December 12, 2025 • 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):
Hey, everybody, it's my turn. Now it's Josh and for
this episode on our Stuff you Should Know twelve Days
of Christmas Toys playlist, we're talking about cabbage Patch Kids,
one of the all time top contenders for a must
have Christmas toy. I had one. His name was Weberdino.
He was very great. We had very fun times together,
(00:24):
important times at any rate, whether you had a cabbage
Patch kid or not. I think you're going to enjoy
this episode. So turn up your coco. There's some marshmallows
in there and enjoy this app.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, Josh, Malcolm Clark.
There's Charles Wayne Bryant. This is Stuff you should know
about cabbage Patch Kids who have two names, which is
why I just did that. That's right.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
This, uh, remarkably the third time we've talked about cabbage
Patch Kids on this show.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I only remember one other time. When was the When
was the third time or the second time?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I guess well, the last time was not even a
year ago, on our on our episode on Must Have
Christmas Gifts. And then that's all I remember yeah. And
then while I was telling the story of my Cabbage
Patch Kid experience, he said, yes, you've told everyone the
story before, so I think this will be the third
(01:42):
time that we hear these stories.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I thought you didn't have a Cabbage Patch kid.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
So you don't remember the other two times I told
the story.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
No, you got to tell it again. It's called the
It's called the hat trick. Baby.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Uh yeah. My sister has one of the first, like
seventy five of them, of the little people dolls oh wow,
that she bought in Okilja when she was a kid.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Now I know why it didn't stick with me because
I didn't understand what the heck you were talking about.
Now I totally get it, and I think it will
stay with me forever, Chuck. When we do our fourth, fifth,
and sixth podcasts on Cabbage Patch Kids, I will be
the one telling that story. How about that?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, and you also told the story of yours that
you rip the head off and gave it a mohawk.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah, for yours, weber Dino met a pretty a terrible demise.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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 even though if My
Sisters is worth a lot of money now, even though
it's hand signed and one of the first ones. I
just I don't think the market is robust as it
(03:01):
was at one point.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
So was hers a callco Little People or as Xavier
Roberts like original Appalachian artworks Little People?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
No, hers was one of the handmade Xavier Roberts og
Kraft fair dolls.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
I think those go for like one two, maybe up
two thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
I think, yeah, I 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 were asking like
one hundred and fifty bucks on eBay for those.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm surprised to see that, like
from what I've seen, Like, if you really want the
big bucks, it's the original Xavier Roberts Little People. But
we're probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit because
some people are probably like, what's the cabbage patch kid? Right?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Right?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
So well, we'll tell everybody what a Cabbage Patch kid
is It's a little doll that was a huge, huge
deal in the Christmas of nineteen eighty three, and like
Chuck said, we talked about this on I guess that
was our I think it was our Christmas episode or
was it a different standalone episode from last year?
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Now? I think the first time we did it was
a Christmas episode, and then last year it was in November.
It was just muscle Christmas toys.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Okay, gotcha, gotcha, So that's worth listening too. But in
December of nineteen eighty three, Christmas of nineteen eighty three,
everybody was going crazy for these dolls. But at the
same time, there was like because it was such a
huge craze and they were so a part of like
popular culture at the moment. They were on the news
every night. People were doing just absolutely crazy things to
(04:49):
get their hands on these dolls for their kids. There
was a lot of talk about, well, what are these things?
They're so ugly that they're cute, and other people thought, well, no,
they're actually just ugly. There was a journal article that
came out in nineteen eighty six and the Semantics Journal,
et cetera, and the Cabbage Patch kids were described as open,
(05:10):
arm denied, seemingly dull witted, with mop haired faces only
mothers could love, which I think is pretty pretty. It's
a pretty accurate description of a cabbage patch kid, don't
you think.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, so on that that was This is something I
never knew. Apparently there was a rumor years after the
fact that the design was managed by Ronald Reagan because
he wanted to get Americans used to what mutant offspring
might look like if we ever go to if the
(05:41):
big one ever drops and we go to war with
the Ruskies, we might want to get used to our
babies looking like this. So let's just it's sort of
in the classic Hollywood, like, you know, their theories that
that's why we make UFO movies. They're commissioned by the
government to get people sort of adjusted to the idea
that one day there's going to be aliens walking around.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Right exactly, 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,
and nuclear war with the USSR. That's about like the
greatest eighties combination I've ever heard of. In my life.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, pretty good.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
So if you go onto the Cabbage Patch Kid's website,
you'll find the enchanting, magical story of where cabbage patch
kids came from or how they came into our human world,
and it goes something like this that when he was
a young boy, Xavier Roberts was wandering around the Appalachian
(06:39):
mountains and he saw what is called a bunny bee,
which is a magical bee 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,
(07:03):
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.
An 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
(07:23):
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 Babyland General Hospital for the purpose
of adopting out cabbage patch kids. And that's where it
all came from.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
That's right, Babyland General, right here in Cleveland, Georgia. And
I just so happened to have driven by there but
two days ago. I went up, Oh yeah, yeah, we
went on a waterfall hike the family did on Sunday and.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Did you see a bunny bee?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Didn't see a bunny bee? But we drove right by
Babyland General and Emily was like, did you know that
was there? I was like, yeah, I've been there, so
of course I know it was there. But that's where
Xavier Roberts went to college. He went to college at
True at McConnell there in Cleveland.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
So that was the 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 Xavier Roberts, while he was
at True at McConnell. While he was studying art there,
he came across a German fabric sculpture technique from the
nineteenth century called needle molding. And if you've ever seen,
(08:40):
you know, that really famous tomato pincushion Chuck in the seventies,
So you know how how like the top the creases
in the top of the tomato are made by like
like taut thread pulled through together to kind of create
that that molded look. That, from what I can tell,
is a form of needle molding. But somehow Xavier Roberts
(09:01):
was like, I really like sculpture, and this is a
form of soft sculpture. I also like quilting, and this
kind of has to do with quilting. I'm going to
get into this and I'm going to figure out how
to make baby dolls using this needle molding technique. And
he did just that starting in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, And for those of you that want to throw
your car into a ditch right now because you're screaming
about the story, yeah, because you know the true story,
just put a pin in it. We're going to get
around to it.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
That was very merciful of you. Chuck.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, I didn't want people to think that we didn't know.
But in nineteen seventy seven, Xavier Roberts, who sort of
looked like a sort of like a shorter haired Kenny
Rogers type, wore a cowboy hat and had this beard,
and he developed these They were, like you said, soft sculpture,
but they were dolls called little People. And here was
(09:55):
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.
It was. It was a brilliant idea that he had
put a bin in it, right, and he sold these things,
little people originals he had. He went to arts and
(10:18):
craft shows, he sold them. We bought ours at Unicoy
Lodge at Unicoy State Park in a gift shop there,
so that was the kind of place that would carry
this kind of stuff. There were about forty dollars, and
I remember distinctly that my father could not imagine paying
forty dollars for a doll and I think even I
(10:39):
think we even left without Little Chuck. And he went
back because he felt so bad about how Cresfall and
my sister was and bought the doll later on for
a Christmas gift or something, if my memory served me,
But it was a lot of money. Forty bucks was
a lot of money for a doll back then.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yeah, it was probably getting pretty close to one hundred bucks.
And I mean, who goes to Unicoy State Park's gift
shop and expects to drop one hundred bucks on a
piece of folk art that's really just a baby doll?
You know, I could kind of start as.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
He thought, he's gonna have to get a Michelle miniature
license plate for two fifty.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Sure, exactly. And when you go on with an expectation
like that and you are faced with one hundred dollars
soft sculpture 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 that, like you said,
that's exactly the kind of place you would have bought this.
(11:37):
You could have also found him at like craft Fares
or something. And in fact, Xavier Roberts one first place
at the Osceola Art Show in Kassimi, Florida for little
people that he named Dexter, which is one of the
most uncanny, haunting, horrid dolls you'll ever see in your life.
(11:58):
But it helped kind of generate some buzz and that
point he was like, you know what this is. Things
are kind of going well. People are paying forty bucks
for to adopt one of these little people. I'm winning
first place prizes. I'm gonna get together some friends and
he founded what's known as Original Appalachian Artworks and they
they are the ones that actually opened up baby Land General.
(12:19):
They took an old medical center in Cleveland, which is
super creepy 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. But it was ash. No,
no it didn't. I'm just saying, if you just look
(12:41):
at the words on paper, Oh you put it like that,
it does seem Yeah, 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 in operation today.
But people would show up and like there were like
the people who worked there were dressed up as nurses
and doctors, and they would help the babies be born
(13:02):
from cabbage from cabbages, then they would be incubated. They
were premies that were born. Like it was a big
deal operation to take this idea that you were adopting
a cabbage patch kid rather than buying a doll, and
then like adding that whole extra dimension to it of
going to Babyland general to do it really helped generate
(13:23):
a lot of buzz for these things.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, and I should say that my sister's doll, Chuck,
who was they come with their name. She didn't name
it after me, but Chuck had You know, if you
see the early versions of these things, like you said,
it was kind of horrific looking. They weren't the cutest
dolls at all. Chuck had a very crooked hairline, like
it looked like it was made by someone who didn't
fully know what they were doing. His little yarn hairline
(13:48):
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 got to pay
forty dollars for these things. But supposedly with the premies.
