Stuff You Should Know - Cabbage Patch Kids: Must-Have Toy of the Century

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Surprisingly, Cabbage Patch Kids have turned up on SYSK almost as much as the Nazis or Seinfeld. It’s finally time to dive all the way into CPKs, from their controversial origins to the Christmas craze of ‘83 to their alter egos, Garbage Pail Kids. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Malcolm Clark. There's Charles Wayne Bryant.

This is Stuff You Should Know about Cabbage Patch Kids who have two names, which is why I just did that. That's right, this remarkably the third time we've talked about Cabbage Patch Kids on this show. I only remember one other time. When was the third time, or the second time, I guess? Well, the last time was not even a year ago on our episode on Must Have Christmas Gifts.

And then- Yeah, that's all I remember. Yeah, and then while I was telling the story of my Cabbage Patch Kid experience, he said, yes, you've told everyone this story before. So I think this will be the third time that we hear these stories. I thought you didn't have a Cabbage Patch Kid.

So you don't remember the other two times I told the story? No, you gotta tell it again. Let's call the hat trick, baby. Yeah, my sister has one of the first, like 75 of them, of the Little People Dolls. Oh, wow. That she bought in New York, Georgia when she was a kid. Now I know why it didn't stick with me

because I didn't understand what the heck you were talking about. Now I totally get it, and I think it will stay with me forever, Chuck. When we do our fourth, fifth, and sixth podcasts on Cabbage Patch Kids, I will be the one telling that story. How about that?

Well, and you also told the story of yours that you ripped the head off and gave it a mohawk. Yeah, Weber Dino met a pretty terrible demise. And I have two of them myself that my mom every once in a while says, hey, do you want these? And I say, no, I don't. Don't think they're worth much money.

And I don't know even though if my sister's 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 was at one point. So was hers a calico Little People or as Xavier Roberts, like original Appalachian artworks, Little People?

No, hers was one of the handmade Xavier Roberts and Craft Fair dolls. I think those go for like one, two, maybe $2,000, I think. Yeah, I guess it depends on where you look. Like I saw the one of mine that was one of those originals and it wasn't one of the first 100, but people were asking like 150 bucks on eBay for those. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm surprised to see that. Like from what I've seen it, 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 a cabbage patch kid? Right?

Right. 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 1983. And like Chuck said, we talked about this on, I guess it was our, I think it was our Christmas episode. Or was it a different standalone episode from last year?

Now, I think the first time we did it was a Christmas episode and then last year it was in November, it was just must have Christmas toys. Okay, gotcha, gotcha. So that's worth listening to, but in December of 1983, Christmas of 1983, 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 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.

Now, other people thought, well, no, they're actually just ugly. There is a journal article that came out in 1986 in the Semantics Journal, et cetera. And the cabbage patch kids were described as open-armed and eyed, seemingly dull-witted with mop-haired faces only mothers could love, which I think is pretty,

it's a pretty accurate description of a cabbage patch kid, don't you think? Yeah, so on that, 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 to offspring might look like. If we ever go to, if the big one ever drops

and we go to war with the Ruskies, we might wanna get used to our babies looking like this. So let's just, it's sort of in the classic Hollywood, like 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 gonna be aliens walking around. 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 80s thing. Cabbage Patch Kids, Ronald Reagan and Nuclear War with the USSR, that's about like the greatest 80s combination I've ever heard of in my life. Yeah, pretty good. So if you go on to the Cabbage Patch Kids 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 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. And when he came out of the other side of the tunnel, he was clearly in some sort of enchanted land

because there were a bunch of bunny bees flying around over a Cabbage Patch, sprinkling some sort of magical dust. And Xavier noticed that when the dust hit the cabbage, the cabbage would start to move and a little baby would be born from it, a Cabbage Patch Kid. And one of those kids, a kid named Otis Lee, came up to Xavier and said,

hey, will you take me and all of my friends over to human world and help us find homes? And so Xavier Roberts agreed and he founded Babyland General Hospital for the purpose of adopting out Cabbage Patch Kids and that's where it all came from. 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 did you see a bunny bee? Well, 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 knew it was there but that's where Xavier Roberts went to college. He went to college at Truett McConnell there in Cleveland. So that was the connection. Right, right. Yeah, if you want to kind of take it down a notch as far as magical enchantment goes,

the official story is that Xavier Roberts while he was at Truett McConnell, while he was studying art there, he came across a German fabric sculpture technique from the 19th century called needle molding. And if you've ever seen, you know that really famous tomato pincushion chuck from the 70s?

