The Day America Went to War With Garbage

The first sign of trouble was probably the circle.

A knot of children on the playground, shoulders pressed together, somebody bargaining, somebody refusing, somebody insisting that what they were holding was worth at least two of whatever the other kid had.

To an approaching teacher, it might have looked suspiciously like gambling.

Then the crowd parted.

The object at the center of this miniature black market was a small rectangular sticker featuring a cherubic little child throwing up.

His name was Up Chuck.

And adults across the country decided, enough was enough.

By 1986, Garbage Pail Kids were being confiscated in classrooms, condemned by parents and banned by schools. Newspapers and television news programs began reporting on the craze with the sort of concerned tone normally reserved for things considerably more dangerous than bubble-gum cards.

Parents found the pictures revolting. Teachers found the trading disruptive. Some child-development experts worried about the violence and grotesque humor.

And the kids?

Kids thought they were absolutely hilarious.

And perhaps nothing explains the comedy of the whole episode better than what American adults had been doing just a couple of Christmases earlier.

Because before there were Garbage Pail Kids, there were Cabbage Patch Kids.

And adults had temporarily lost their minds over those, too.

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Christmas 1983.

Cabbage Patch Kids were the toy.

Not a popular toy.

Thee toy.

They had round faces, wide-set eyes, yarn hair and little adoption certificates that helped turn buying a doll into something closer to bringing home a child.

Children wanted them desperately. Parents responded accordingly.Children wanted them desperately. Parents responded accordingly. They camped outside stores. They chased rumors about incoming shipments. They offered other shoppers money for dolls already sitting in their carts.

And occasionally, things got physical.

A Washington Post report from November 1983 described shoppers around the Washington area waiting for hours outside Zayre stores, attempting to bribe employees and even snatching Cabbage Patch Kids from other customers' shopping carts.

At one Maryland store, an employee described customers pushing and shoving their way inside.

At a Toys “R” Us in Rockville, Maryland, more than 200 parents reportedly lined up beginning around six in the morning after word spread that a shipment had arrived.

The dolls disappeared almost immediately.

Which makes what happened next considerably funnier.

Because somewhere inside Topps, somebody essentially looked at the most adored children's faces in America and thought:

What if we added a twist?

Before parents were horrified by Garbage Pail Kids, they had spent Christmas 1983 fighting to get their hands on Cabbage Patch Kids.

The Garbage Pail Kids debuted in 1985 as a deliberate parody of the Cabbage Patch phenomenon.

Topps had a history of this sort of thing. Its earlier Wacky Packages had spoofed familiar consumer brands, turning the polished language of advertising against itself.

Garbage Pail Kids took that same instinct and aimed it directly at the toy craze consuming America.

And this is where you really have to picture the two characters side by side.

Imagine a classic Cabbage Patch Kid.
Round baby cheeks. Tiny nose. Huge eyes. Soft expression.

Now put Up Chuck beside it. Same basic baby-faced sweetness. Same chubby cheeks. Same innocent proportions.

Except Chuck is projectile-vomiting.

That was the joke. Not sophisticated. Not subtle.

The joke worked because the resemblance was unmistakable: take America’s most precious little face and make it disgusting.

The first Garbage Pail Kids series included characters with names like Nasty Nick, Junkfood John, Dead Ted, Fryin' Brian and, of course, Up Chuck.

The cards typically paired grotesque situations with playground-grade puns, and Topps even issued alternate-name versions of the same artwork.

Adults tended to focus on the grotesque part.

Children understood something else immediately:

The grown-ups had spent years telling them that this particular baby face was precious.

Garbage Pail Kids took that precious face and made it burp, explode, drool, melt, stink and occasionally lose body parts.

Of course kids laughed.

It was a tiny act of cultural vandalism you could carry in your pocket.

This is where Garbage Pail Kids stopped being merely successful trading cards and became something much more powerful.

They became forbidden.

Schools began banning them. Teachers confiscated them. Parents complained.

Stories circulated about children trading them obsessively during class and recess.

Topps itself now describes the school and parent-group bans as part of what helped turn the cards into an overnight sensation.

This probably should have surprised no one.

Garbage Pail Kids suddenly had everything a childhood craze requires.

Scarcity. Collectibility. Status. Gross humor. Adult hostility. And names funny enough to repeat at lunch.

The playground economics were serious.

You didn't just have Garbage Pail Kids.

You knew who had which ones.

You knew which kid might trade.

You knew which card somebody desperately wanted.

You knew when someone was trying to rip you off.

And because two different names could sometimes share the same illustration, the cards created layers of desirability and negotiation.

Children who had never heard the phrase “secondary market” were running one beside the monkey bars.

To teachers, it was understandably maddening.

To kids, it was commerce.

And once confiscation began, a Garbage Pail Kid tucked inside a Trapper Keeper suddenly carried the thrill of contraband.

This is one of my favorite things about old moral panics.

Adults would go on television to warn other adults about something children loved.

Which meant millions of additional children learned about the thing.

A local news reporter could essentially provide a three-minute Garbage Pail Kids commercial while explaining why Garbage Pail Kids were terrible.

There would be shots of the cards.

Close-ups of the names.

Children trading them.

A concerned parent.

Perhaps a school administrator explaining the ban.

For a kid watching at home, the takeaway wasn't necessarily:

These are dangerous.

It was:

Where can I find that one?

The controversy became inseparable from the product.

By 1987, the Los Angeles Times would casually describe parents as horrified, schools as having banned the cards and psychiatrists as worried that the images encouraged children to laugh at violence, deformity and pain.

