Cabbage Patch Kids: Must-Have Toy of the Century

Published Dec 1, 2020, 10:00 AM

Surprisingly, Cabbage Patch Kids have turned up on SYSK almost as much as the Nazis or Seinfeld. It’s finally time to dive all the way into CPKs, from their controversial origins to the Christmas craze of ‘83 to their alter egos, Garbage Pail Kids.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh um Josh, Malcolm Clark. There's Charles Wayne Bryant. This is stuff you should know about cabbage Patch kids who have two names, which is why I just did that. That's right. This, uh, remarkably the third time we've talked about cabbage Patch kids on this show. I only remember one other time. When was the When was the third time or the second time? I guess, well, the last time was not even a year ago. Um on our on our episode on must Have Christmas Gifts. And then that's all I remember. Yeah. And then while I was telling the story of my cabbage Patch kid experience, he said, yes, you've told everyone this story before, so I think this will be the third time that we hear these stories. I thought you didn't have a cabbage Patch kid, so you don't remember the other two times I told the story. No, you gotta tell it again. It's called it's called a hat trick baby. Uh yeah. He My sister has one of the first, like seventy five of them, of the little people dolls. Oh wow, that she bought when she was a kid. Now, I now I know why it didn't stick with me because I didn't understand what the heck you were talking about. Now I totally get it, and I think it will stay with me forever, Chuck, when we do our fourth, fifth, and sixth podcasts on Cabbage Patch Kids, I will be the one telling that story. How about that? Well, and you also told the story of yours that you uh ripped the head off and gave it a mohawk. Yeah, yours, Webberdno met a pretty terrible demise. And I have two of them myself that my mom every once in a while says, hey, do you want these? And I say, no, I don't. I don't think they're worth much money. And I don't know even though if my Sisters is worth a lot of money now, even though it's hand signed and one of the first ones, I just I don't think the market is is robust as it was at one point. So was HER's a colliqo Little People or as Xavier Roberts like original Appalachian artworks, um Little People know hers was one of the handmaid Xavier Roberts Kraft Fair dolls. I think those go for like one to maybe two thousand dollars. I think yeah, just I guess depends on where you look. Like I saw the one that of mine that was one of those originals, and it wasn't one of the first one hundred. But people are asking like a hundred and fifty bucks on eBay for those Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. UM I'm surprised to see that, Like from what I've seen, if like if, if you really want the big Bucks, it's the original Xavier Roberts little people. But UM, we're probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit because some people are probably like, what's the cabbage patch kid? Right, So well we'll tell everybody what a cabbage patch kid is. It's a little doll that UM was a huge, huge deal in the Christmas of EREE and like Chuck said, we talked about this on UM. I guess it was our I think it was our Christmas episode or was it a different standalone UM episode from last year? Now. I think the first time we did it was a Christmas episode and then last year it was in November. It was just Christmas toys. Okay, gotcha, gotcha? UM, So that's worth listening to. But UM in in December of Christmas of everybody was going crazy for these dolls. But at the same time there was like because it was such a huge craze and there they were so a part of like popular culture at the moment. They were on the news every night. UM. People were doing just absolutely crazy things to get their hands on these these dolls for their kids. There was a lot of talk about well, what what, what are these things? They're so ugly that they're cute, and other people thought, well, no, they're actually just ugly. UM. There was a a art a journal article that came out in the Semantics Journal, etcetera. UM, and the cabbage Patch kids were described as open, arm denied, seemingly dull witted, with mop haired faces only mothers could love, which I think is pretty pretty. It's a pretty accurate description of a cabbage Patch kid, don't you think. Yeah, so on that that was And this is something I never knew. Apparently there was a rumor years after the fact that UM the design was UM managed by Ronald Reagan because he wanted to get Americans used to what UM mutant offspring my look like. If we ever go to if the big One ever drops and we go to war with the rooskis, Um, we might want to get East of our babies looking like this. So it's just it's sort of in the classic Hollywood, like, you know, their theories that that's why we make UFO movies. Their commissioned by the government to get people sort of adjusted to the idea that one day there's gonna be aliens walking around right exactly. Um, but that's probably not the case. Ronald Reagan probably didn't have anything to do with it. But that's just such an eighties thing. Cabbage Patch Kids, Ronald Reagan in Nuclear War with the USS are that's about like the greatest