Xavier Roberts has given some credit to just raising awareness
for premature babies because the pre in Cabbage Patchland were
(14:12):
so cute. They also had c sections cabbage sections, and
by the time nineteen eighty rolls around, he's selling a
pretty good amount of these things. But it really explodes
in popular culture from sort of the early eighties. He
was featured on the TV show Real People, which I
watched a lot as a kid, made Newsweek, made the
(14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
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's
like a whole underground cult market that was developing around
these little people. And it became very apparent that Xavier
Roberts was not going to be able to keep up
(15:02):
with supply, so he started looking for some help and
he found it in nineteen eighty two. And we will
talk all about that partnership Made in Heaven starting after
these messages. Okay, Chuck, So it's nineteen eighty two, and
(15:39):
the little people are just going bonkers. They're flying off
of shelves. They can't keep them in stock anywhere. They're
selling them. Unicoy 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 got to
have them. And so Xavier Roberts started looking for some
like a legit toy manufacturer to help him out and
(16:00):
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 came
out with pac Man. So they were riding high by
this time, and they said, I think there's something to
these little people, and we're gonna we're gonna buy in here.
And so Xavier Roberts partnered with Kalico, and the rest
(16:23):
of the story just kind of takes off like a
rocket from there. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
So this was in nineteen eighty two, and at first
Kaliko said, you know what, we're going to keep calling
them little People. We think that's a good name, even
though it wasn't, so they stuck with the name. They
figured out the best way to mass produce these things
was to get rid of that hand done hands on head.
(16:47):
That was a real problem. That's what took the most time.
It's also, frankly, what gave those early dolls all the personality.
A lot of that was lost when they went to
the plastic heads, but they did keep the cloth bodies.
They machine produced these vinyl heads. They sized the doll
down a little bit to about sixteen inches. The initial
(17:08):
dolls were pretty big. They varied in size, obviously depending
on how old they were when you adopted them, but
they were large, like Chuck was a big doll, the
two I have here big dolls.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yeah, they were like the size where if they were
possessed by a demon and came alive, they could smother
you like you'd be in big trouble if they came
alive while you were asleep.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yes, big time. But sizing them down made a big
difference because then you could just box them up, get
more shelf space that way. Sure, and they were smart
early on too, to realize that kids wanted a lot
of variety. They wanted different ethnicities, they wanted different skin color,
different shapes. They wanted some with freckles, some with dimples, obviously,
(17:52):
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 Samesy's mass p is do all
that right. Every kid could have the same one. Every
kid wanted a different version.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, Because I mean that was the part of the
whole marketing that you were adopting your own individual kid,
your own cabbage patch kid who had his or her
own name, his or her own like specific birth date.
He or she was a unique little baby that you
were adopting. So the idea that you could take different
(18:27):
head molds and different facial features and different types of hair,
and you had like a few different from each category.
You suddenly had like millions of combinations that you could
randomly put together. It continued that uniqueness that was like
part of the brand from the beginning, and like you said,
was like part of like the big the big thing
that like made this craze so so huge. You know,
(18:48):
they were very smart 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 Kleco's part.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah, And it was also clever to change the name
Little People, Yeah, just didn't have legs, basically in the end,
and they thought cabbage Patch Kids, they were born in
the cabbage patch. It's and you know, looking back, it's
a pretty brilliant name because it ties into being adopted,
being born in the little cabbage patch, and it's it
(19:23):
was pretty brilliant. I think it was a kind of
name like that you could end up making into a
bunch of other things, which they did, and we're going
to talk about that, but I don't think little people
quite had the legs to do that.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
So Kalico also figured out that there was a really
good sweet spot that even if you couldn't really afford it,
you would still stretch to reach that point, and they
started adopting these. The adoption fees for Cabbage Patch Kids
came to about thirty dollars, which is seventy eight dollars
in today's money. And then they took their you know,
(19:59):
comparatively much larger clout and contacts in the media and
started getting way more press for Cabbage Patch Kids than
Xavier Roberts ever managed to generate for little People, which
I have to say, looking back, though, Xavier Roberts did
some really good work as just some dude from Cleveland,
(20:19):
Georgia who was hand sewing dolls. I mean he got
some pretty good coverage.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
It was a niche and regional.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Right exactly, and it wasn't it became a big deal,
but Kalico just put it to shame. They got a
lot of press, a lot of interest drummed up for
Cabbage Patch kids, and all of that kind of culminated
in a December twelfth to a nineteen eighty three edition
of Newsweek when there was a cabbage pet, a little
(20:50):
girl with her Cabbage Patch kid on the cover of
that edition, just in time for the Christmas buying season.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
That's right, because every kid in America was reading Newsweek
and saying, Mom, Dad, look, it's on the cover. We
have to get one.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yep. And that was at the very quaint time when
you would you would just start Christmas shopping two weeks
before Christmas rather than eight months before Christmas.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
So Clico and by the way, just to save listener mails,
Clico did not make back man, and we'll just want
to save you from that fate, because is it right, Yeah,
I think it was Namco if I remember correctly.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Oh man, I.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Mean they did do video games.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
But okay, well thanks for saving me.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
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 retrack the email. But that's okay.
So they started selling these things like hotcakes. They sold
three million plus by the end of nineteen eighty three,
and like so many Christmas items that came before and after,
(21:53):
it is sort of the frenzy is determined by availability
and supply, and they were underprepared and they could not
keep up with demand. They weren't like the Rubik's Cube,
where they just made, you know, millions and millions and
millions of these things, and it became a supply problem
and it became a really big deal. And this is
(22:14):
this is the first toy where people were angry because
there weren't enough of them to go around.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Yeah, and I mean they still made three million of
them and they ran out like very quickly. And when
you say people were angry, like they were throwing elbows,
they were pushing one another, 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.
(22:40):
People hadn't done that up to this point. This is
very new and so in addition to you know, the
normal press they were getting, these dolls were also ending
up on like the Nightly News a lot that December
with stories about how parents were like driving across state
lines to get one of those Cabbage Patch Kids. Or
(23:00):
there was a story about a post carrier in Kansas
City I think who flew to London to buy one,
which I don't understand why, because London had its own
frenzy going on as well. There was a whole lot
of stuff going down that hadn't really gone down before
Cabbage Patch Kids came along that Christmas.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, I wonder if that became a technique to sell
more things, was to either falsely kind of falsely say
that you don't have enough.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I think we covered that and the Must Have Toys
episode that that is a technique that they use that
they purposefully underproduce to create scarcity.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Yeah, but then you can't sell as many. I would
think it'd be better to produce the regular amount and
then just say you didn't and then they're like, but
we found a warehouse that we didn't know about, right exactly,
because you still want to move these dolls. I mean
Rubik's Cube. They sold two hundred million rubbs cubes in
the years. I know that's nuts because they were just
pumping those things out.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah. Well, at the very least, I think Calico was
genuinely caught under prepared. I don't think it was in
any way, shape or form a purposeful scarcity. I think
it was just straight up scarcity. And there was there was.
There's this footage from Zale's Department No, sorry, Zayer Department store, Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. Right,
(24:28):
this is in wilkes wilkes Bury, Pennsylvania or Wilkes Barra.
I've also seen Pennsylvania. But there's this manager who I
know we talked about before. But you got to see
this guy. He's the manager of the Zai department store
in December nineteen eighty three at least. And this guy
is like unhinged. Have you seen footage of him?
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah? I saw him last year.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Okay, you got to see him again. I gotta describe
again because I I he struck a chord with me
this year. They didn't last year. But he's 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 waving this baseball bat.
And there's this crowd of people filling every available inch
(25:11):
of this department store wanting cabbage patch kids, and this
guy decides that the way to satisfy the need is
to just start tossing them into the crowd. So the
crowd is like jostling, going crazy trying to catch these
cabbage patch kids while the manager of the department store
is screaming at them holding a baseball fat It's one
of the worst forms of crowd management anyone's ever attempted ever,
(25:36):
and it was caught on film and you got to
see it yourself.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Yeah, he was. He wasn't doing his best work that day.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
I really was agreed.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
A lot of times, the problems were so big that
they didn't even want people in the stores, so they
would say, like, we can't have another fistfight in here.
So what you do is you can arrive and get
a coupon and then you go round back to the
loading dock and we'll distribute them there. The secondary market
started booming. There were actual stores that were buying them.
(26:09):
Up and then marking them up, and then there was
the black market that really really marked them up. And
this was not WKRP in Cincinnati, but it was very
much in that rich tradition of DJ's kind of conning
people into acting like fools. And this happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
(26:30):
when some local DJs there said there's going to be
a B twenty six bomber plane and it's going to
drop two thousand dollars over the Brewers Baseball Stadium and
all you got to do is show up with your
baseball glove to catch these babies and hold up your
credit cards so the pilot can take a picture and
charge you for it. And of course this is the
(26:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, and negative seven degree wind chill, which is very cold.