So you know how like the top, the creases in the top of the tomato are made by like taut thread pulled through together to kind of create that molded look. That from what I can tell is a form of needle molding. But somehow Xavier Roberts 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 we're going to figure out how to make baby dolls using this needle molding technique. And he did just that starting in 1977. Yeah, and for those of you that want to throw your car into a ditch right now because you're screaming

about the story because you know the true story, just put a pin in it, we're going to get around to it. That was very merciful of you Chuck. Yeah, I didn't want people to think that we didn't know. But in 1977, Xavier Roberts who sort of looked like sort of like a shorter haired Kenny Rogers type where a cowboy had and had this beard and he developed these, like you said, soft sculpture

but they were dolls called little people. And here was the 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 a brilliant idea that he had put a pin in it. Right, and he sold these things, little people originals he had,

he went to arts and 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 $40 and I remembered distinctly that my father could not imagine paying $40 for a doll. And I think we even left without little Chuck

and he went back because he felt so bad about how crestfallen my sister was and bought the doll later on for a Christmas gift or something, if my memory serves me. But it was a lot of money, $40 was a lot of money for a doll back then. Yeah, it was probably getting pretty close to a hundred bucks. And I mean, who goes to Unicoy State Park's gift shop

and expects to drop a hundred bucks on a piece of folk art that's really just a baby doll, you know? I could kind of see it in his. He thought he's gonna have to get a Michelle miniature license plate for $250. Sure, exactly. And when you go on with an expectation like that and you're faced with a $100 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. You could have also found them at like craft fairs

or something. And in fact, Xavier Roberts won first place at the Osceola Art Show in Kissimmee, 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. But it helped kind of generate some buzz. And at that point he was like, you know what?

This is, things are kind of going well. People are paying 40 bucks 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 are the ones that actually opened up Babyland General.

They took an old medical center in Cleveland, which is super creepy that 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. It didn't look creepy though. No, no, it didn't. I'm just saying, if you just look at the words on paper

and you put it like that, it does seem really creepy. But no, it was like a little house. 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 work there were dressed up

as nurses and doctors. And they would help the babies be born from cabbages. Cabbages, then they would be incubated. There were preemies that were born. Like it was a big deal operation to take this idea of 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 a lot of buzz for these things. 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 was like a good three inches higher on one side of his forehead than the other, which again, my dad did not see the charm in this. He was like, it's not even made well.

And I got to pay $40 for these things. But supposedly with the preemies, Xavier Roberts has given some credit to just raising awareness for premature babies because the preemies in Cabbage Patch Land were so cute. They also had C sections, cabbage sections. And by the time 1980 rolls around, he's selling a pretty good amount of these things,

but it really explodes in popular culture from sort of the early 80s. He was featured on the TV show Real People, which I watched a lot as a kid, made Newsweek, made the Wall Street Journal. And so the press is starting to kind of come around and these things are just getting more and more popular at this point.

Yeah, a lot of those stories just kind of focused on people who were paying a lot more than the original retail price to start collecting these dolls. So there was like a whole underground cult market that was developing around these little people. And it became very apparent that Xavier Roberts was not going to be able to keep up with supply.

So he started looking for some help. And he found it in 1982. And we will talk all about that partnership made in heaven starting after these messages. O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O Okay Chuck, so it's 1982 and 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. Unicoys State Park is on the phone every day being like, send us more, send us more. We don't care what the hairline looks like, we gotta have them. And so Xavier Roberts started looking for some, like a legit toy manufacturer to help him out. And he found it in Calico,

who had made a name, I guess around the same time as maybe a little bit before this, a 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 buy in here.

And so Xavier Roberts partnered with Calico and the rest of the story just kind of takes off like a rocket from there. Yeah, so this was in 1982. And at first Calico said, you know what, we're gonna 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, hand-sewn head. 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 16 inches. The initial 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 are big dolls.