eighties combination I've ever heard of in my life. Yeah, pretty good. So, um, if you go onto the Cabbage Patch Kids website, you'll find the um enchanting magical story of where Cabbage Patch Kids came from or how they came into our human world, and it goes something like, um, this that when he was a young boy, Xavier Roberts was wandering around the Appalachian mountains and he saw what is called a bunny bee, which is a magical bee that or magical bunny that can fly around like buzzes around like a bee. And he followed it, and the bunny bee went through a waterfall, and Xavier Roberts went and looked and saw that behind the waterfall there was a tunnel, and he went into the tunnel, being an inquisitive type of Appalachian young boy um. And when he came out on the other side of the tunnel, he was clearly in some sort of enchanted land, because there were a bunch of bunny bees flying around over a cabbage patch, sprinkling some sort of magical dust, and Xavier noticed that when the dust hit the cabbage, the cabbage would start to move and a little baby would be born from it, a cabbage patch kid. And one of those kids, a kid named Otis Lee, came up to Xavier and said, hey, will you take me and all of my friends over to your human world and help us find homes? And so Xavier Roberts agreed, and he found a baby Land General hospital for the per us of adopting out cabbage patch kids. And that's where it all came from. That's right, baby Land General, right here in Cleveland, Georgia. And I just so happened to have driven by there but two days ago. I went up, Oh yeah, yeah, we went on a waterfall hike the family did on Sunday, and did you see a bunny bee? Didn't see a bunny bee. But we drove right by baby Land General and Emily was like, did you know that was there? I was like, yeah, I've been there, so of course I know it was there. But that's where Xavier Roberts went to college. He went to college at trut McConnell there in Cleveland. So that was a connection, right right, Yeah, if you want to, if you want to kind of take it down a notch as far as magical enchantment goes. The the official story is that, um, Xavier Roberts while he was at true McConnell UM, while he was studying art there, he came across a German fabric sculpture technique from the nineteenth century called needle molding, and um, if you've ever seen, you know that that really famous tomato pincushion Chuck in the seventies, So you know how how like the top the creases in the top of the tomato are made by like like taught thread pulled through together to kind of create that that molded look. That from what I can tell is is a form of needle molding. But somehow Xavier Roberts was like, I really like sculpture, and this is a form of soft sculpture, also like quilting, and this kind of has to do with quilting. I'm going to get into this and we're going to figure out how to make baby dolls using this needle molding technique. And he did just that starting in nineteen Yeah. And for those of you that want to throw your um car into a ditch right now because you're screaming about the story, um, because you know the true story, just put a pin in it. We're gonna get around to it. That was very merciful of Ea chuck. Yeah. I didn't want people to to think that we didn't know. Um. But in nineteen seventy seven, Xavier Roberts, who sort of looked like a it's sort of like a shorter haired Kenny Rogers type where cowboy hat and had this beard, and um, he developed these uh. They were like you said, soft sculpture, but they were dolls called little people. And here was this sort of hitch that really drove kids wild, is that they were not dolls that you buy. They were little people that you adopt, so you got adoption birth certificates. Um. It was a Um, it was a brilliant idea that he had. Could have been in it right, and the and the some of these things, little people originals he had. He went to arts and craft shows. He sold them. We bought ours at Unicoi Lodge at Unicois State Park in a gift shop there, so that was a kind of place that would carry this kind of stuff. Um, there were about forty dollars. And I remember distinctly that my father could not imagine paying forty dollars for a doll and uh, I think even think we even left without a little chuck. And he went back because he felt so bad about how crestfall and my sister was and bought the doll later on for a Christmas gift or something, if my memory served me. But there's a lot of money. Uh, forty bucks is a lot of money for a doll back then. Yeah, it was probably getting pretty close to a hundred bucks. And I mean, who goes to Unicoise State Parks gift shop and expects to drop a hundred bucks on a piece of folk art that's really just a baby doll? You know, I could kind of thought it's he thought he's gonna have to get a Michelle miniature license plate for two fifty Sure, exactly. And when you go on with an expectation like that and you've are faced with a hundred dollar uh soft sculpture um payment that you have to make, that's a big shock. And sometimes somebody needs to get in their car and drive home and think about it before they can accept that that's right. So um that, like you said, that's exactly the kind of place you would have bought this. You could have