If you're in the centigrade parts of the world, that's
very cold. They're used to it, I guess so. But
the 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
(27:18):
like that was that really did happen in Milwaukee in
nineteen eighty three. That was like the level the craze reached.
And what's really to cale Eco's credit is they managed
to keep the party going for a full another year
because in Christmas nineteen eighty four, Cabbage Patch Kids were
again the must have toy, and in just nineteen eighty
(27:39):
four alone, not nineteen eighty three Christmas season, in nineteen
eighty four. That year they sold two billion dollars worth
of Cabbage Patch Kids in nineteen eighty four money.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah, I mean, this was I think one of the
things that made it truly unique is like I said,
the Rubikskub was really hot for a few years. But generally,
as these things go, it's sort of like the you
can count on the one Christmas season. If you're overlapping
to the next Christmas season, that is a grand slam
home run as far as toys go.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Absolutely so. One of the one of the outcomes of
that of being a toy that managed manages to span
two Christmas seasons that at thoroughly as they become you know,
iconic and they start popping up in other places like
there was one named Christopher Xavier, who's a very famous
(28:31):
cabbage patch kid, I guess, as cabbage patch kids can
be famous. And he actually rode on the Space Shuttle
on a on a genuine, legit NASA Space Shuttle mission
in nineteen eighty five, and that reminds me, Chuck, have
you seen the mini doc about about the Challenger? No?
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Not yet. It's good.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Oh boy, it is really good. I mean it's a
it's a high, high caliber documentary to begin with, but
then like the the emotional that it manages to dredge
up is really it's a really well done documentary in
every every way. I highly recommend it. Where's that showing
that one's on Netflix? I believe almost positive and I
(29:13):
think it's just called Challenger and then probably colon something.
But it's good. It was it's by I think JJ
isn't bad Robot JJ Abrams production company. Yeah, they did it.
They were one of the companies that handled it. But
it was it's very good.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
I did watch, and Nola Holmes on your recommendation.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Yes, what'd you think?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
I liked it a lot. It was good. It was
just a good, breezy, light fun movie to watch, which
is just what we needed to tonight.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
We watched it for sure, and and but it was
smart too, wasn't it. Yeah? It was.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
It was smart enough. And she's just great Millie Bobby
Brown is. She's just she's got a lot of personality
and lovable charisma, so she's she's great to watch and
it's fun to see her outside of playing eleven with
all her person able to come out like that.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Right. Yeah, Well, I'm very glad that you liked it,
because I think we would have had some sort of
awkward wedge between us for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
As you know that you haven't seen the Octopus stock yet,
No I did. Oh okay, So I think if we're
going to talk about octopus, my octopus teacher, you should
just turn down your volume for about a minute and
you won't have it spoiled.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
All right, fair enough, fair enough? And actually I think
that guy is terrible. I think is a terrible human
being for not rescuing his companion friend for on two
different occasions. Really, yes, And I know that he's a documentarian,
so they're not supposed to interfere. I've seen drop dead gorgeous.
I know the rules, but this is different. He crossed
(30:45):
the line, he crossed boundaries when he became friends with
that octopus. He stopped being a documentary and started being
its 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 for that reason.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Oh interesting, Well I don't concur but I guess that's
part of the beauty of that movie. You can have different,
different takes.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
So but there's not a gulf between us a wedge
between us, now, is there?
Speaker 2 (31:12):
I mean, did you hate the documentary?
Speaker 1 (31:14):
No? I otherwise thought it was amazing, all right, Well,
then there's no amazing. It really was really was great,
except for that one thing time too. All right, no way,
So let's see back to Cabbage Patch Kids. There was
another kind of landmark they reached in nineteen ninety two
when they became I think maybe Christopher Xavier became the
(31:34):
official mascot of the US Olympic team and got to
go to Barcelona with them. Yeah, I mean, this is
pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
This is ten plus years after these things were the
hot ticket, you know, which is crazy, crazy time they
were on a postage stamp. Eventually, of course, though his
star will 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
(32:03):
know what happened. We know what happens in the end.
It never completely went away though, they you know Kaliko,
and then eventually was like, you know, we got to
offload these guys. We're going to sell it. We're in
the video game industry like big time, and so we got.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
A have you heard of pac Man?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Well, the video game industry starts tanking, so they're trying
to guess recoup some money on their investments. So they
sell the Cabbage Patch Kid license and then you know,
this is not before trying a few things they tried
like talking Cabbage Patch Kids and stuff like that, but
eventually they went bankrupt in the eighties and the license
(32:43):
moved on to different people over the years. Mattel Hasbro Toys,
r Us and then right now it's owned by play Along, Inc.
Which it just seems like those are seems like there's
a lot of toy companies named weird things like that.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Now agree, I agree, and I find it unsettling like
their slogan should be we're watching you.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
It just seems like we talk about those a lot.
Like there's still the giants like Hasbro and Mattel, but
I feel like when we've done our toy podcast, it
seems like the newer ones they don't have these sort
of name brands that you that you think of as toys.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
No. I know, they all sound like Russian fronts. It's
really weird and unsettling and kind of off putting.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
And all the c's are k's. It's really strange.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
It's very sinister. So yeah, along the along the lines,
like all of these companies were like, we've got to
figure out a way to capture lightning in a bottle
again a second time. That just doesn't happen. It's hard
enough the first time. And so they tried different things,
Like you said, Kalico tried that talking one didn't work.
I think Hasbro had one that swam, which is kind
(33:54):
of impressive, sure, and then Mattel had one that they
had to withdraw. It was all cabbage patch snack time kids,
and they these things would like eat like they came
with like French fries or something, and you'd put like
the French fry in their mouth and they'd start chewing
and the French fe would go down their throat and
actually come out the back of their head and fall
(34:15):
into their backpack, and then you could feed it to
them again, which is great and fine, but if you're
a little kid and you get your fingers in there
or 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.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Yeah, And these things also declined in quality. Think of
the mid nineties. Mattel shrunk them even more down to
fourteen inches and they were like, forget these cloth bodies
even we're gonna make the whole thing vinyl. And people
didn't like that at all. And it took I think
the twentieth anniversary in two thousand and three. It took
(34:52):
Toys r Us, who took over the rights at that point,
to jack these things back up to eighteen inches. They
had cloth bodies. I think they had an eighteen inch
and a twenty inch and then they finally brought back
those cloth bodies, which were a big deal, and they
debuted them at their flagship store in New York City,
(35:12):
and they sort of recaptured the magic a little bit.
And it's about this time and I think a year
later is when play Along licensed it. But it's about
this time that people started buying them again a little
bit for nostalgia, Like kids that grew up with them
were now buying them for their kids. And I think
you know, they sold Okay, it's nothing like they were
(35:34):
at first, but they're still around.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
No, yeah, and I play a long ink if that
is their real name. Was very wise to basically recreate
the original nineteen eighty three style cabbage patch kids, like
they're basically indistinguishable from the ones that the people who
are buying them now for their kids had when they
were kids. And it's like you said, it's all nostalgia
(35:58):
and they're doing pretty good trade on it with without
having to reinvent the wheel.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
That's right. A little quick stat before we take a
break that is remarkable. Over the past thirty two years,
there have been one hundred and thirty million of these
babies born, which would 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.
(36:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Okay, Chuck, I'm curious, why did you say true like that?
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Well, if you listen to the show a year ago,
it's already ruined. But we didn't go into that much depth.
Here's what really happened, though. Xavier Roberts ripped off a lady.
That's the easiest way to say it. There was a
very kind hearted, soft spoken folk artist named Martha Nelson
Thomas went to art school in the seventies. She experimented
(37:22):
with the same exact German soft sculpture molding, and she
created what was called little doll babies. If you google
Martha Nelson Thomas little Dolls, and you see this very
now famous picture when it hasn't been swept under the
rug by Xavier Roberts people and maybe Kaliko's people, This
black and white picture of this woman surrounded by what
(37:45):
are clearly and obviously cabbage patch kids.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yes, and there's actually funny enough. There's another famous picture
of Xavier Roberts, taken 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 the fact that
that picture was taken of Martha and Nels Nelson Thomas
in nineteen seventy five is photographic documentary evidence that she
(38:12):
is the person who came up with cabbage Patch Kids.
Not cabbage Patch kids, but what cabbage Patch Kids were
based on. And if that were it, if that were
the photo, if that was the only evidence whatsoever, you'd
be like, that's a I don't know. People can have
similar ideas. You know, there's only one you know, old
(38:33):
German technique called needle molding. Other people could have found it,
but that is not the only evidence. And in fact,
Xavier Roberts has gone on public record saying that he
was inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas, but he changed it enough.
But if you go and look at the actual story
in the facts along the way, and there's actually a
pretty good sixteen minute long vice documentary on this whole
(38:57):
thing 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.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, so he from what I could tell, and there's
a bunch of different sort of versions of this online.
But from what I saw is they actually did have
an agreement early on that he would sell these for her.
He said, hey, these are great. Can I take some
of these to my gift shops and sell them for you?
