts.

48:26Yeah, it's one of the famous things about Cabbage Patch Kids, aside from their distinctive faces, is that each one of them has Xavier Roberts' signature stamped onto its butt. And I guess Martha Nelson Thomas was like, there's no place to put a signature on a child. And these are like children to me. That's why I adopt them out rather than sell them. So I'm not going to sign this. I'm not going to copyright them. And that basically, you would think it would have sunk her case. And after almost eight years, Xavier Roberts finally said, OK, fine, let's settle this. I suspect it had to do with he sold out at some point in the 80s.

49:06He sold his portion. And I would guess he probably needed that court case to go away to finalize that sale. And for whatever the reason, in 1985, he was suddenly ready to settle. and they settled for an undisclosed sum that apparently Martha Nelson Thomas was satisfied with. Yeah, and he also said, And hey, lady, you say you can't copyright these things? You can sign it right next to their little butthole. Right. He sounded cockney there for a second. Cockney? Like, I started to get nervous, like, oh, my God, why does he sound cockney? And then you pulled it out with the real Appalachian Mountain folk twist at the end there.

49:43Yeah, so he settled. It was enough money to put her kids through college, she said. And it's still sort of a sad story to me that, you know, that this, you know, man came along and ripped off this lady's design and then later on complained that he was getting ripped off. He complained about knockoffs and said, you know, my point is not take my product to my creation and tarnish it. Yeah, which was pretty audacious because he said this like, you know, I believe it right when he was settling with this other case in which a part of the settlement was he had to acknowledge that he had taken her idea.

50:20and for him to be complaining about this on TV, it was a little audacious, especially if you know that, you know, the full story. But even though it was an open secret or even a widely known tale in the toy industry and even some parts of the press, even still today, everybody thinks of Xavier Roberts as the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids and technically he was because he came up with Cabbage Patch Kids and Martha Nelson Thomas came up with Little Doll Babies. Yeah, and he sold it to, well, he didn't come up with Cabbage Patch Kids. He sold it to Pac-Man and Pac-Man named them Cabbage Patch Kids.

51:00Yeah, I guess so. I hadn't thought about that. So one of the groups he was complaining about was Topps Trading Cards. Topps Trading Cards around the still in the height of the Cabbage Patch Kid craze in 1985. Came out with one of the greatest parodies anyone's ever come out with, the beloved Garbage Pail Kids series. Yeah, I didn't, I wasn't into these. I was a little too old. I certainly, I was 14. I certainly remember them in The Zeitgeist, and I knew it was a very big deal. But this was probably more for kids probably around your age. I imagine you were probably into these, right? I loved Garbage Pail Kids.

51:42I believe Yumi had a pretty impressive Garbage Pail Kid collection herself. Oh, really? Yeah. And she actually, yeah, she actually bought me a couple of Garbage Pail Kids that I have somewhere. I think one is Squash Josh. I can't remember the other one. But they are, for people who don't know what a Garbage Pail Kid is, go look up gpk.com. And I think it's like g-e-e-p-e-e-k-a-y.com. I'm not sure. But they have every single series scanned. So you can see all 15 series that came out between 1985 and 1988. And they're just awesome. But they're basically like if Cabbage Patch Kids were meant to get us used to what mutant offspring of nuclear war survivors would look like, Garbage Pail Kids were the mutated version of that.

52:37Yeah, that's a good way to say it. They were deformed and they were plagued and diseased. And they had names like Atom Bomb and Boney Tony and I guess Squash Josh and Rumi Yumi. I don't know. No, they didn't have names for everyone. But it was a big deal. They sold a ton of them. And Xavier Roberts was not happy with this and I think ended up in the lawsuit being successful and getting them just to change enough to where it didn't look like it was officially tied to the Cabbage Patch Kids. Yeah, like they had, you know, how it says like on the box for the Cabbage Patch Kid, it's like in a banner, kind of like semicircle banner.

53:25They had that originally as Garbage Pail Kids. They had to turn that into a straight bar. They made them look less like lifelike and more like plastic dolls in the later series. There were a few changes, but, I mean, it was still pretty clear what the whole thing was a riff off of. But one thing I didn't realize is that one of the art directors who helped conceptualize Garbage Pail Kids from the outset was Art Spiegelman, who created Mouse. Yeah. Did you know that? I mean, I've heard of Art Spiegelman, but I really don't know anything about him, so I didn't know that. But I know the name. I've not read Mouse, but I know it's like just a legendary graphic novel about fascism.

54:06But that guy helped create Garbage Pail Kids just a couple of years before he created Mouse. Amazing. And there was a bad TV show that eventually only aired in Europe. There was a bad movie that is pretty legendarily bad. But it was a big deal, though. They sold a ton of them. They didn't quite have the spinoff power of the CPKs, but the GPKs did okay for themselves. Yeah, I mean, like that really goes to show you just how big Cabbage Patch Kids were, that it could sustain a cottage industry for a parody even. That's how big Cabbage Patch Kids were in the movies. So hats off to Cabbage Patch Kids.

54:48I can't wait to talk about them again next year in another episode. It'll be great. We'll figure it out. We'll spend 2021 figuring out how to do that, Chuck. And in the meantime, everybody, since we're thinking about how to talk about Cabbage Patch Kids some more, it's time for Listener Mail.

55:08That's right. Before we do Listener Mail real quick, I just want to give a shout out to the Budge family. Not really going to get into what's going on with them, but just want them to know that we're thinking about them and sending them lots of love and support over the Internet airwaves. but this email is called oh I know I'm going to call it The Beave this is about beavers again and it starts out as this is seriously not a please read me on the air email and that's a pretty good way to get on the air by the way thanks for the amazing show been a listener since they were paltry 20 minutes love everyone keep me company while walking, driving, cleaning, cooking and providing an endless source of interesting topics for my English students in Spain.

55:54I kind of think Chuck is my podcast soulmate as we grow up in much the same circumstances around the same age. We have a very similar cultural outlook on different things. I do have a small difference of opinion, though. Your Bigfoot podcast was great. And I was happy to hear you say the possibility exists. Did we say that? Yeah, I think we were. I don't know if it was we so much as you. Yeah, maybe so. But a while back you were— I'm just teasing. I think it was we. You were adamant that Nessie does not exist. Buddy, show Nessie some love. Wouldn't it be amazing if she did exist? So she has her fingers crossed on that.

56:34But the real reason she wrote in is she listened to the Beaver episode and came across Beave the Beaver. So just get online and Google Beave. It was this beaver that was found, I think, abandoned by its parents and then adopted as a young baby and then raised for a while to eventually be put in maybe a wildlife center or something. But the long and short of it is Beeb makes dams in their house. So there are all these videos of Beeb dragging stuff into this one specific doorway that Beeb is trying to dam up and like dragging a shoe rack, pillows, tissue boxes, like anything B can get a hold of in his little paws and teeth.

57:20He'll drag over to this doorway and try and dam up. And it's really one of the cutest, funniest things I've ever seen. Yeah, it is very cute because he looks like, should this go here or maybe a little bit to the left? Okay, that's all right right there. Or like when he brought the pillow over, he's like, oh, this is very useful. I can just squish this into place. It was very cute to watch him do that. It is amazing. And that email, by the way, is from Kerry Keeley. Thanks, Kerry. That was a great email. And yes, way to get it on the air by saying it's not meant to be on the air. We fall for stuff like that all the time.

57:55And if you want to try to make us fall for something, have at us. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

58:07Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

58:22I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Palk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.

59:03Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name.

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