also found him a like craft fairs or something. And in fact, um uh Xavier Roberts one first place at the Osceola Art Show in Kissimi, Florida, UM for little people that he named Dexter, which is one of the most uncanny, haunting, horrid dolls you'll ever see in your life. Um, but it helped kind of generate some buzz. And at that point he was like, you know what this is. Things are kind of going well. People are paying forty bucks for for um to adopt one of these little people. I'm winning first place prizes. I'm gonna get together some friends and he uh founded what's known as original Appalachian artworks. Um. And they they are the ones that actually opened up baby Land General. They took an old medical center in Cleveland, which is super creepy. Um that they they they took an abandoned hospital and opened it for it's basically like a doll store, really creepy if you step back and just look at the contours of the whole thing. Um. But it was a no, no, it didn't. I'm just saying if you just look at the words on paper, put it like that, it does seem when you know, it was like a little house. It was, and it was the opposite of creepy. Like it was delightful. And I guess it still is because I mean it's still an operation today. But people would show up and like they were like the people who worked there were dressed up as nurses and doctors and and they would help the the the babies be born from cabbage um from cabbage is uh, then they would be incubated. They were premises that were born. Like it was a big deal operation to take this this idea of that you were adopting a cabbage patch kid rather than buying a doll. And then like adding that whole extra to mention to it of going to Babyland general to do it really helped generate a lot of buzz for for these things. Yeah, and I should say that my sister's doll, Chuck, who was they come with their names. She didn't name it after me, but Chuck had um you know, if you see the early versions of these things, like you said, it was kind of horrific looking. They They weren't the cutest dolls at Chuck had a very crooked hairline. Um Like, it looked like it was made by someone who didn't fully know what they were doing. His little yarn hairline was like a good three inches higher on one side of his forehead than the other. Which again, further, my dad did not see the charm in this. He was like, it's not even made well, and I gotta pay forty dollars for these things. But um supposedly with the premise uh. Xavier Roberts has given some credit to just raising awareness for premature babies because the premise in Cabbage patch Land were so cute. They also had c sections cabbage sections, and by the time nineteen eight rolls around, he's selling a pretty good amount of these things. But it really explodes, uh. In popular culture from sort of the early eighties, he was featured on the TV show Real People, UM, which I watched a lot as a kid. Uh, made Newsweek, made the Wall Street Journal, and so the press is starting to kind of come around and these things are just getting more and more popular at this point. Yeah, a lot of those stories just kind of focused on people who were paying a lot more than the original retail price to start collecting these dolls. So there was like a whole underground cult market that was developing around these little people. UM. And it became very apparent that Xavier Roberts was not going to be able to keep up with supply, so he started looking for some help and he found it in two. And we will talk all about that partnership made in Heaven starting after these messages. Okay, Chuck, So uh, it's two and the little p bull are just going bonkers. They're flying off the shelves. They can't keep them in stock anywhere. They're selling them. Unicois State Park is on the phone every day being like, send us more, send us more. We don't care what the hairline looks like. We gotta have them, and um, so Xavier Roberts started looking for some like a legit toy manufacturer to help him out, and he found it in Kaliko, who had made a name I guess around the same time as maybe a little bit before this year before maybe as the people who UM came out with pac Man. So they were riding high by this time, and they said, I think there's something to this, these little people, and we're gonna we're gonna buy in here and so UM Xavier Roberts partnered with Kaliko, and the rest of the story just kind of takes off like a rocket from there. Yeah. So this was in N two and UH. At first Kaliko said, you know what, we're gonna keep calling them little People. We think that's a good name, even though it wasn't UM. So they stuck with the name. Uh. They figured out the best way to mass produce these things UM was to get rid of that hand done, hands owned head. That was a real problem. That's what took the most time. UM. It's also frankly, what gave those early dolls all the personality. UM. A lot of that was lost when they went to the plastic heads. But they did keep the cloth bodies. Uh. The machine produced these vinyl heads. They sized the doll down a little bit to about sixteen inches. Um. The initial dolls were pretty big. Um. They varied in size obviously depending on how old um they were when you adopted them. But um, they were large, Like Chuck