And I think I could sell a lot more than
you could, And for a little while they did have
(39:29):
an agreement, but as it turns out, he ended up
marking them up and charging too much money, and she
wasn't happy about that. She was like, no, they shouldn't
cost forty dollars. It's you know, it's nineteen seventy eight.
For God's sake, that's a doll And he's like, yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
There, well, you think this is Unicoy State Park.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
They're a handmade and you know, you should put a
value on your talents. And they had a disagreement about that,
and she said, you know what, forget it. I don't
want you to sell these anymore. He follows up with
a letter saying, well, you know what, if you don't
let me sell your dolls, he basically said, I'm just
going to start making my own and that's exactly what
(40:09):
he did.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Supposedly he wrote her a letter, and I don't remember
who mentions it in the Vice documentary, but basically they
said that in the letter he said, if I can't
sell your dolls, I will sell something just like them.
And she apparently was like whatever, just went her own way.
She was satisfied to have her dolls back and probably
thought she was done with the matter. And then supposedly
(40:30):
one of her friends said, hey, I saw your little
doll babies for sale at the Atlanta Airport. Way to go.
She said, I'm not selling these at the Atlanta Airport.
And apparently that's when she knew she had a big
problem on her hands and found out that Xavier Roberts
had come up with the little people dolls that were
just the spinning image of her little doll babies.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah, so she filed a lawsuit that went on for years.
I think by the time they were selling out in
stores in nineteen eighty three, she was about seven years
into this lawsuit. And for her, it wasn't She asked
for I think a million dollars, but she said it
wasn't about the money. She was like, I don't want
to see this as a commodity. And I don't want
(41:12):
to be ripped off, and I don't want this guy
to come along and basically not have the same respect
for these little dolls that I had. And if you
look at the court case, you think, you know, open
and shut. She's got this picture from seventy five. They
had a prior relationship. She's got this letter that says
where he basically says he's going to rip her off.
But she didn't copyright these things. And you would have
(41:35):
had to copyright because they were all handmade and they
were all I guess, unique into themselves. You would have
had to copyright and sign or stamp each doll, and
she didn't want to do that, and he had no
problem doing it. Ours little Chuck has an Xavier Robert's
hand signature on his butt if you pull down his
little corduroy shorts.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, it's one of the famous things about Cabbage Patch kids,
aside from their distinctive faces, is that each one of
them has Xavier Roberts signature stamped onto it's butt. And
I guess Martha Nelson Thomas was like, there's no place
to put a signature on a child, and these are
like children to me. That's why I adopt them out
rather than sell them. So I'm not going to sign this.
(42:15):
I'm not going to copyright them. And that basically so
you would think it would have sunk her case. And
after almost eight years, Exavier Roberts finally said, okay, fine,
let's settle this. I suspect it had to do with
he sold out at some point in the eighties he
sold his portion, and I would guess he probably needed
(42:38):
that court case to go away to finalize that sale,
and for whatever the reason, in nineteen eighty five he
was suddenly ready to settle, and they settled for an
undisclosed sum that apparently Martha Nelson Thomas was satisfied with.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah, And he also said, and hey, lady, you say
you can't copyright these things, you can sign it right
next to their little butthole.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Right. He sent a cockney there for a second cockney
Like I started to get nervous, like, oh my god,
why does he sound cockney? And then you pulled it
out with the real Appalachian Mountain folk twist at the
end there.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yeah, So he he settled as shit 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 this. You know, man came along and ripped off
this lady's design and then later on complained that he
was getting ripped off. He complained about knockoffs and said,
you know, my point is not not take my product
(43:32):
to my creation and tarnish it.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
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, and for him to be complaining about
this on TV, it was a little audacious, especially if
(43:54):
you know that you know the full story. But the
even though it was a open secret or even a
widely known tale in the toy industry and even some
parts of the press. Even still today, everybody thinks of
Xavier Roberts as the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids, and
technically he was because he came up with Cabbage Patch
(44:17):
Kids and Martha Nelson Thomas came up with Little doll Babies.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Yeah, and he sold it to well, he didn't come
up with cabbage Patch Kids. He sold it to pac Man,
and pac Man named him cabbage patch Kids.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah, I guess so, I hadn't thought about that. So
one of the groups he was complaining about was tops
trading cards, Tops trading cards around the still in the
height of the cabbage patch kid craze in nineteen eighty five,
came out with one of the greatest parodies anyone's ever
come out, with the beloved garbage pale Kids series.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah. I wasn't endo these. I was a little too old. Yeah, certainly,
I was fourteen. I certainly remember them in the zeitgeist,
and I knew it was a very big deal. But
this was probably more for kids, probably around your age.
I imagine you were probably into these.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Right, I loved garbage pail Kids. I believe that you
had a pretty impressive garbage pail kid collection herself. Oh
really yeah, and she actually, yeah, she actually bought me
a couple of garbage pail kids that I have somewhere.
I think one is squashed, Josh, I can't remember the
other one. But they are for people who don't know
what a garbage pail kid is. Go look up gp
(45:31):
K dot com and I think it's like g E
E p e e ka y dot com. I'm not sure,
but they have every single series scanned, so you can
see all fifteen series that came out between nineteen eighty
five and nineteen eighty eight, and they're just awesome. But
they're basically like if garbage If Cabbage Patch Kids were
(45:53):
meant to get us used to what mutant offspring of
nuclear war survivors would look like, Garbage Pail Kids were
the mutated version of that.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
Yeah, that's a good way to say it. They were.
They were deformed, and they were plagued and diseased, and
they had names like Adam Baum and Bony Tony and
I guess squashed Josh and yeah roomy Umie. I don't know. No,
they didn't have they didn't have names for everyone, but
(46:25):
it was it was a big deal. They sold a
ton of them, and Xavier Roberts was was not happy
with this, and I think ended up in the lawsuit
being successful and getting them just to change enough to
where it didn't look like it was officially tied to
the Cabbage Patch Kids.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
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 semi circle
banner they had that originally as Garbage Pail Kids. They
had to turn that into a straight bar. They made
them look less like lifelike and more like plastic dolls.
In the later series. There were a few changes, but
I mean, it was still pretty clear what the whole
(47:07):
thing was a riff off of. But one thing I
didn't realize is that one of the art directors who
helped conceptualize Garbage Pale Kids from the outset was Art Spiegelman,
who created Mouse.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Yeah, did you know that? I Mean, I've heard of
Art Spiegelman, but I really don't know anything about him,
So I didn't know that, But I know the name.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
I've not read Mouse, but I know it's like it's
like a like a just a legendary graphic novel about fascism.
But that guy helped create Garbage Pale Kids just a
couple of years before he created Mouse.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Amazing, and there was a bad TV show that eventually
only aired in Europe. That was a bad movie that
is pretty legendarily bad, but it was a big deal.
Though they sold a ton of them, they didn't quite
have the spinoff power of the cpks, but the gpks
did okay for themselves.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Yeah. I mean like that really goes to show you
just how big cabbage Patch Kids were that it could
sustain a cottage industry for a parody. Even that's how
big cabbage Patch Kids were in the yeah piece. So
hats off to cabbage Patch Kids. I can't wait to
talk about them again next year in another episode. It'll
be great, we'll figure it out. We'll spend twenty twenty
(48:23):
one figuring out how to do that, Chuck. And in
the meantime, everybody, since we're thinking about how to talk
about cabbage Patch Kids so more, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
That's right. Before we do listener mail, real quick, I
just want to give a shout out to the Budge family.
Not really going to get into what's going on with them,
but just want them to know that we're thinking about
them and sending them lots of love and support over
the internet airwaves. But this email is called oh I know,
(48:56):
I'm going to call it the beev this is about
beavers again. And it starts out as this is seriously
not a please read me on the air email, And
that's a pretty good way to get on the air.
By the way, thanks for the amazing show. Been a
listener since they were paltry twenty minutes. Love everyone, keep
me company while walking, driving, cleaning, cooking, and providing an
(49:18):
endless source of interesting topics for my English students in Spain.
I kind of think Chuck is my podcast soulmate, as
we grow up in much the same circumstances around the
same age. We have very similar cultural outlook on different things.
I do have a small difference of opinion, though your
Bigfoot podcast was great and I was happy to hear
you say the possibility exists. Did we say that?
Speaker 1 (49:41):
I guess yeah, I think we were. I don't know
if it was we so much as you.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, maybe so, But a while back you were just teasing.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
I think it was we.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
You were adamant that NeSSI does not exist, buddy show
NeSSI 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 Beav the beaver, So just get
online and google bev. It was this beaver that was found,
(50:15):
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 while life center or something.
But the long and short of it is Beav makes
dams in their house. So there are all these pretty
cute videos of Bev dragging stuff into this one specific
(50:35):
doorway that Beav is trying to dam up and like
dragging a shoe rack, pillows, tissue boxes, like anything Beef
can get a hold of in his little paws and teeth.
He'll drag over to this doorway and try and dam up.