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. 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. 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 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 produced doll that every kid could have the same one. Every kid wanted a different version. Yeah, because that was 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 specific birth date. He or she was a unique little baby that you were adopting. So the idea that you could take different head molds and different facial features and different types of hair and you had a few different from each category, you suddenly had millions of combinations that you could randomly put together. It continued that uniqueness.

That was part of the brand from the beginning. And like you said, it was part of the big thing that made this craze so huge, you know? 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 Coleco's part.

Yeah, and it was also clever to change the name. Little people just didn't have legs, basically, in the end. And they thought cabbage patch kids, they were born in the cabbage patch, it's, 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 was pretty brilliant, I think. It was the kind of name like that you could end up making into a bunch of other things which they did and we're gonna talk about that. But I don't think little people quite had the legs to do that. So Coleco 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 $30, which is $78 in today's money. And then they took their comparatively much larger clout in context 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, Georgia who was hand-sewing dolls. I mean, he got some pretty good coverage. But it was a nothing compared to- That should have been very niche and regional.

Right, exactly, and it wasn't, it became a big deal. But Coleco 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 12th, 1983 edition of Newsweek when there was a little girl with her cabbage patch kid on the cover of that edition

just in time for the Christmas buying season. That's right, because every kid in America was reading Newsweek and saying, Mom, Dad, look, it's on the cover. We have to get one. Yep, and that was at the very quaint time when you would just start Christmas shopping two weeks before Christmas

rather than eight months before Christmas. So Coleco, and by the way, just to save listener mails, Coleco did not make Pac-Man. And we just want to save you from that fate. Is that right? Yeah, I think it was Namco, if I remember correctly. Oh, man. I mean, they did do video games, but...

Okay, well, thanks for saving me. No, no, no, there'll be plenty of people that probably sent the email before I even got to this and that want to retract the email, but that's okay. So they started selling these things like hotcakes. They sold 3 million plus by the end of 1983. And like so many Christmas items that came before and after, 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 millions and millions and millions of these things. And it became a supply problem and it became a really big deal. And this is the first toy where people were angry

because there weren't enough of them to go around. Yeah, and I mean, they still made 3 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 like, they were getting physical trying to get these dolls.

And now it's like, well, yeah, that sounds like a Christmas, like must have Christmas toy. People hadn't done that up to this point. This was very new. And so in addition to, you know, the normal press they were getting, these dolls were also ending up on like the nightly news a lot that December with stories about how parents were

like driving across state lines to get one of those cabbage patch kids. Or there was a story about a post carrier in Kansas City, I think, who flew to London to buy one, which I don't understand why, because London had its own 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. 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. I think we covered that in the must have toys episode that that is a technique that they use, that they purposefully underproduce to create scarcity. 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 200 million Rubik's Cubes in the first few years.

I know, that's nuts. Because they were just pumping those things out. Yeah, well, at the very least, I think Calico was genuinely caught underprepared. 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's this footage from Zales department,

or no, sorry, Zayer department store. Zales. Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania. Right, this is in Wilkesbury, Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania, or Wilkes-Barre, 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 Zayer department store in December of 1983, at least. And this guy is like unhinged. Have you seen footage of him? Yeah, I saw him last year. Okay, you got to see him again. I got to describe him again, because he struck a chord with me this year

that he didn't last year. But he's holding a baseball bat, very famously. But if you listen to what he's doing, he's shouting at the customers. He's like, shut up, listen to me. And he's like waving this baseball bat. And there's this crowd of people filling every available inch of this department store,

wanting cabbage patch kids. And this guy decides that the way to satisfy the need is to just start tossing them into the crowd. 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 bat. It's one of the worst forms of crowd management

anyone's ever attempted, ever. And it was caught on film, and you got to see it yourself. Yeah, he wasn't doing his best work that day. I think that's, we can all agree on that. You really wasn't, I agreed. A lot of times the problems were so big that they didn't even want people in the stores.

So they would say, like we can't have another fist fight in here. So what you do is you can arrive and get a coupon, and then you go around back to the loading dock, and we'll distribute them there. The secondary market started booming. There were actual stores that were buying them up, and then marking them up.