was a big doll, the two I have her big dolls. Yeah, they were like the size where if they were possessed by a demon and came alive, they could smother you like that. You'd be in big trouble if they came alive while you were asleep, Yes, big time. But sizing him and down made a big difference because then you could just box them up, get more shell space that way. And they were smart early on too, to realize that kids wanted a lot of variety. Um, they wanted different ethnicities, they wanted different skin color, different shapes, they wanted some with freckles, some with dimples. Um. Obviously, different eye color and hair color and stuff like that. And that was one of the big selling points is it wasn't just this um Sames's mass produced all that that every kid could have the same one. Every kid wanted a different version. Yeah, because I mean that was the part of the whole marketing that you were adopting your own individual kid, your own cabbage patch kid who had his or her own name, his her own like specific birthdate. Um, he or she was a unique little baby that you were adopting. So um the idea that you could take different head molds and different facial features and different types of hair, and you had like a few different from each category. You suddenly had like millions of combinations that you could randomly put together. Continued that uniqueness that was part of the brand from the beginning. And like you said, it was like part of like the big the big thing that like made this craze so so huge. You know, they were very smart to to identify that as a big part of the marketing and then figure out a way to carry it on while also mass producing these things. It was pretty clever on Clico's part. Yeah, And it was also clever to change the name. Um. Little people just didn't have legs basically in the end, and they thought cabbage patch kids, they were born in the cabbage patch. It's um And you know, looking back, it's it's a pretty brilliant name because it ties into being adopted, being born in the Little cabbage Patch and um it's it was pretty brilliant. I think, um it was a kind of name like that you could end up making into a bunch of other things, which they did, and we're going to talk about that, but I don't think little people quite had the legs to do that. So um Clico also figured out that there was a really good sweet spot that even if you couldn't really afford it, you would still stretch to reach that point, and they started adopting these. The adoption fees for cabbage Patch kids came to about thirty dollars, which is seventy eight dollars in today's money. Um. And then they took their um, you know, comparatively much larger clout um in contacts in the media and started getting way more pressed for Cabbage Patch kids than Xavier Roberts ever managed to generate for little People, which I have to say, looking looking back, though, Xavier Roberts did some really good work as just some dude from Cleveland, Georgia who was hands sewing dolls. I mean, he got some pretty good coverage, but it was right exactly, and it wasn't it became a big deal, but Kaliko just put it to shame. They they m they got a lot of press, a lot of um interest drummed up for Cabbage Patch kids, and all of that kind of culminated in a December twelve m to edition of Newsweek when there was a cabbage pet a little girl with her Cabbage Patch kid on the cover of that edition, just in time for the Christmas buying season. That's right, because every kid in America was reading Newsweek and saying, mom, dad, look, it's on the cover, right, we have to get one. And that was at the very quaint time when when you would, um, you would just start Christmas shopping two weeks before Christmas rather than eight months before Christmas. Uh so, Clico and by the way, just to save listener mails, uh Clico did not make pac Man, and we just want to save you from that fate because is it right? Yeah, I think I think it was Namco if I remember correctly. Oh man, I mean they did do video games. But okay, well thanks for saving me. No, no, no, there'll be plenty of people that write that probably sent the email before I even got to this, and that want to retract the email. But that's okay. So they started selling these things like hotcakes. They sold um three million plus by the end of nineteen three. And like so many Christmas items that came before and after, it is sort of the frenzy is determined by availability and and supply, and they were underprepared and they could not keep up with demand. They weren't like the Rubik's Cube where they just made you know, millions and millions and millions of these things. Uh, and it became a supply problem and it became a really big deal. And this is, um, this is the first toy where people were angry because there weren't enough of them to go around. Yeah, and I mean they still made three million of them and they ran out like very quickly. And when you say people were angry, like they were throwing elbows, they were um pushing one another. They were like they were getting physical trying to get these dolls. And now it's like, well, yeah, that sounds like a Christmas like must have Christmas toy. People hadn't done that up to this point. This is very new. And so in