And it's really one of the cutest, funniest things I've
ever seen.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
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 were 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.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
It is amazing. And that email, by the way, was
from Carrie Keeley.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Thanks Carrie, that was a great email. And yes, way
to get it on the air by saying it's not
meant to be on the air. 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 at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, it's my turn. Now it's Josh and for
this episode on our Stuff you Should Know twelve Days
of Christmas Toys playlist, we're talking about cabbage Patch Kids,
one of the all time top contenders for a must
have Christmas toy. I had one. His name was Weberdino.
He was very great. We had very fun times together,
(00:24):
important times at any rate, whether you had a cabbage
Patch kid or not. I think you're going to enjoy
this episode. So turn up your coco. There's some marshmallows
in there and enjoy this app.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, Josh, Malcolm Clark.
There's Charles Wayne Bryant. This is Stuff you should know
about cabbage Patch Kids who have two names, which is
why I just did that. That's right.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
This, uh, remarkably the third time we've talked about cabbage
Patch Kids on this show.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I only remember one other time. When was the When
was the third time or the second time?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I guess well, the last time was not even a
year ago, on our on our episode on Must Have
Christmas Gifts. And then that's all I remember yeah. And
then while I was telling the story of my Cabbage
Patch Kid experience, he said, yes, you've told everyone the
story before, so I think this will be the third
(01:42):
time that we hear these stories.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I thought you didn't have a Cabbage Patch kid.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
So you don't remember the other two times I told
the story.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
No, you got to tell it again. It's called the
It's called the hat trick. Baby.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Uh yeah. My sister has one of the first, like
seventy five of them, of the little people dolls oh wow,
that she bought in Okilja when she was a kid.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Now I know why it didn't stick with me because
I didn't understand what the heck you were talking about.
Now I totally get it, and I think it will
stay with me forever, Chuck. When we do our fourth, fifth,
and sixth podcasts on Cabbage Patch Kids, I will be
the one telling that story. How about that?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, and you also told the story of yours that
you rip the head off and gave it a mohawk.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah, for yours, weber Dino met a pretty a terrible demise.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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 even though if My
Sisters is worth a lot of money now, even though
it's hand signed and one of the first ones. I
just I don't think the market is robust as it
(03:01):
was at one point.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
So was hers a callco Little People or as Xavier
Roberts like original Appalachian artworks Little People?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
No, hers was one of the handmade Xavier Roberts og
Kraft fair dolls.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
I think those go for like one two, maybe up
two thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
I think, yeah, I 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 were asking like
one hundred and fifty bucks on eBay for those.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm surprised to see that, like
from what I've seen, Like, if you really want the
big bucks, it's the original Xavier Roberts Little People. But
we're probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit because
some people are probably like, what's the cabbage patch kid? Right?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Right?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
So well, we'll tell everybody what a Cabbage Patch kid
is It's a little doll that was a huge, huge
deal in the Christmas of nineteen eighty three, and like
Chuck said, we talked about this on I guess that
was our I think it was our Christmas episode or
was it a different standalone episode from last year?
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Now? I think the first time we did it was
a Christmas episode, and then last year it was in November.
It was just muscle Christmas toys.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Okay, gotcha, gotcha, So that's worth listening too. But in
December of nineteen eighty three, Christmas of nineteen eighty three,
everybody was going crazy for these dolls. But at the
same time, there was like because it was such a
huge craze and they were so a part of like
popular culture at the moment. They were on the news
every night. People were doing just absolutely crazy things to
(04:49):
get their hands on these dolls for their kids. There
was a lot of talk about, well, what are these things?
They're so ugly that they're cute, and other people thought, well, no,
they're actually just ugly. There was a journal article that
came out in nineteen eighty six and the Semantics Journal,
et cetera, and the Cabbage Patch kids were described as open,
(05:10):
arm denied, seemingly dull witted, with mop haired faces only
mothers could love, which I think is pretty pretty. It's
a pretty accurate description of a cabbage patch kid, don't
you think.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, so on that that was This is something I
never knew. Apparently there was a rumor years after the
fact that the design was managed by Ronald Reagan because
he wanted to get Americans used to what mutant offspring
might look like if we ever go to if the
(05:41):
big one ever drops and we go to war with
the Ruskies, we might want to get used to our
babies looking like this. So let's just it's sort of
in the classic Hollywood, like, you know, their theories that
that's why we make UFO movies. They're commissioned by the
government to get people sort of adjusted to the idea
that one day there's going to be aliens walking around.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Right exactly, 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,
and nuclear war with the USSR. That's about like the
greatest eighties combination I've ever heard of. In my life.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, pretty good.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
So if you go onto the Cabbage Patch Kid's website,
you'll find the enchanting, magical story of where cabbage patch
kids came from or how they came into our human world,
and it goes something like this that when he was
a young boy, Xavier Roberts was wandering around the Appalachian
(06:39):
mountains and he saw what is called a bunny bee,
which is a magical bee 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,
(07:03):
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.
An 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
(07:23):
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 Babyland General Hospital for the purpose
of adopting out cabbage patch kids. And that's where it
all came from.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
That's right, Babyland General, right here in Cleveland, Georgia. And
I just so happened to have driven by there but
two days ago. I went up, Oh yeah, yeah, we
went on a waterfall hike the family did on Sunday and.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Did you see a bunny bee?
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Didn't see a bunny bee? But we drove right by
Babyland General and Emily was like, did you know that
was there? I was like, yeah, I've been there, so
of course I know it was there. But that's where
Xavier Roberts went to college. He went to college at
True at McConnell there in Cleveland.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
So that was the 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 Xavier Roberts, while he was
at True at McConnell. While he was studying art there,
he came across a German fabric sculpture technique from the
nineteenth century called needle molding. And if you've ever seen,
(08:40):
you know, that really famous tomato pincushion Chuck in the seventies,
So you know how how like the top the creases
in the top of the tomato are made by like
like taut thread pulled through together to kind of create
that that molded look. That, from what I can tell,
is a form of needle molding. But somehow Xavier Roberts
(09:01):
was like, I really like sculpture, and this is a
form of soft sculpture. I also like quilting, and this
kind of has to do with quilting. I'm going to
get into this and I'm going to figure out how
to make baby dolls using this needle molding technique. And
he did just that starting in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, And for those of you that want to throw
your car into a ditch right now because you're screaming
about the story, yeah, because you know the true story,
just put a pin in it. We're going to get
around to it.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
That was very merciful of you. Chuck.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, I didn't want people to think that we didn't know.
But in nineteen seventy seven, Xavier Roberts, who sort of
looked like a sort of like a shorter haired Kenny
Rogers type, wore a cowboy hat and had this beard,
and he developed these They were, like you said, soft sculpture,
but they were dolls called little People. And here was
(09:55):
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.
It was. It was a brilliant idea that he had
put a bin in it, right, and he sold these things,
little people originals he had. He went to arts and
(10:18):
craft shows, he sold them. We bought ours at Unicoy
Lodge at Unicoy State Park in a gift shop there,
so that was the kind of place that would carry
this kind of stuff. There were about forty dollars, and
I remember distinctly that my father could not imagine paying
forty dollars for a doll and I think even I
(10:39):
think we even left without Little Chuck. And he went
back because he felt so bad about how Cresfall and
my sister was and bought the doll later on for
a Christmas gift or something, if my memory served me,
But it was a lot of money. Forty bucks was
a lot of money for a doll back then.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yeah, it was probably getting pretty close to one hundred bucks.
And I mean, who goes to Unicoy State Park's gift
shop and expects to drop one hundred bucks on a
piece of folk art that's really just a baby doll?
You know, I could kind of start as.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
He thought, he's gonna have to get a Michelle miniature
license plate for two fifty.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Sure, exactly. And when you go on with an expectation
like that and you are faced with one hundred dollars
soft sculpture 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 that, like you said,
that's exactly the kind of place you would have bought this.
(11:37):
You could have also found him at like craft Fares
or something. And in fact, Xavier Roberts one first place
at the Osceola Art Show in Kassimi, Florida for little
people that he named Dexter, which is one of the
most uncanny, haunting, horrid dolls you'll ever see in your life.
(11:58):
But it helped kind of generate some buzz and that
point he was like, you know what this is. Things
are kind of going well. People are paying forty bucks
for to adopt one of these little people. I'm winning
first place prizes. I'm gonna get together some friends and
he founded what's known as Original Appalachian Artworks and they
they are the ones that actually opened up baby Land General.
(12:19):
They took an old medical center in Cleveland, which is
super creepy 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. But it was ash. No,
no it didn't. I'm just saying, if you just look
(12:41):
at the words on paper, Oh you put it like that,
it does seem Yeah, 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 in operation today.
But people would show up and like there were like
the people who worked there were dressed up as nurses
and doctors, and they would help the babies be born
(13:02):
from cabbage from cabbages, then they would be incubated. They
were premies that were born. Like it was a big
deal operation to take this idea that you were adopting
a cabbage patch kid rather than buying a doll, and
then like adding that whole extra dimension to it of
going to Babyland general to do it really helped generate
(13:23):
a lot of buzz for these things.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, and I should say that my sister's doll, Chuck,
who was they come with their name. She didn't name
it after me, but Chuck had You know, if you
see the early versions of these things, like you said,
it was kind of horrific looking. They weren't the cutest
dolls at all. Chuck had a very crooked hairline, like
it looked like it was made by someone who didn't
fully know what they were doing. His little yarn hairline
(13:48):
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 got to pay
forty dollars for these things. But supposedly with the premies.
