December 1, 2020 • 51 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:24):
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
(00:47):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:32):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:18):
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
(02:41):
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,
(03:02):
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
(03:24):
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
(03:49):
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
(04:10):
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,
(04:31):
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
(04:53):
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
(05:14):
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
(05:37):
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
(05:59):
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.
(06:23):
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
(06:43):
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,
(07:06):
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,
(07:26):
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
(07:49):
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
(08:10):
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
(08:30):
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.
(08:51):
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,
(09:12):
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,
(09:34):
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
(09:55):
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,
(10:17):
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
(10:38):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:20):
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,
(11:42):
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,
(12:03):
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
(12:24):
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,
(12:45):
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
(13:08):
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
(13:32):
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,
(13:54):
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
(14:15):
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,
(14:56):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:40):
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.
(16:00):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:43):
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,
(17:06):
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,
(17:27):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:08):
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.
(18:31):
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
(18:53):
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
(19:13):
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,
(19:34):
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
(19:54):
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,
(20:17):
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
(20:39):
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
(21:02):
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
(21:25):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:05):
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
(22:28):
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
(22:50):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:15):
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,
(24:35):
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
(24:55):
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
(25:15):
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,
(25:39):
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
(26:01):
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.
(26:22):
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
(26:43):
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
(27:05):
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
(27:28):
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
(27:51):
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.
(28:14):
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
(28:35):
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,
(28:59):
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
(29:19):
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
(29:41):
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.
(30:05):
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
(30:25):
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
(30:45):
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
(31:07):
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,
(31:29):
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
(31:49):
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
(32:10):
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
(32:32):
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
(32:55):
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
(33:17):
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,
(33:39):
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,
(34:02):
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.
(34:23):
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
(34:43):
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
(35:08):
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
(35:30):
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
(36:16):
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
(36:39):
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,
(37:02):
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
(37:24):
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,
(37:46):
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.
(38:09):
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
(38:30):
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
(38:52):
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
(39:14):
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,
(39:34):
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.
(39:55):
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
(40:16):
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,
(40:39):
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
(41:00):
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
(41:20):
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,
(41:42):
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
(42:05):
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
(42:27):
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
(42:48):
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
(43:11):
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
(43:35):
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
(43:56):
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,
(44:20):
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.
(44:44):
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
(45:08):
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
(45:29):
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
(45:52):
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.
(46:15):
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
(46:37):
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
(46:59):
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,
(47:20):
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
(47:41):
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
(48:03):
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
(48:24):
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
(48:45):
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,
(49:07):
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
(49:30):
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
(49:50):
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.
(50:11):
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,
(50:34):
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
(50:56):
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
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
(00:24):
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
(00:47):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:32):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:18):
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
(02:41):
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,
(03:02):
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
(03:24):
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
(03:49):
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
(04:10):
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,
(04:31):
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
(04:53):
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
(05:14):
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
(05:37):
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
(05:59):
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.
(06:23):
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
(06:43):
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,
(07:06):
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,
(07:26):
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
(07:49):
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
(08:10):
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
(08:30):
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.
(08:51):
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,
(09:12):
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,
(09:34):
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
(09:55):
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,
(10:17):
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
(10:38):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:20):
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,
(11:42):
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,
(12:03):
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
(12:24):
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,
(12:45):
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
(13:08):
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
(13:32):
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,
(13:54):
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
(14:15):
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,
(14:56):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:40):
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.
(16:00):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:43):
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,
(17:06):
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,
(17:27):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:08):
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.
(18:31):
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
(18:53):
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
(19:13):
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,
(19:34):
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
(19:54):
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,
(20:17):
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
(20:39):
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
(21:02):
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
(21:25):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:05):
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
(22:28):
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
(22:50):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:15):
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,
(24:35):
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
(24:55):
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
(25:15):
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,
(25:39):
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
(26:01):
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.
(26:22):
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
(26:43):
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
(27:05):
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
(27:28):
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
(27:51):
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.
(28:14):
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
(28:35):
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,
(28:59):
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
(29:19):
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
(29:41):
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.
(30:05):
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
(30:25):
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
(30:45):
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
(31:07):
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,
(31:29):
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
(31:49):
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
(32:10):
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
(32:32):
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
(32:55):
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
(33:17):
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,
(33:39):
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,
(34:02):
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.
(34:23):
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
(34:43):
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
(35:08):
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
(35:30):
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
(36:16):
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
(36:39):
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,
(37:02):
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
(37:24):
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,
(37:46):
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.
(38:09):
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
(38:30):
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
(38:52):
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
(39:14):
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,
(39:34):
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.
(39:55):
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
(40:16):
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,
(40:39):
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
(41:00):
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
(41:20):
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,
(41:42):
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
(42:05):
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
(42:27):
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
(42:48):
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
(43:11):
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
(43:35):
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
(43:56):
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,
(44:20):
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.
(44:44):
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
(45:08):
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
(45:29):
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
(45:52):
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.
(46:15):
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
(46:37):
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
(46:59):
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,
(47:20):
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
(47:41):
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
(48:03):
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
(48:24):
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
(48:45):
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,
(49:07):
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
(49:30):
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
(49:50):
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.
(50:11):
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,
(50:34):
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
(50:56):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
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