addition to you know, the normal press they were getting, these dolls were also ending up on like the nightly news, a lot that December with stories about how parents were like driving across state lines to get one of those cabbage Patch Kids, or there was a story about a post carrier in Kansas City, I think who flew to London to buy one, which I don't understand why, because London had its own Friendzy going on as well. Um, there was a whole lot of stuff going down that hadn't really gone down before Cabbage Patch Kids came along that Christmas. Yeah, I wonder if that became a technique to sell more things, was to either uh falsely, um, kind of falsely say that you don't have enough. I think we covered that and the Must Have Toys episode that that is that is a technique that they use that they they purposed the under produce to to create scarcity. Yeah, but then you can't sell as many. I would think you'd be better to produce the regular amount and then just say you didn't And then I'm like, but we found a warehouse that we didn't know about exactly, because you still want to move these dolls. I mean Rubik's Cube. They sold two hundred million Rubik's cubes in the first few years because they were just pumping those things out. Yeah. Well, at the very least, I think Calliko was genuinely caught under prepared. I don't think it was in any way shape or form a purposeful scarcity. I think it was just straight up scarcity. UM. And there was there was. There's this footage from U Zales to partner No sorry, Zaire Department Store, Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. Right, this is in Wolkesbury, Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania or wilkes Barra. I've also seen Pennsylvania. UM. But there's this manager who I know we talked about before, but you got to see this guy. He's the manager of the Zir department store. UM in December at least. And this guy is like unhinged. Have you seen footage of him last year? Okay, you gotta see him again. I gotta describe again because I 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, shouting at the customers, he's like, shut up, listen to May. And he's like waiving this baseball bat and there's this crowd of people filling every available inch of this. 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. So the crowd is like Joscelyn going crazy trying to catch these cabbage patch kids while the manager of the department store screaming at them holding a baseball bat. 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. He was uh uh, he wasn't doing his best work that day. I think that's a lot of times the UM 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 fist fight 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. Um. The secondary market started booming. There are 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. UM. And this was not w KRP in Cincinnati, but it was very much in that rich tradition of of DJ's um kind of conning people into acting like fools. And this happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin when um, some local DJs there said there's gonna be a beat twenty six bomber plane and it's gonna drop two thousand dolls over the Brewers Baseball Stadium and all you gotta do is show up with your baseball glove to catch these babies and hold up your credit cards so the pilot can take a picture and charge you for it. And 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. Um, they're used to it, I guess so. UM. But the the yeah, the fact that people would would do that is it's like, I double check to make sure that that wasn't an urban legend and it definitely is not. Like that was that really did happen in Milwaukee in three That was like the level of the craze reached UM and what's really to Collico's credit is they managed to keep the party going for a full another year because in Christmas, cabbage Patch Kids were again the must have toy, and in just four own not Christmas seas, in four that year, they sold two billion dollars worth of Cabbage Patch Kids in nineteen eighty four. Money. Yeah, I mean, this was I think. One of the things that made it truly unique is like I said, the rub Excue was really hot for a few years. But generally, as these things go, it's sort of like that 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 one of the outcomes of that of of being a toy that managed manages to span two Christmas seasons that at thoroughly um as they become you know, iconic and they start popping up in other places like um. There was one named Christopher Xavier who's a very famous cabbage Patch kid, I guess, as as cabbage Patch kids can be famous. Um. And he actually rode on the Space Shuttle on a on a genuine legit NASA Space Shuttle mission in um and that reminds me, Chuck, have you seen the mini duck about um about the Challenger? No? Not yet. It's good. Oh boy, it is really good. I mean it's a it's a high 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 and every every way. I highly recommend it. Where's that showing that one's on Netflix? I believe I'm almost positive, and I think it's just called Challenger and then probably cole in something. But um, it's good. It was. It's by uh. I think j J isn't bad. Robot j J Abrams production company. They did it. They were one of the companies that that handled it. But it was It's very good. I did watch a Nola Holmes on your recommendation. Yes, what do 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 to the night we watched it, for sure. And and but it was smart too, wasn't it? Yeah? It was it was smart enough and she's just great Milly Bobby brown is. She's just she's got a lot of personality and lovable charismas so she's 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. 