Xavier Roberts has given some credit to just raising awareness
for premature babies because the pre in Cabbage Patchland were
(14:12):
so cute. They also had c sections cabbage sections, and
by the time nineteen eighty rolls around, he's selling a
pretty good amount of these things. But it really explodes
in popular culture from sort of the early eighties. He
was featured on the TV show Real People, which I
watched a lot as a kid, made Newsweek, made the
(14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
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's
like a whole underground cult market that was developing around
these little people. And it became very apparent that Xavier
Roberts was not going to be able to keep up
(15:02):
with supply, so he started looking for some help and
he found it in nineteen eighty two. And we will
talk all about that partnership Made in Heaven starting after
these messages. Okay, Chuck, So it's nineteen eighty two, and
(15:39):
the little people are just going bonkers. They're flying off
of shelves. They can't keep them in stock anywhere. They're
selling them. Unicoy 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 got to
have them. And so Xavier Roberts started looking for some
like a legit toy manufacturer to help him out and
(16:00):
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 came
out with pac Man. So they were riding high by
this time, and they said, I think there's something to
these little people, and we're gonna we're gonna buy in here.
And so Xavier Roberts partnered with Kalico, and the rest
(16:23):
of the story just kind of takes off like a
rocket from there. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
So this was in nineteen eighty two, and at first
Kaliko said, you know what, we're going to keep calling
them little People. We think that's a good name, even
though it wasn't, so they stuck with the name. They
figured out the best way to mass produce these things
was to get rid of that hand done hands on head.
(16:47):
That was a real problem. That's what took the most time.
It's also, frankly, what gave those early dolls all the personality.
A lot of that was lost when they went to
the plastic heads, but they did keep the cloth bodies.
They machine produced these vinyl heads. They sized the doll
down a little bit to about sixteen inches. The initial
(17:08):
dolls were pretty big. They varied in size, obviously depending
on how old they were when you adopted them, but
they were large, like Chuck was a big doll, the
two I have here big dolls.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yeah, they were like the size where if they were
possessed by a demon and came alive, they could smother
you like you'd be in big trouble if they came
alive while you were asleep.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yes, big time. But sizing them down made a big
difference because then you could just box them up, get
more shelf space that way. Sure, and they were smart
early on too, to realize that kids wanted a lot
of variety. They wanted different ethnicities, they wanted different skin color,
different shapes. They wanted some with freckles, some with dimples, obviously,
(17:52):
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 Samesy's mass p is do all
that right. Every kid could have the same one. Every
kid wanted a different version.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, Because I mean that was the part of the
whole marketing that you were adopting your own individual kid,
your own cabbage patch kid who had his or her
own name, his or her own like specific birth date.
He or she was a unique little baby that you
were adopting. So the idea that you could take different
(18:27):
head molds and different facial features and different types of hair,
and you had like a few different from each category.
You suddenly had like millions of combinations that you could
randomly put together. It continued that uniqueness that was like
part of the brand from the beginning, and like you said,
was like part of like the big the big thing
that like made this craze so so huge. You know,
(18:48):
they were very smart 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 Kleco's part.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah, And it was also clever to change the name
Little People, Yeah, just didn't have legs, basically in the end,
and they thought cabbage Patch Kids, they were born in
the cabbage patch. It's and you know, looking back, it's
a pretty brilliant name because it ties into being adopted,
being born in the little cabbage patch, and it's it
(19:23):
was pretty brilliant. I think it was a kind of
name like that you could end up making into a
bunch of other things, which they did, and we're going
to talk about that, but I don't think little people
quite had the legs to do that.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
So Kalico also figured out that there was a really
good sweet spot that even if you couldn't really afford it,
you would still stretch to reach that point, and they
started adopting these. The adoption fees for Cabbage Patch Kids
came to about thirty dollars, which is seventy eight dollars
in today's money. And then they took their you know,
(19:59):
comparatively much larger clout and contacts in the media and
started getting way more press for Cabbage Patch Kids than
Xavier Roberts ever managed to generate for little People, which
I have to say, looking back, though, Xavier Roberts did
some really good work as just some dude from Cleveland,
(20:19):
Georgia who was hand sewing dolls. I mean he got
some pretty good coverage.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
It was a niche and regional.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Right exactly, and it wasn't it became a big deal,
but Kalico just put it to shame. They got a
lot of press, a lot of interest drummed up for
Cabbage Patch kids, and all of that kind of culminated
in a December twelfth to a nineteen eighty three edition
of Newsweek when there was a cabbage pet, a little
(20:50):
girl with her Cabbage Patch kid on the cover of
that edition, just in time for the Christmas buying season.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
That's right, because every kid in America was reading Newsweek
and saying, Mom, Dad, look, it's on the cover. We
have to get one.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yep. And that was at the very quaint time when
you would you would just start Christmas shopping two weeks
before Christmas rather than eight months before Christmas.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
So Clico and by the way, just to save listener mails,
Clico did not make back man, and we'll just want
to save you from that fate, because is it right, Yeah,
I think it was Namco if I remember correctly.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Oh man, I.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Mean they did do video games.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
But okay, well thanks for saving me.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
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 retrack the email. But that's okay.
So they started selling these things like hotcakes. They sold
three million plus by the end of nineteen eighty three,
and like so many Christmas items that came before and after,
(21:53):
it is sort of the frenzy is determined by availability
and supply, and they were underprepared and they could not
keep up with demand. They weren't like the Rubik's Cube,
where they just made, you know, millions and millions and
millions of these things, and it became a supply problem
and it became a really big deal. And this is
(22:14):
this is the first toy where people were angry because
there weren't enough of them to go around.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Yeah, and I mean they still made three million of
them and they ran out like very quickly. And when
you say people were angry, like they were throwing elbows,
they were pushing one another, 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.
(22:40):
People hadn't done that up to this point. This is
very new and so in addition to you know, the
normal press they were getting, these dolls were also ending
up on like the Nightly News a lot that December
with stories about how parents were like driving across state
lines to get one of those Cabbage Patch Kids. Or
(23:00):
there was a story about a post carrier in Kansas
City I think who flew to London to buy one,
which I don't understand why, because London had its own
frenzy going on as well. There was a whole lot
of stuff going down that hadn't really gone down before
Cabbage Patch Kids came along that Christmas.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, I wonder if that became a technique to sell
more things, was to either falsely kind of falsely say
that you don't have enough.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
I think we covered that and the Must Have Toys
episode that that is a technique that they use that
they purposefully underproduce to create scarcity.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Yeah, but then you can't sell as many. I would
think it'd be better to produce the regular amount and
then just say you didn't and then they're like, but
we found a warehouse that we didn't know about, right exactly,
because you still want to move these dolls. I mean
Rubik's Cube. They sold two hundred million rubbs cubes in
the years. I know that's nuts because they were just
pumping those things out.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah. Well, at the very least, I think Calico was
genuinely caught under prepared. I don't think it was in
any way, shape or form a purposeful scarcity. I think
it was just straight up scarcity. And there was there was.
There's this footage from Zale's Department No, sorry, Zayer Department store, Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. Right,
(24:28):
this is in wilkes wilkes Bury, Pennsylvania or Wilkes Barra.
I've also seen Pennsylvania. But there's this manager who I
know we talked about before. But you got to see
this guy. He's the manager of the Zai department store
in December nineteen eighty three at least. And this guy
is like unhinged. Have you seen footage of him?
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah? I saw him last year.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Okay, you got to see him again. I gotta describe
again because I I he struck a chord with me
this year. They didn't last year. But he's 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 waving this baseball bat.
And there's this crowd of people filling every available inch
(25:11):
of this department store wanting cabbage patch kids, and this
guy decides that the way to satisfy the need is
to just start tossing them into the crowd. So the
crowd is like jostling, going crazy trying to catch these
cabbage patch kids while the manager of the department store
is screaming at them holding a baseball fat It's one
of the worst forms of crowd management anyone's ever attempted ever,
(25:36):
and it was caught on film and you got to
see it yourself.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Yeah, he was. He wasn't doing his best work that day.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
I really was agreed.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
A lot of times, the problems were so big that
they didn't even want people in the stores, so they
would say, like, we can't have another fistfight in here.
So what you do is you can arrive and get
a coupon and then you go round back to the
loading dock and we'll distribute them there. The secondary market
started booming. There were actual stores that were buying them.
(26:09):
Up and then marking them up, and then there was
the black market that really really marked them up. And
this was not WKRP in Cincinnati, but it was very
much in that rich tradition of DJ's kind of conning
people into acting like fools. And this happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
(26:30):
when some local DJs there said there's going to be
a B twenty six bomber plane and it's going to
drop two thousand dollars over the Brewers Baseball Stadium and
all you got to do is show up with your
baseball glove to catch these babies and hold up your
credit cards so the pilot can take a picture and
charge you for it. And of course this is the
(26:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, and negative seven degree wind chill, which is very cold.
