Who would'a guessed that two hours of screen time on the Garbage Pail Kids, a 1980s kid-schlock fad, could be entertaining, thought-provoking, and informative? It is a sign of the storytelling talents of filmmakers Jeff Zapata and Joe Simko.
Peddled by bubblegum-and-sports-trading-card colossus Topps, The Garbage Pail Kids arrived as a scatological mockery of the overpriced 1980s doll craze The Cabbage Patch Kids. It wasn't always that way, however. As a followup to Topps' popular supermarket-products lampoon Wacky Packages (remember those 1970s stickers?), the GPK were first conceived as mere gross little characters, owing much to "underground comix," especially the humanoid grotesques of illustrator Basil Wolverton (a lot of favorite outlier-artists get name-dropped here).
After initial runs of Garbage Pail Kids (Adam Bomb, Nasty Nick, Weird Wendy, etc.) became a "viral" phenomenon with youngsters, minus any substantial ad campaign or internet, Topps sustained a lawsuit by the Georgia-based creator of the Cabbage Patch dolls for a multi-million-dollar payoff and agreement to avoid overt physical resemblances to the dolls.
Parents, teachers, and opinion leaders (including...Jacques Cousteau?!) were horrified by the Garbage Pail Kids and their spinoffs, which were soon being distributed in now highly prized foreign-language versions (in German they are the "Totally Kaputten Kids"). No matter what, children kept buying the things, and the original GPK run went into several issues. Before the trend burned out, there was a widely condemned Garbage Pail Kids Movie (actress Debbie Lee Carrington describes her casting as "Valerie Vomit"), and a TV cartoon series so opposed by pressure groups it never aired (finally finding a 2003 DVD release).
In the 21st century, Topps revived the property, and now the Garbage Pail Kids have second and third-generation creators and fans. The creators have included Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who describes having to interest publishers in his classic Holocaust graphic novel Maus when the Garbage Pail Kids was foremost on his resume. James Warhola, a commercial/fine artist (and nephew of Andy Warhol), found himself in the career quandary of alternating between Garbage Pail Kids and rendering book-cover art for literary classics by William Gibson and Isaac Asimov.
There are homey descriptions of working for Topps in their Brooklyn factory complex under clouds of bubblegum powder sugar. Topps remains one of few places where artists still submit finished pieces on physical paper, not as insubstantial digital computer files.
It's a lively two hours with many a laugh-out-loud moment for Garbage Pail haters as well as lovers (sometimes the same thing). The feature is dedicated to GPK and comix artist Jay Lynch, who died after the film's completion. Lynch describes the Garbage Pail Kids as a worthy mockery of Reagan-era consumerism that, paradoxically, can now be worth thousands as collectible rarities. So go figure. The documentary itself is recommended for collections on library shelves devoted to art, comics, and the eccentric corners of pop culture.