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. You know, you haven't seen the Octopus stock yet, now I did. Okay, So I think if 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? And actually I think that guy is terrible. I think it's a terrible human being for not rescuing his companion friend for on two different occasions. Really, yes, And I know that he's a documentary and so they're not supposed to interfere. I've scene 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 documentary and started being his friend, and then he as his 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, Well I don't concur but I guess. Uh, that's part of the beauty of that movie. You can have different, different takes. So but there's not a gulf between us, a wedge between us, now, is there? I mean, did you hate the documentary? No, otherwise thought it was amazing, Right, Well, then there's no amazing. It really was, really was great except for the that one thing. Um, So let's see back to Cabbage Patch Kids. There's another kind of landmark they reached 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 him. Yeah, I mean, this is pretty impressive. This is ten plus years after these things were the hot ticket, you know, um, which is crazy crazy time. Um. They were on a postage stamp. Um. Eventually, of course, though his star 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 knows what happened. We know what happens in the end. Um. It never completely went away though, they you know, Colleco. And then eventually was like, you know, we got to offload these guys. We're gonna sell it. We're in the video game industry like big time. Um, and so we gotta have you heard of pac Man? Well, the video game industry starts tanking, so they're trying to guess recoup some money on their investments. So they sell the Cabbage Patch Kid license. Uh. And then you know, this is not before trying a few things they tried like talking Cabbage Patch Kids uh and stuff like that. But eventually they went bankrupt in the eighties and the license moved on to different people over the years. Mattel, has Bro Toys are us, and then right now it's owned by play Along, Inc. Which it just seems like those are It seems like there's a lot of toy companies named weird things like that. Now. I agree, I agree, and I find it unsettling, like their slogans should be We're watching you. It just seems like we talked about this 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 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 in all the seas are ks. It's really strange. It's very sinister. So yeah, along the along the lines, like all of these companies were like, we gotta figure out a way to capture lightning in a bottle again. Um, a second time. That just doesn't happen. It's hard enough the first time. Um. And so they tried different things, like you said, Colico tried that talking one didn't work. Um. I think Hasbro had one that swam, which is kind of impressive. Um. And then Mattel had one that they had to withdraw. It was called, um 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 by in their mouth and they'd start chewing and the French five 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, but if you're a little kid and you get your fingers in there, your hair in there, that cabbage patch dolls just kind of 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. Um think of the mid nineties. Mattel shrunk them even more down to four teen inches and they were like, forget these cloth bodies even We're gonna make the whole thing vinyl. Uh. And people didn't like that at all. And it took I think the twentie anniversary in two thousand three. It took Toys r Us, who took over the rights at that point, to um jack these things back up to eighteen inches. Um, they had cloth bodies. Uh. I think they had an eighteen inch in a twenty in. And then they finally brought back those cloth bodies, which were a big deal, and they m debuted him at their flagship store in New York City and they sort of recaptured the magic a little bit. Uh. And it's about this time, and I think a year later as 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. Yeah, and I play a long ink if that is there real name was very wise to basically recreate the original three style cabbage Patch kids, like they're basically indistinguishable from the ones that 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 nostalgi and they're they're doing pretty good trade on it with without having to reinvent the wheel. That's right. A little quick stat before we take a break, that is remarkable. Over the past thirty two years, there have been a hundred and thirty million of these babies born, which would make if they were real little people, it would make them the tenth most populous country in the world, with one being born every six point eight seconds. But having said that, we're gonna take a little break, and right after this we're going to tell you the true origin story of the Little People. Okay, Chuck, I'm curious, why did you say true like that? Well, if you listen to the show a year ago, it's already ruined. But uh, we didn't go into that much depth. Um, here's what really happened, though. Xavier Roberts ripped off a lady. It'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 seventies. 