If you're in the centigrade parts of the world, that's
very cold. They're used to it, I guess so. But
the 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
(27:18):
like that was that really did happen in Milwaukee in
nineteen eighty three. That was like the level the craze reached.
And what's really to cale Eco's credit is they managed
to keep the party going for a full another year
because in Christmas nineteen eighty four, Cabbage Patch Kids were
again the must have toy, and in just nineteen eighty
(27:39):
four alone, not nineteen eighty three Christmas season, in nineteen
eighty four. That year they sold two billion dollars worth
of Cabbage Patch Kids in nineteen eighty four money.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah, I mean, this was I think one of the
things that made it truly unique is like I said,
the Rubikskub was really hot for a few years. But generally,
as these things go, it's sort of like the you
can count on the one Christmas season. If you're overlapping
to the next Christmas season, that is a grand slam
home run as far as toys go.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Absolutely so. One of the one of the outcomes of
that of being a toy that managed manages to span
two Christmas seasons that at thoroughly as they become you know,
iconic and they start popping up in other places like
there was one named Christopher Xavier, who's a very famous
(28:31):
cabbage patch kid, I guess, as cabbage patch kids can
be famous. And he actually rode on the Space Shuttle
on a on a genuine, legit NASA Space Shuttle mission
in nineteen eighty five, and that reminds me, Chuck, have
you seen the mini doc about about the Challenger? No?
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Not yet. It's good.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Oh boy, it is really good. I mean it's a
it's a high, high caliber documentary to begin with, but
then like the the emotional that it manages to dredge
up is really it's a really well done documentary in
every every way. I highly recommend it. Where's that showing
that one's on Netflix? I believe almost positive and I
(29:13):
think it's just called Challenger and then probably colon something.
But it's good. It was it's by I think JJ
isn't bad Robot JJ Abrams production company. Yeah, they did it.
They were one of the companies that handled it. But
it was it's very good.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
I did watch, and Nola Holmes on your recommendation.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Yes, what'd you think?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
I liked it a lot. It was good. It was
just a good, breezy, light fun movie to watch, which
is just what we needed to tonight.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
We watched it for sure, and and but it was
smart too, wasn't it. Yeah? It was.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
It was smart enough. And she's just great Millie Bobby
Brown is. She's just she's got a lot of personality
and lovable charisma, so she's she's great to watch and
it's fun to see her outside of playing eleven with
all her person able to come out like that.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Right. Yeah, Well, I'm very glad that you liked it,
because I think we would have had some sort of
awkward wedge between us for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
As you know that you haven't seen the Octopus stock yet,
No I did. Oh okay, So I think if we're
going to talk about octopus, my octopus teacher, you should
just turn down your volume for about a minute and
you won't have it spoiled.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
All right, fair enough, fair enough? And actually I think
that guy is terrible. I think is a terrible human
being for not rescuing his companion friend for on two
different occasions. Really, yes, And I know that he's a documentarian,
so they're not supposed to interfere. I've seen drop dead gorgeous.
I know the rules, but this is different. He crossed
(30:45):
the line, he crossed boundaries when he became friends with
that octopus. He stopped being a documentary and started being
its 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 for that reason.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Oh interesting, Well I don't concur but I guess that's
part of the beauty of that movie. You can have different,
different takes.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
So but there's not a gulf between us a wedge
between us, now, is there?
Speaker 2 (31:12):
I mean, did you hate the documentary?
Speaker 1 (31:14):
No? I otherwise thought it was amazing, all right, Well,
then there's no amazing. It really was really was great,
except for that one thing time too. All right, no way,
So let's see back to Cabbage Patch Kids. There was
another kind of landmark they reached in nineteen ninety two
when they became I think maybe Christopher Xavier became the
(31:34):
official mascot of the US Olympic team and got to
go to Barcelona with them. Yeah, I mean, this is
pretty impressive.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
This is ten plus years after these things were the
hot ticket, you know, which is crazy, crazy time they
were on a postage stamp. Eventually, of course, though his
star will 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
(32:03):
know what happened. We know what happens in the end.
It never completely went away though, they you know Kaliko,
and then eventually was like, you know, we got to
offload these guys. We're going to sell it. We're in
the video game industry like big time, and so we got.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
A have you heard of pac Man?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Well, the video game industry starts tanking, so they're trying
to guess recoup some money on their investments. So they
sell the Cabbage Patch Kid license and then you know,
this is not before trying a few things they tried
like talking Cabbage Patch Kids and stuff like that, but
eventually they went bankrupt in the eighties and the license
(32:43):
moved on to different people over the years. Mattel Hasbro Toys,
r Us and then right now it's owned by play Along, Inc.
Which it just seems like those are seems like there's
a lot of toy companies named weird things like that.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Now agree, I agree, and I find it unsettling like
their slogan should be we're watching you.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
It just seems like we talk about those a lot.
Like there's still the giants like Hasbro and Mattel, but
I feel like when we've done our toy podcast, it
seems like the newer ones they don't have these sort
of name brands that you that you think of as toys.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
No. I know, they all sound like Russian fronts. It's
really weird and unsettling and kind of off putting.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
And all the c's are k's. It's really strange.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
It's very sinister. So yeah, along the along the lines,
like all of these companies were like, we've got to
figure out a way to capture lightning in a bottle
again a second time. That just doesn't happen. It's hard
enough the first time. And so they tried different things,
Like you said, Kalico tried that talking one didn't work.
I think Hasbro had one that swam, which is kind
(33:54):
of impressive, sure, and then Mattel had one that they
had to withdraw. It was all cabbage patch snack time kids,
and they these things would like eat like they came
with like French fries or something, and you'd put like
the French fry in their mouth and they'd start chewing
and the French fe would go down their throat and
actually come out the back of their head and fall
(34:15):
into their backpack, and then you could feed it to
them again, which is great and fine, but if you're
a little kid and you get your fingers in there
or 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.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Yeah, And these things also declined in quality. Think of
the mid nineties. Mattel shrunk them even more down to
fourteen inches and they were like, forget these cloth bodies
even we're gonna make the whole thing vinyl. And people
didn't like that at all. And it took I think
the twentieth anniversary in two thousand and three. It took
(34:52):
Toys r Us, who took over the rights at that point,
to jack these things back up to eighteen inches. They
had cloth bodies. I think they had an eighteen inch
and a twenty inch and then they finally brought back
those cloth bodies, which were a big deal, and they
debuted them at their flagship store in New York City,
(35:12):
and they sort of recaptured the magic a little bit.
And it's about this time and I think a year
later is when play Along licensed it. But it's about
this time that people started buying them again a little
bit for nostalgia, Like kids that grew up with them
were now buying them for their kids. And I think
you know, they sold Okay, it's nothing like they were
(35:34):
at first, but they're still around.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
No, yeah, and I play a long ink if that
is their real name. Was very wise to basically recreate
the original nineteen eighty three style cabbage patch kids, like
they're basically indistinguishable from the ones that the people who
are buying them now for their kids had when they
were kids. And it's like you said, it's all nostalgia
(35:58):
and they're doing pretty good trade on it with without
having to reinvent the wheel.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
That's right. A little quick stat before we take a
break that is remarkable. Over the past thirty two years,
there have been one hundred and thirty million of these
babies born, which would 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.
(36:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Okay, Chuck, I'm curious, why did you say true like that?
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Well, if you listen to the show a year ago,
it's already ruined. But we didn't go into that much depth.
Here's what really happened, though. Xavier Roberts ripped off a lady.
That's the easiest way to say it. There was a
very kind hearted, soft spoken folk artist named Martha Nelson
Thomas went to art school in the seventies. She experimented
(37:22):
with the same exact German soft sculpture molding, and she
created what was called little doll babies. If you google
Martha Nelson Thomas little Dolls, and you see this very
now famous picture when it hasn't been swept under the
rug by Xavier Roberts people and maybe Kaliko's people, This
black and white picture of this woman surrounded by what
(37:45):
are clearly and obviously cabbage patch kids.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yes, and there's actually funny enough. There's another famous picture
of Xavier Roberts, taken 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 the fact that
that picture was taken of Martha and Nels Nelson Thomas
in nineteen seventy five is photographic documentary evidence that she
(38:12):
is the person who came up with cabbage Patch Kids.
Not cabbage Patch kids, but what cabbage Patch Kids were
based on. And if that were it, if that were
the photo, if that was the only evidence whatsoever, you'd
be like, that's a I don't know. People can have
similar ideas. You know, there's only one you know, old
(38:33):
German technique called needle molding. Other people could have found it,
but that is not the only evidence. And in fact,
Xavier Roberts has gone on public record saying that he
was inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas, but he changed it enough.
But if you go and look at the actual story
in the facts along the way, and there's actually a
pretty good sixteen minute long vice documentary on this whole
(38:57):
thing 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.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, so he from what I could tell, and there's
a bunch of different sort of versions of this online.
But from what I saw is they actually did have
an agreement early on that he would sell these for her.
He said, hey, these are great. Can I take some
of these to my gift shops and sell them for you?