And then there was the black market that really, really marked them up. And this was not WKRP in Cincinnati, but it was very much in that rich tradition of DJs, kind of conning people into acting like fools. And this happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin when some local DJs there said there's gonna be a B-26 bomber plane,

and it's gonna drop 2,000 dolls over the Brewer's Baseball Stadium. And all you gotta do is show up with your baseball glove to catch these babies and hold up your credit card so the pilot can take a picture and charge you for it. And of course, this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard, but that still didn't stop. A couple of dozen people from showing up

with their baseball glove and credit card. Yeah, and negative seven-degree wind chill, which is very cold if you're in the centigrade of parts of the world, that's very cold. They're used to it. Right, I guess so. But the fact that people would do that is like, I double-checked to make sure

that that wasn't an urban legend, and it definitely is not. That really did happen in Milwaukee in 1983. That was like the level the craze reached. And what's really to Coleco's credit is they managed to keep the party going for a full another year because in Christmas 1984, Cabbage Patch Kids were again the must-have toy.

And in just 1984 alone, not 1983 Christmases, in 1984 that year, they sold $2 billion worth of Cabbage Patch Kids in 1984 money. Yeah, I mean, this was, I think one of the things that made it truly unique is, like I said, the Rubik's Cube was really hot for a few years, but generally as these things go, it's sort of like you can count on the one Christmas season.

If you're overlapping to the next Christmas season, that is a grand slam home run as far as toys go. Absolutely. So one of the outcomes of that, of being a toy that manages to span two Christmas seasons thoroughly, is they become iconic, and they start popping up in other places, like there was one named Christopher Xavier, who's a very famous Cabbage Patch Kid,

I guess as Cabbage Patch Kids can be famous. And he actually rode on the space shuttle on a genuine legit NASA space shuttle mission in 1985. And that reminds me, Chuck, have you seen the mini doc about the Challenger? No, not yet, is it good? Oh boy, it is really good. I mean, it's a high caliber documentary to begin with,

but then the emotionality that it manages to dredge up is really, it's a really well done documentary in every way, I highly recommend it. Where's that showing? That one's on Netflix, I believe, I'm almost positive. And I think it's just called Challenger, and then probably Cole and something, but it's good, it's by, I think JJ,

isn't it Bad Robot JJ Abrams Production Company? Yeah. They did it. They were one of the companies that handled it, but it's very good. I did watch Enola Holmes on your recommendation. Yes, what'd you think? I liked it a lot, it was good.

It was just a good, breezy, light, fun movie to watch, which is just what we needed to the night we watched it. For sure, and, but it was smart too, wasn't it? Yeah, it was smart enough, and she's just great. Millie Bobby Brown, she's got a lot of personality and lovable charisma, so she's great to watch. And it's fun to see her outside of playing 11 with all her personality able to come out like that.

Right, yeah. Well, I'm very glad that you liked it, because I think we would have had some sort of awkward wedge between us for the rest of our lives, had you not. You haven't seen the octopus doc yet, no? I did. Oh, okay.

So I think if we're gonna talk about octopus, my octopus teacher, you should just turn down your volume for about a minute, and you won't have it spoiled. All right, fair enough, fair enough. And actually, I think that guy is terrible. I think he's a terrible human being for not rescuing his companion friend for on two different occasions.

Really? Yes, and I know that he's a documentarian, so they're not supposed to interfere. I've seen Drop Dead Gorgeous, I know the rules, but this is different. He crossed the line, he crossed boundaries when he became friends with that octopus. He stopped being a documentarian,

started being his friend, and then he, as his friend, wasn't there for his friend when it was attacked, not once, but twice, and I really dislike that guy for that reason. Oh, interesting. Well, I don't concur, but I guess that's part of the beauty of that movie. You can have different takes.

So, but there's not a gulf between us, a wedge between us now, is there? I mean, did you hate the documentary? No, I otherwise thought it was amazing. All right, well, then there's no gulf. It was amazing, it really was great, except for that one thing, times two. All right, no wedge.

So let's see, back to Cabbage Patch Kids. There was another kind of landmark they reached in 1992 when they became, I think maybe Christopher Xavier became the official mascot of the US Olympic team and got to go to Barcelona with them. Yeah, I mean, this is pretty impressive. This is 10 plus years after these things were the hot ticket, you know, which is crazy, crazy time.