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 fame now famous picture when you know, hasn't been swept under the rug by Xavier Roberts people and maybe Calico's people, This 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 um probably about ten years after that, and he's surrounded by straight up cabbage patch kids, you know, with the vinyl heads and everything. But that that the fact that that picture was taken to Martha Nelson Tom Nelson Thomas 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, Xavier Roberts has gone on public record saying that he was inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas, but he changed it enough. But if you go and look at the actual story and the facts along the way, and there's actually a pretty good sixteen minute long vice documentary on this whole thing, um that that you will see that it went way beyond him just being inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas's work, and in fact, like you said, he basically ripped her off. Yeah, so he Um, 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. Uh. He said, hey, these are great. Can I take some of these to my gift shops and um sell them for you? And 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, they shouldn't cost forty it's you know, it's night for God's sake, and that's a doll. Uh. And he's like, yeah, but what do you think this is? Unicois State Park? Their handmade and uh, you know, you should put a value on 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, if you don't let me sell your dolls, I'm He basically said, I'm just gonna 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. Way to go. She said, I'm not selling these at the Atlanta Airport. And apparently that's and she knew she had a big problem on her hands and found out that Xavier Roberts had come up with the little people dolls UM that were just the spinning image of her little doll babies. Yeah, so she um filed a lawsuit that went on for for years. I think by the time they were selling out in stores in three she was about seven years into this lawsuit. And for her, it wasn't She asked her, I think a million dollars, but she said it wasn't about the money. She was like, I don't want to see this um 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, and if you look at the court case, you think, you know, open and shut. She's got this picture from seventy five. They had a prior relationship. She's got this letter, uh 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 copy, right because they were all handmade and they were all, um I guess, unique into 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 Robert's hand signature on his butt if you pull down his little quarturoy shorts. Yeah, it's one of the famous things about cabbage patch kids, aside from their distinctive faces, is that each one of them has Xavier Robert's 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 him out rather than sell them. Um, so I'm not going to sign this, I'm not gonna copyright him and that basically, so you would think it would have sunk her case. And after um, almost eight years, Um Xavier Roberts finally said, okay, fine, let's settle this. I suspect it had to do with um. He sold out at some point in the eighties he sold his 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 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 butt hole. Right. He sounded cockney there for a second, cockney Like I started to getting 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. Yeah, So he, uh, he settled, and ship was enough money to put her kids through college. She said, Uh, it's still sort of a sad story to me that you know that 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, it's not 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 that he had taken her idea UM and for him to to be complaining about this on TV, it was a little audacious, especially if you know that you know the full story. But the even though it was an open secret or at least even a widely known tale in the toy industry and even some parts of the press, even still today, everybody thinks of Xavier Roberts is the the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids. And technically he was um because he he came up with Cabbage Patch Kids, and Martha Nelson Thomas came up with um little doll babies, and he sold it to uh, well, he didn't come up with Cabbage Patch Kids. He sold it to Pacman, and pac Man named him cabbage Patch Kids. Yeah, I guess, so I hadn't thought about that. So one of the groups he was complaining about was tops trading cards, Tops trading cards around the the still in the height of the average patch kid, crates In