And I think I could sell a lot more than
you could, And for a little while they did have
(39:29):
an agreement, but as it turns out, he ended up
marking them up and charging too much money, and she
wasn't happy about that. She was like, no, they shouldn't
cost forty dollars. It's you know, it's nineteen seventy eight.
For God's sake, that's a doll And he's like, yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
There, well, you think this is Unicoy State Park.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
They're a handmade and you know, you should put a
value on your talents. And they had a disagreement about that,
and she said, you know what, forget it. I don't
want you to sell these anymore. He follows up with
a letter saying, well, you know what, if you don't
let me sell your dolls, he basically said, I'm just
going to start making my own and that's exactly what
(40:09):
he did.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Supposedly he wrote her a letter, and I don't remember
who mentions it in the Vice documentary, but basically they
said that in the letter he said, if I can't
sell your dolls, I will sell something just like them.
And she apparently was like whatever, just went her own way.
She was satisfied to have her dolls back and probably
thought she was done with the matter. And then supposedly
(40:30):
one of her friends said, hey, I saw your little
doll babies for sale at the Atlanta Airport. Way to go.
She said, I'm not selling these at the Atlanta Airport.
And apparently that's when she knew she had a big
problem on her hands and found out that Xavier Roberts
had come up with the little people dolls that were
just the spinning image of her little doll babies.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah, so she filed a lawsuit that went on for years.
I think by the time they were selling out in
stores in nineteen eighty three, she was about seven years
into this lawsuit. And for her, it wasn't She asked
for I think a million dollars, but she said it
wasn't about the money. She was like, I don't want
to see this as a commodity. And I don't want
(41:12):
to be ripped off, and I don't want this guy
to come along and basically not have the same respect
for these little dolls that I had. And if you
look at the court case, you think, you know, open
and shut. She's got this picture from seventy five. They
had a prior relationship. She's got this letter that says
where he basically says he's going to rip her off.
But she didn't copyright these things. And you would have
(41:35):
had to copyright because they were all handmade and they
were all I guess, unique into themselves. You would have
had to copyright and sign or stamp each doll, and
she didn't want to do that, and he had no
problem doing it. Ours little Chuck has an Xavier Robert's
hand signature on his butt if you pull down his
little corduroy shorts.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, it's one of the famous things about Cabbage Patch kids,
aside from their distinctive faces, is that each one of
them has Xavier Roberts signature stamped onto it's butt. And
I guess Martha Nelson Thomas was like, there's no place
to put a signature on a child, and these are
like children to me. That's why I adopt them out
rather than sell them. So I'm not going to sign this.
(42:15):
I'm not going to copyright them. And that basically so
you would think it would have sunk her case. And
after almost eight years, Exavier Roberts finally said, okay, fine,
let's settle this. I suspect it had to do with
he sold out at some point in the eighties he
sold his portion, and I would guess he probably needed
(42:38):
that court case to go away to finalize that sale,
and for whatever the reason, in nineteen eighty five he
was suddenly ready to settle, and they settled for an
undisclosed sum that apparently Martha Nelson Thomas was satisfied with.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah, And he also said, and hey, lady, you say
you can't copyright these things, you can sign it right
next to their little butthole.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Right. He sent a cockney there for a second cockney
Like I started to get nervous, like, oh my god,
why does he sound cockney? And then you pulled it
out with the real Appalachian Mountain folk twist at the
end there.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yeah, So he he settled as shit 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 this. You know, man came along and ripped off
this lady's design and then later on complained that he
was getting ripped off. He complained about knockoffs and said,
you know, my point is not not take my product
(43:32):
to my creation and tarnish it.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
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, and for him to be complaining about
this on TV, it was a little audacious, especially if
(43:54):
you know that you know the full story. But the
even though it was a open secret or even a
widely known tale in the toy industry and even some
parts of the press. Even still today, everybody thinks of
Xavier Roberts as the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids, and
technically he was because he came up with Cabbage Patch
(44:17):
Kids and Martha Nelson Thomas came up with Little doll Babies.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Yeah, and he sold it to well, he didn't come
up with cabbage Patch Kids. He sold it to pac Man,
and pac Man named him cabbage patch Kids.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah, I guess so, I hadn't thought about that. So
one of the groups he was complaining about was tops
trading cards, Tops trading cards around the still in the
height of the cabbage patch kid craze in nineteen eighty five,
came out with one of the greatest parodies anyone's ever
come out, with the beloved garbage pale Kids series.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah. I wasn't endo these. I was a little too old. Yeah, certainly,
I was fourteen. I certainly remember them in the zeitgeist,
and I knew it was a very big deal. But
this was probably more for kids, probably around your age.
I imagine you were probably into these.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Right, I loved garbage pail Kids. I believe that you
had a pretty impressive garbage pail kid collection herself. Oh
really yeah, and she actually, yeah, she actually bought me
a couple of garbage pail kids that I have somewhere.
I think one is squashed, Josh, I can't remember the
other one. But they are for people who don't know
what a garbage pail kid is. Go look up gp
(45:31):
K dot com and I think it's like g E
E p e e ka y dot com. I'm not sure,
but they have every single series scanned, so you can
see all fifteen series that came out between nineteen eighty
five and nineteen eighty eight, and they're just awesome. But
they're basically like if garbage If Cabbage Patch Kids were
(45:53):
meant to get us used to what mutant offspring of
nuclear war survivors would look like, Garbage Pail Kids were
the mutated version of that.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
Yeah, that's a good way to say it. They were.
They were deformed, and they were plagued and diseased, and
they had names like Adam Baum and Bony Tony and
I guess squashed Josh and yeah roomy Umie. I don't know. No,
they didn't have they didn't have names for everyone, but
(46:25):
it was it was a big deal. They sold a
ton of them, and Xavier Roberts was was not happy
with this, and I think ended up in the lawsuit
being successful and getting them just to change enough to
where it didn't look like it was officially tied to
the Cabbage Patch Kids.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
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 semi circle
banner they had that originally as Garbage Pail Kids. They
had to turn that into a straight bar. They made
them look less like lifelike and more like plastic dolls.
In the later series. There were a few changes, but
I mean, it was still pretty clear what the whole
(47:07):
thing was a riff off of. But one thing I
didn't realize is that one of the art directors who
helped conceptualize Garbage Pale Kids from the outset was Art Spiegelman,
who created Mouse.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Yeah, did you know that? I Mean, I've heard of
Art Spiegelman, but I really don't know anything about him,
So I didn't know that, But I know the name.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
I've not read Mouse, but I know it's like it's
like a like a just a legendary graphic novel about fascism.
But that guy helped create Garbage Pale Kids just a
couple of years before he created Mouse.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Amazing, and there was a bad TV show that eventually
only aired in Europe. That was a bad movie that
is pretty legendarily bad, but it was a big deal.
Though they sold a ton of them, they didn't quite
have the spinoff power of the cpks, but the gpks
did okay for themselves.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Yeah. I mean like that really goes to show you
just how big cabbage Patch Kids were that it could
sustain a cottage industry for a parody. Even that's how
big cabbage Patch Kids were in the yeah piece. So
hats off to cabbage Patch Kids. I can't wait to
talk about them again next year in another episode. It'll
be great, we'll figure it out. We'll spend twenty twenty
(48:23):
one figuring out how to do that, Chuck. And in
the meantime, everybody, since we're thinking about how to talk
about cabbage Patch Kids so more, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
That's right. Before we do listener mail, real quick, I
just want to give a shout out to the Budge family.
Not really going to get into what's going on with them,
but just want them to know that we're thinking about
them and sending them lots of love and support over
the internet airwaves. But this email is called oh I know,
(48:56):
I'm going to call it the beev this is about
beavers again. And it starts out as this is seriously
not a please read me on the air email, And
that's a pretty good way to get on the air.
By the way, thanks for the amazing show. Been a
listener since they were paltry twenty minutes. Love everyone, keep
me company while walking, driving, cleaning, cooking, and providing an
(49:18):
endless source of interesting topics for my English students in Spain.
I kind of think Chuck is my podcast soulmate, as
we grow up in much the same circumstances around the
same age. We have very similar cultural outlook on different things.
I do have a small difference of opinion, though your
Bigfoot podcast was great and I was happy to hear
you say the possibility exists. Did we say that?
Speaker 1 (49:41):
I guess yeah, I think we were. I don't know
if it was we so much as you.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, maybe so, But a while back you were just teasing.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
I think it was we.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
You were adamant that NeSSI does not exist, buddy show
NeSSI 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 Beav the beaver, So just get
online and google bev. It was this beaver that was found,
(50:15):
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 while life center or something.
But the long and short of it is Beav makes
dams in their house. So there are all these pretty
cute videos of Bev dragging stuff into this one specific
(50:35):
doorway that Beav is trying to dam up and like
dragging a shoe rack, pillows, tissue boxes, like anything Beef
can get a hold of in his little paws and teeth.
He'll drag over to this doorway and try and dam up.
And it's really one of the cutest, funniest things I've
ever seen.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
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 were 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.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
It is amazing. And that email, by the way, was
from Carrie Keeley.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Thanks Carrie, that was a great email. And yes, way
to get it on the air by saying it's not
meant to be on the air. 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 at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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