They were on a postage stamp. Eventually, of course, though, his star, well not his star, it was more than Christopher Xavier, but their collective star was going to fade. Like all toys and all dolls, we've all seen Toy Story, we know what happens in the end. It never completely went away though. They, you know, Coleco eventually was like,

you know, we gotta offload these guys. We're gonna sell it. We're in the video game industry like big time. And so we got a- Have you heard of Pac-Man? Well, the video game industry starts tanking. So they're trying to, I guess, recoup some money on their investment.

So they sell the Cabbage Patch Kids license. And then, you know, this is not before trying a few things. They tried talking Cabbage Patch Kids and stuff like that, but eventually they went bankrupt in the 80s and the license moved on to different people over the years, Mattel, Hasbro, Toys R Us. And then right now it's owned by Playalong Inc, which it just seems like those are,

seems like there's a lot of toy companies named weird things like that now. I agree. I agree. And I find it unsettling. Like their slogan should be, we're watching you. It just seems like we talk about those a lot. Like there's still the giants like Hasbro and Mattel,

but I feel like when we've done our toy podcast, it seems like the newer ones, they don't have these sort of name brands that you think of as toys. No, I know. They all sound like Russian fronts. It's really weird and unsettling and kind of off-putting. And all the C's are K's.

It's really strange. It's very sinister. So yeah, along the lines, like all of these companies were like, we've got to figure out a way to capture lightning in a bottle. Again, a second time, that just doesn't happen. It's hard enough the first time. And so they tried different things.

Like you said, Coleco tried that talking one. Didn't work. I think Hasbro had one that swam, which is kind of impressive. Sure. And then Mattel had one that they had to withdraw. It was called cabbage patch snack time kids. And they, these things would like eat.

Like they came with like french fries or something. And you'd put like the french fry in their mouth and they'd start chewing and the french fry would go down their throat and actually come out the back of their head and fall into their backpack. And then you could feed it to them again, which is great and fine. But if you're a little kid and you get your fingers

in there, your hair in there, that cabbage patch dolls just kind of keep eating and eating and you're going to start screaming and your parents are going to be like, I don't want this doll anymore. Give me my money back. Yeah. And these things also declined in quality. I think of the mid 90s, Mattel shrunk them even more

down to 14 inches. And they were like, forget these cloth bodies even. We're going to make the whole thing vinyl. And people didn't like that at all. And it took, I think the 20th anniversary in 2003, it took Toys R Us who took over the rights at that point to jack these things back up to 18 inches. They had cloth bodies.

I think they had an 18 inch and a 20 inch. And then they finally brought back those cloth bodies, which were a big deal. And they debuted them at their flagship store in New York City. And they sort of recaptured the magic a little bit. And it's about this time. And I think a year later is when Play Along licensed it.

But it's about this time that people started buying them again a little bit for nostalgia. Like kids that grew up with them, were now buying them for their kids. And I think, you know, they sold okay. It's nothing like they were at first, but they're still around. No, yeah.

And Play Along Inc, if that is their real name, was very wise to basically recreate the original 1983 style cabbage patch kids. Like they're basically indistinguishable from the ones that the people who are buying them now for their kids had when they were kids. And it's like you said, it's all nostalgia. And they're doing pretty good trade on it

without having to reinvent the wheel. That's right, a little quick stat before we take a break that is remarkable. Over the past 32 years, there have been 130 million of these babies born, which would, if they were real little people, it would make them the 10th most populous country in the world with one being born every 6.8 seconds.

But having said that, we're gonna take a little break. And right after this, we are going to tell you the true origin story of the little people. ["The Little People"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck, I'm curious, why did you say true like that? Well, if you listened to the show a year ago, it's already ruined, but we didn't go into that much depth. Here's what really happened, though. Xavier Roberts ripped off a lady. It's the easiest way to say it.

There was a very kind-hearted, soft-spoken folk artist named Martha Nelson Thomas. Went to art school in the 70s. She experimented with the same exact German soft sculpture molding, and she created what was called Little Doll Babies. If you Google Martha Nelson Thomas, Little Dolls, and you see this very now famous picture when it hasn't been swept under the rug

by Xavier Roberts people and maybe Coleco's people, this black and white picture of this woman surrounded by what are clearly and obviously cabbage patch kids. Yes, and there's actually, funny enough, there's another famous picture of Xavier Roberts taken probably about 10 years after that, and he's surrounded by straight-up cabbage patch kids with the vinyl heads and everything.