But there is something wonderfully revealing about adult concern over children laughing at absurd fake catastrophe.

Children had been doing that forever.

Wile E. Coyote could fall from a cliff, get crushed by a boulder, explode and return thirty seconds later.

Tom and Jerry routinely attempted murder.

Garbage Pail Kids merely removed the reassuring animation and froze the punchline on cardboard.

And for parents, that made it feel more dangerous.

There was another problem.

The Garbage Pail Kids looked an awful lot like Cabbage Patch Kids.

That was, of course, entirely the point.

Original Appalachian Artworks, the company behind the Cabbage Patch Kids characters, sued Topps.

Topps defended the cards as parody.

Eventually, in 1987, the dispute was settled. Topps agreed to change the design of its characters to reduce their resemblance to Cabbage Patch Kids and paid an undisclosed amount.

Contemporary reporting said the Cabbage Patch side had originally sought $30 million in damages.

Think about that for a moment. The joke had graduated from the schoolyard to federal court.

Naturally, somebody decided Garbage Pail Kids needed a Saturday morning cartoon.

CBS scheduled one for the fall of 1987.

This immediately produced another round of objections.

Parent organizations and advocacy groups complained.

Some television affiliates balked.

Potential advertisers indicated they weren't interested.

Among the companies reported as declining to advertise on the program were McDonald's, RJR Nabisco and Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola crayons.

CBS eventually pulled the series from its schedule just days before its planned premiere.

And here's the perfect detail:

Many of the people protesting it had never seen it.

The Los Angeles Times later noted that the campaign against the program unfolded despite protesters not actually having watched the show.

That may be the purest expression of an '80s moral panic imaginable.

A Saturday morning cartoon became controversial enough to be canceled before Saturday morning children could even watch it.

CBS filled the hole by extending Muppet Babies.

The nation survived.

It would be easy to laugh at all of this now.

And we should.

Because some of it is extremely funny.

But moral panics rarely emerge from nowhere.

Adults were responding to something real, just not necessarily something dangerous.

Children were building a culture that adults did not control.

The humor belonged to them.

The trading rules belonged to them.

The hierarchy of desirable cards belonged to them.

Even the language belonged to them.

Up Chuck.

Dead Ted.

Junkfood John.

You didn't need an adult to explain the joke.

In fact, having an adult dislike it improved the joke.

That may be why the phenomenon felt more threatening than many other toy crazes.

A Cabbage Patch Kid invited adults into the game.

Adults bought the doll.

Adults admired it.

Adults understood nurturing.

The whole ritual of “adoption” borrowed heavily from adult ideas about family.

Garbage Pail Kids didn't need adults at all.

They were childhood humor talking directly to childhood humor.

And sometimes adults become nervous when children create a world whose rules they cannot quite understand.

Which brings us back to those toy stores.

Because there is an irresistible symmetry here.

In 1983, parents were pushing through department-store doors trying to obtain Cabbage Patch Kids.

Two years later, children were laughing at grotesque parodies of those same dolls.

And then adults became appalled by the children's behavior.

That is almost too perfect.

The children weren't the ones who had turned Cabbage Patch Kids into a national spectacle.

Adults had already done that.

They had created scarcity.

They had camped outside stores.

They had chased shipments.

They had offered strangers money.

They had shoved.

They had grabbed dolls out of shopping carts.

And then the children received their own collectible craze and began trading pieces of cardboard at lunch.

Suddenly civilization was in peril.

There is probably a lesson buried somewhere in that.

Or at least a very good joke.

The frenzy before the backlash: shoppers crowd a store for Cabbage Patch Kids.

The objects change.

The anxiety doesn't.

Comic books were going to corrupt children.

Rock and roll was going to corrupt children.

Hip Hop was going to corrupt children.

Dungeons & Dragons was going to corrupt children.

Video games were going to corrupt children.

The internet was going to corrupt children.

Social media was going to corrupt children.

Every generation eventually looks at the culture forming beneath it and thinks:

This can't possibly be good for them.

Sometimes the concern is justified.

Sometimes it isn't.

Usually the truth is more complicated.

But childhood culture has always depended partly on adults not quite getting it.

That was half the pleasure.

The songs your parents hated.

The movie you weren't supposed to watch.

The joke your teacher didn't understand.

The card hidden behind your notebook.

Garbage Pail Kids belonged beautifully to that tradition.

Today, the cards that once disappeared into desk drawers and principal's offices are collectibles.

They're graded.

Cataloged.

Placed carefully inside protective sleeves.

Collectors debate condition and print variations.

The forbidden object has become an artifact.

And somewhere there is almost certainly a former fourth grader handling an Up Chuck card with considerably more care than he ever did in 1985.

That's what time does.

It turns contraband into nostalgia.

It turns panic into anthropology.

And it leaves behind the strange realization that many things adults once believed were destroying childhood eventually become the things adults use to remember it.

Maybe that's the real story of Garbage Pail Kids.

Children saw humor.

Adults saw danger.

Both looked at the same card and saw two completely different worlds.

Decades later, the warnings are mostly forgotten.

The school bans don't matter.

The outraged television interviews look wonderfully dated.

But Up Chuck is still funny.

The panic fades.

The laughter lingers.And history, with its dry sense of humor, tends to remember the joke much more kindly than the outrage.

ELSEWHERE IN THE 80s is a weekly trip back to one familiar piece of the decade — and the unexpected place it leads.

Because the '80s are worth a do-over.