by Haggis (Sean Loyless)
July 9th, 2003 @ 5:12 pm
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The Return Of The Garbage Pail Kids
HELL YEAH! I LOVED these as a kid!
Source: Boston.com via Fark.com
Garbage Pail Kids, the grandfather of gross-out, set to return
NEW YORK (AP) Long before ”South Park” or ”Beavis and Butthead” were entertaining kids with lowbrow toilet humor there were the ”Garbage Pail Kids.” Now, the grandfather of gross-out is making a comeback.
After being off the market for 15 years, a new series of the hugely successful stickers that entertained children in the mid-1980s with depictions of bodily functions and other unsavory concepts will be released in August by The Topps Company, Inc.
Garbage Pail Kids still maintain a cult following, with several dedicated fan Web sites and an active trade on Internet auction sites.
But will the stickers, which originally were conceived as a spoof of early-1980s it-toy, The Cabbage Patch Kids, find an audience among kids raised on the hyper-potty-humored ”Jackass” and the sophomoric ”Sponge Bob Square Pants?”
”I think gross-out has always been and will always be of interest to kids,” said Arthur T. Shorin, chairman of Topps, whose lower Manhattan headquarters is crowded with mountains of candy and collectible cards. ”Garbage Pail Kids was a phenomenal fad it really struck a funny bone and we expect kids will still enjoy them because it’s a spoof on real life.”
The new series finds plenty of new things to make fun of, like ”Fartin’ Martin,” who gaseously propels himself on a Razor scooter, or the heavily pierced ”Metallic Alec,” who is pulled out of his shoes by a magnet.
They even take a shot at the bespectacled child wizard ”Harry Potty” toilet plunger in tow, doing his business in the loo.
Also, to help modernize the series, Topps plans to launch a Web site in August that will let youngsters create their own Garbage Pail Kids and take a tour of a Garbage Pail Kid city, among other things.
Not all the ideas are new. About two-thirds of the series is made up of original art drawn for stickers 15 years ago that were never released.
The company ran 15 different series of Garbage Pail Kids from 1985 through 1988, earning the company millions, Shorin said. The unreleased art was drawn for the 16th series, which never saw print because the stickers’ popularity had waned.
When the old drawings came out of the archive, Shorin felt the company had a good thing on its hands, but said he didn’t rely just on a hunch. It was shown to a research group of children.
”And they loved it,” Shorin said.
Back in the 1980s, Garbage Pail Kids suffered a backlash of sorts from parents who thought gross-out humor was detrimental to children something that probably spurred their popularity.
”I would get letters all the time from parents saying, ‘This is in poor taste.’ Well, of course it’s in poor taste!” Shorin said. ”But it’s not in wrong taste; we would never do that.”
Some are still skeptical about Garbage Pail Kids.
”I’m kind of surprised they’re releasing it, because I think kids may be beyond this,” said Mark Long, author of ”Bad Fads,” and operator of the Bad Fads Museum Web site.
Shorin argues the stickers are not only fun, but educational, helping children face ideas that are difficult to talk about.
”Garbage Pail Kids deals with bodily functions and death and dismemberment, which kids are very much aware of, but it deals with it in a humorous way, which helps kids confront these things.”