But the fact that that picture was taken of Martha Nelson Thomas in 1975 is photographic documentary evidence that she is the person who came up with cabbage patch kids. Not cabbage patch kids, but what cabbage patch kids were based on. And if that were it, if that were the photo, if that was the only evidence whatsoever,

you'd be like, that's a, I don't know, people can have similar ideas. There's only one old German technique called needle molding. Other people could have found it, but that is not the only evidence. And in fact, Xavier Roberts has gone on public record saying that he was inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas,

but he changed it enough. But if you go and look at the actual story and the facts along the way, and there's actually a pretty good 16-minute-long vice documentary on this whole thing, that you will see that it went way beyond him just being inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas' work. And in fact, like you said, he basically ripped her off.

Yeah, so he, from what I could tell, and there's a bunch of different sort of versions of this online, but from what I saw is they actually did have an agreement early on that he would sell these for her. He said, hey, these are great. Can I take some of these to my gift shops and sell them for you?

And I think I could sell a lot more than you could. And for a little while, they did have an agreement, but as it turns out, he ended up marking them up and charging too much money. And she wasn't happy about that. She was like, no, these shouldn't cost $40. It's 1978, for God's sake, and that's a doll. And he's like, yeah, but they're-

What do you think this is, Unicoys State Park? They're handmade, and 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 gonna start making my own.

And that's exactly what he did. Supposedly he wrote her a letter, and I don't remember who mentions it in the vice documentary, but basically they said that in the letter, he said, if I can't sell your dolls, I will sell something just like them. And she apparently was like whatever,

and just went her own way. She was satisfied to have her dolls back and probably thought she was done with the matter. And then supposedly one of her friends said, hey, I saw your little doll babies for sale at the Atlanta airport. Way to go. She said, I'm not selling these at the Atlanta airport.

And apparently that's when she knew she had a big problem on her hands. And found out that Xavier Roberts had come up with the little people dolls that were just the spinning image of her little doll babies. Yeah, so she filed a lawsuit that went on for years. I think by the time they were selling out in stores in 1983, she was about seven years into this lawsuit.

And for her, it wasn't, she asked for I think a million dollars, but she said it wasn't about the money. She was like, I don't wanna see this as a commodity and I don't wanna 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 open and shut. She's got this picture from 75. They had a prior relationship. She's got this letter that says, where he basically says he's gonna rip her off. But she didn't copyright these things. And you would have had to copyright because they were all handmade

and they were all, I guess, unique into themselves. You would have had to copyright and sign or stamp each doll. And she didn't wanna do that. And he had no problem doing it. Ours, little Chuck has an Xavier Roberts hand signature on his butt if you pulled on his little corduroy shorts.

Yeah, it's one of the famous things about cabbage patch kids, aside from their distinctive faces, is that each one of them has Xavier Roberts signature stamped onto its butt. And I guess Martha Nelson Thomas was like, there's no place to put a signature on a child. And these are like children to me.

That's why I adopt them out rather than sell them. So I'm not gonna sign this. I'm not gonna copyright them. And that basically, you would think it would have sunk her case. And after almost eight years, Xavier Roberts finally said, okay, fine, let's settle this. I suspect it had to do with, he sold out at some point in the 80s.

He sold his portion. And I would guess he probably needed that court case to go away to finalize that sale. And for whatever the reason, in 1985, he was suddenly ready to settle. And they settled for an undisclosed sum that apparently Martha Nelson Thomas was satisfied with. Yeah, and he also said,

and hey lady, you say you can't copyright these things. You can sign it right next to their little butthole. Right. He 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. Yeah, so he settled as it was enough money to put her kids through college. She said, it's still sort of a sad story to me that this 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, my point is not take my product to my creation

and tarnish it. Yeah, which was pretty audacious because he said this like, I believe it right when he was settling with this other case in which a part of the settlement was he had to acknowledge that he had taken her idea. And for him to be complaining about this on TV, it was a little audacious, especially if you know that, you know, the full story,

but even though it was an open secret or even a widely known tale in the toy industry and even some parts of the press, even still today everybody thinks of Xavier Roberts as the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids. And technically he was because he came up with Cabbage Patch Kids and Martha Nelson Thomas came up with Little Doll Babies.

