Cabbage Patch Kids: Evil With Pudgy Cheeks - The 80's #13

 The Toy That Taught an Entire Generation that Shopping Was a Contact Sport

There  are moments in history when humanity reaches a turning point. 

The moon landing.

The invention of the internet.

The first time someone put cheddar cheese on a hamburger.

Allowing a chronically overthinking sarcastist (yes, that's a real word.... now) to have his own forum.

All noble in their own way.

Then there was the Cabbage Patch Kids craze of the 1980's, when otherwise respectable adult human beings temporarily forgot they lived in a somewhat civilised society in the pursuit of a cloth baby with a face like a potato and the general expression of someone who wouldn't give up where the bodies were buried.

These weren't dolls. They were, in fact, tiny pudgy-cheeked cult leaders.

And they had many, many followers and wannabe followers,

The Great Winter Panic

Are you old enough to remember the hysteria? Parents were stampeding through stores like extras in a low budget zombie movie, desperately searching for these little hideous bundles of fabric and stuffing...

And they were clearing the shelves faster than toilet paper during Covid.

People were fighting over them. Actual adults, Responsible people. People with mortgages and car payments, jobs and hobbies, hopes and dreams and presumably fully functioning frontal lobes.

All because little Jenny or Johnny wanted a doll.

Not a bike. Not a chemistry set. Not something educational that might prepare him or her for a productive future.

Nope. A lumpy baby with yarn hair.

Somewhere, a marketing executive was enjoying a scotch while watching society collapse on store monitors.

"How are sales?"

"We've had to have the janitor clean up blood in the toy department seven time already today."

"Excellent. Increase the price another five bucks."

The Adoption Scam

And lest we forget the adoption papers...

Because apparently paying an exorbitant amount for a doll wasn't enough. You had to actually legally adopt the little psycho.

Each Cabbage Patch Kid came with a birth certificate and a name, which made the entire experience feel less like shopping and more like a black market baby trafficking operation run by an overly optimistic gardening club.

You'd bring home little Mortimer Snodgrass, and suddenly he was family. You couldn't just throw him in a cupboard when you got bored because he had paperwork.

I bet somewhere in North America, a lawyer had to advise parents on the legal ramifications of abandoning a bald, polyester infant.

"Your Honour, my client claims the child was emotionally manipulative and refused to sleep through the night and eat his veggies."

"Was the child a Cabbage Patch Kid?"

"Yes, Your Honour."

"Guilty. Case dismissed."

Ah, Those Faces, Though

Here's the thing:

They were supposed to be cute.

But there was always something slightly unsettling about them. Those round cheeks. Those fixed smiles. Those eyes that seemed to follow you no matter where you went in the room.

They looked like they'd always known the truth about JFK and Jimmy Hoffa and were just waiting for the right time to reveal to you, "IT WAS MEEEEEE!"

And the names!! Xavier Quincy. Bertha Lou. Percival something-or-other.

Names that sounded like the result of feeding a scrabble board to a dyslexic photocopier.

Yet children adored them.

We'd cradle these little sociopaths, invent elaborate multiple personalities for them, and insist they were the greatest things ever created.

To be fair, they were a significant improvement over the pet rock.

We Were All Part of the Problem

Looking back, the Cabbage Patch Kids weren't really the villains. They were just the pudgy-faced mascots of an era when advertising could convince an entire generation that happiness came with yarn hair and legal adoption paperwork.

And perhaps that's what made the 80's so special.

We believed in things. Big hair. Terrible synthesizers, Action heroes who never ran out of ammunition or awesome one-liners. And yes, dolls that required more paperwork than buying a house.

We didn't have smartphones, social media, or to your door delivery of just about anything.

We had catalogs, weirdly specific wish lists, and the desperate hope that our parents would by some miracle locate a specific fabric infant before the entire continent bought them all. Or dad realized each one cost six weeks worth of beer.

And when we finally got one, we were ecstatic.

For a little while anyway.

Then we discovered a little box named Nintendo.

But that's another story....