The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

Pop culture scandals in the 1980s seemed to have parents up in arms about a new issue every year, be it the "Satanic Panic" scare or the push for parental advisory labels on music to name two of the most famous. Up there with the most incendiary of them was the short-lived furor over the Garbage Pail Kids. An obvious lampoon of the popular, cutesy Cabbage Patch Kids that were causing holiday shopping stampedes with actual bodily harm involved. The Garbage Pail Kids debuted as collectible trading cards in June of 1985 from the Topps Company. That venerable, five-decade-old baseball card company from Brooklyn struck gold with the gross-out line, creating a merchandizing bonanza and selling over a billion cards in two years. Parents and teachers were agitated by the cards and related tie-ins like shirts and garbage cans, with the cards eventually being banned outright in many schools and serving as the subject of many national TV think pieces. Of course, it was just a matter of time before the trendy kids would get their own movie, and that came to pass in 1987 with a feature written and directed by Rod Amateau, a veteran of numerous TV sitcoms including Mister Ed and Gilligan's Island. His feature career was more modest with a handful of titles including the mostly forgotten Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (1970), an ersatz sequel to What's New, Pussycat? and the genial comedy Drive-In (1976). The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) revolves around a young boy named Dodger (Mackenzie Astin), whose pursuit of a new girl in town (Katie Barberi) inadvertently plays a part in the release of a garbage pail of slimy kid creatures overseen by an antique shop owner improbably played by Anthony Newley. The film was the first to star Astin, son of actors John Astin and Patty Duke, though he was already familiar to viewers thanks to his stint as Andy Moffett on The Facts of Life starting in 1985. On the other hand, veteran singer, actor and songwriter Newley had been around since the 1950s, with numerous collaborations with Leslie Bricusse and a slew of hits under his best including standards like "Goldfinger" and "Feeling Good." Of course, the real stars of this film are the Garbage Pail Kids themselves; only a few faces from the cards could make it to the big screen including Foul Phil, Nat Nerd, Valerie Vomit, Ali Gator, Messy Tessie, Windy Winston and Greaser Greg. This film actually earned a minor place in the cinematic history books as the first feature to be cut via Ediflex, an electronic editing system widely used by the Hollywood television community. Electronic post-production seemed like a cost-saving measure at the time with only a handful of other films using electronic editing processes in the preceding months like Sweet Liberty (1986), Power (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) cut on the rival Montage. The process was actually necessary since this film was announced on February 24 and went into production in late April of 1987, which made the August release date a much tighter window than usual. Topps refused to talk about the film when approached by the Los Angeles Times, and even Martin Rabinov from the film's distributor, Atlantic, only vaguely commented, "It's a delicate situation. I hope you'll be as kind as you can be." Critics disregarded that request, with a typical reaction coming from The Hollywood Reporter who dismissed the film as "crude, disgusting and amazingly stupid." They also noted that Atlantic was trying to cash in on the same late August release strategy that had made a hit out of Teen Wolf (1985). Likewise, Variety also raided its thesaurus to call the film "vile, smelly, rude, ugly." That summer CBS was also in the process of launching its own animated Garbage Pail Kids series in September, though due to ongoing parental protests, the show didn't air on a single channel until 1988. Nevertheless, the Garbage Pail Kids have endured thanks to nostalgia and the eternal appeal of dark humor. Card series continue to be generated to this day with the grotesque tykes parodying everything from prime-time TV shows to U.S. presidents. By Nathaniel Thompson