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. Yeah, I guess so. I hadn't thought about that. So one of the groups he was complaining about was Topps Trading Cards. Topps Trading Cards around the still in the height

of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze in 1985 came out with one of the greatest parodies anyone's ever come out with, the beloved Garbage Pale Kids series. Yeah, I didn't, I wasn't into these. I was a little too old. I certainly, I was 14. I certainly remember them in The Zeitgeist

and I knew it was a very big deal, but this was probably more for kids, probably around your age. I imagine you were probably into these, right? I loved Garbage Pale Kids. I believe Yumi had a pretty impressive Garbage Pale Kid collection herself. Oh really? Yeah.

And she actually, yeah, she actually bought me a couple of Garbage Pale Kids I have somewhere. I think one is Squash Josh. I can't remember the other one, but they are for the people who don't know what a Garbage Pale Kid is. Go look up GPK.com and I think it's like G-E-E-P-E-K-A-Y.com. I'm not sure, but they have every single series scanned.

So you can see all 15 series that came out between 1985 and 1988 and they're just awesome, but they're basically like, if Garbage, if Cabbage Patch Kids were meant to get us used to what mutant offspring of nuclear war survivors would look like, Garbage Pale Kids were the mutated version of that. Yeah, that's a good way to say it.

They were deformed and they were plagued and diseased and they had names like Adam Baum and Boney Tony and I guess Squash Josh and Rumi Yumi, I don't know. No, they didn't have names for everyone, but it was a big deal. They sold a ton of them and Xavier Roberts was not happy with this and I think ended up in the lawsuit being successful and getting them

just to change enough to where it didn't look like it was officially tied to the Cabbage Patch Kids. Yeah, like they had, you know how it says like on the box for the Cabbage Patch Kids, it's like in a banner, kind of like semi-circle banner. They had that originally as Garbage Pale Kids, they had to turn that into a straight bar. They made them look less like lifelike

and more like plastic dolls in the later series. There were a few changes, but I mean, it was still pretty clear what the whole thing was a riff off of, but one thing I didn't realize is that one of the art directors who helped conceptualize Garbage Pale Kids from the outset was Art Spiegelman, who created Mouse. Yeah. Did you know that?

I mean, I've heard of Art Spiegelman, but I really don't know anything about him, so I didn't know that, but I know the name. I've not read Mouse, but I know it's like, it's like just a legendary graphic novel about fascism, but that guy helped create Garbage Pale Kids just a couple of years before he created Mouse. Amazing, and there was a bad TV show

that eventually only aired in Europe. There was a bad movie that is pretty legendarily bad, but it was a big deal, though. They sold a ton of them. They didn't quite have the spinoff power of the CPKs, but the GPKs did okay for themselves. Yeah, I mean, like that really goes to show you just how big cabbage patch kids were,

that it could sustain a cottage industry for a parody even. That's how big cabbage patch kids were in the movies. So hats off to cabbage patch kids. 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 2021 figuring out how to do that, Chuck.

And in the meantime, everybody, since we're thinking about how to talk about cabbage patch kids some more, it's time for Listener Mail. 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, I'm going to call it The Beve. 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 a Paltry 20 minutes. Love everyone. Keep me company while walking, driving, cleaning, cooking, and providing an endless source of interesting topics for my English students in Spain. 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? Yeah, I think we were.

I don't know if it was we so much as you. Yeah, maybe so. But a while back, you were. I'm just teasing, I think it was we. You were adamant that Nessie does not exist, buddy. Show Nessie some love. Wouldn't it be amazing if she did exist? So she has her fingers crossed on that.

But the real reason she wrote in, she listened to the Beaver episode and came across Beave the Beaver. So just get online and Google Beave. It was this Beaver that was found, I think, abandoned by its parents and then adopted as a young baby and then raised for a while to eventually be put in maybe a wildlife center or something.

But the long and short of it is Beave makes dams in their house. So there are all these videos of Beave dragging stuff into this one specific doorway that Beave is trying to dam up and dragging a shoe rack, pillows, tissue boxes, anything Beave can get ahold 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.

Yeah, it is very cute. Because he looks like, should this go here? Maybe a little bit to the left? OK, 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.

It is amazing. And that email, by the way, is from Carrie Keely. 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 stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.