came out with one of the greatest parodies anyone's ever come out, with the beloved garbage Pale Kids series. Yeah. I didn't, Uh, I wouldn't into these. I was a little too old, certainly, I was. I was fourteen. I certainly remember them in uh 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 pill Kids. I believe that you had a pretty impressive garbage pill kid collection herself. And she actually, yeah, she actually bought me. Um, a couple of garbage Pail Kids I have somewhere. UM. I think one is Squash Josh. I can't remember the other one. But they are for the people who don't know what the garbage pail Kid is. Go look up g p K dot com and I think it's like g E E p e k a y dot com. Not sure, but um, they have every single series scanned, so you can see all fifteen series that came out between and they're just awesome. But they're basically like, um, if garbage if cabbage Patch Kids were meant to get his used to what mutant offspring of nuclear war survivors would look like. Um, garbage pail Kids were the mutated version of that. Yeah, that's a good way to say it. They were. They were deformed, and they were plagued and diseased. And they had names like Adam Bomb and bony Tony and I guess squash Josh and uh roomy Umi. I don't know. No, they didn't. They didn't have names for everyone, but um, it was. It was a big deal. They sold a ton of them, and Xavier Roberts was was not happy with this and I think ended up um in the lawsuit being successful in 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 the cat you know where how it says like on the box for the Cabbage Patch Kid. It's like in a banner kind of like semicircle banner. They 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 are 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 um art directors who helped conceptualize Garbage pill Kids from the outset was Art Spiegelman, who created Mouse. Yeah, did you know that? I mean, I've heard of Art Spielman, but I really don't know anything about him, So I didn't know that, but I know the name. I've not Red Mouse, but I know it's like it's like a like a just a legendary graphic novel um about fascism. But that guy helped create Garbage Pail Kids just a couple of years before Creative Mouse. Amazing, and there was a a bad TV show that eventually only aired in Europe that was a bad movie that is pretty legendarily bad. But um, 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 g p ks did okay for themselves. Yeah, I mean, like that really goes to show you just how big Cabbage petch Kids were that it could sustain a cottage industry for a parody even that's how big Cabbage Patch Kids were in there. So hats off to Cabbage Patch Kids. I can't wait to talk about them again next year in another episode. Will be great, We'll figure it out. We'll spend figuring out how to do that, Chuck. And in the meantime, everybody, since we're thinking about how to talk about Cabbage petch Kids, so more, it's time for listener mail. That's right before we do listener may real quick. I just want to give a shout out to the Budge family. Uh, not really gonna 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 air waves. But this email is called oh I know, I'm gonna call it the beav Uh this is 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 twenty 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. Uh. I kind of think Chuck is my podcast soulmatee. As we grew up in much the same circumstances around the same age. We have very similar cultural outlook on different things. I do have a small difference of opinion. Though your Bigfoot podcast was great, uh, and I was happy to hear you say the possibility exists to be saying that. Guess, yeah, I think we were. I don't know if it was we so much as you. Yeah, maybe so, But a while back it was weak. 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. But the real reason she wrote in she listened to the beaver episode and came across Beave the beaver. So just get online and google be That was this beaver that was found Um, I think abandoned by its parents and then adopted as a young baby and then raised for a while to eventually be putting maybe a wildlife center or something. But the long and short of it is beef makes damns in their house. So there are all these pretty cute videos of Beef dragging stuff into this one specific doorway that beab is trying to damn up and like dragging a shoe, IRAQ, pillows, um, tissue boxes, like anything Beef can get ahold of in his little paws and teeth, he'll drag over to this doorway and try and damn 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? Maybe a little bit to the left. Okay, that's all right right there. They're 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, was from Carrie Keeley. Thanks Carrie, 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. Um, we fall for stuff like that all the time. And if you want to try to make us fall for something, have at us. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast. Did I Heart Radio dot com Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, is it the eye radio app? Apple podcasts are where ever you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD,  
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,500 clip(s)