30 Years of Garbage: The Garbage Pail Kids Story, 2017 - ★★★★

thunt’s review published on Letterboxd: I really enjoyed the Garbage Pail Kids documentary. It's not often that you get to learn about something so much about something that was truly forbidden, verboten, just like the kids in the documentary, I mainly know Garbage Pail Kids as something I was not allowed to have. So whenever I got a chance to look at it at some kid's house or on the schoolyard. I was always fascinated by the nose picking, farting, booger eating Garbage Pail Kids. So it was a delight to learn about the origins of the TOPS company as truly a bubble gum company. First bubble gum, first cards and collectibles second. So the fact that they showed a slide with a series of tops, bubblegum packages, long, long before they show any Topps, bubblegum cards or let alone any Wacky Packages, Mars Attacks, or tops, tops, garbage pail. Kids, who knew that the company that was selling me baseball cards would have sold me garbage pail. Kids, I wonder if it would have been at the same store. I would have gladly bought them, but I never saw them at good old Stidham sporty goods in Fairfield, California back in the 80s, but yes, Garbage Pail Kids, the forbidden collectible. I was interested to learn of the lawsuit that the cards were deemed too close to cabbage packed kids to be a parody. Well, I obviously see them clearly as parody and satire, thus protected and free. They actually had to make a deal out of court, or chose to make a deal out of court, and then had to redesign the cards so they didn't look like stuffed dolls, leading to, pretty clearly, a decline in the quality of the cards. However, of course, they kept going for 17 more series you can't keep a good garbage pail kid down. I was also surprised to learn that Art Spiegelman, famous for the classic graphic novel mouse about the Holocaust, told through mice and cats, was originally an artist at tops and was involved with the Garbage Pail Kids project. Very surprised, he was a delightful part of the narration crew on the documentary, and kept it light, kept it moving, and even had to explain at one point that they were worried when releasing mouse that it might become a problem because he would be identified as the garbage pail guy, and who would want to hear a book about the Holocaust from the garbage pail guy. He overcame this and mouse is a huge bestseller and fantastic book. It was neat to see the artist to continue to get some funding and kind of have a second life through private commissions that I'm sure is still going on as it seemed that the younger artists had taken up from the old. And we're now offering the ability for you to be in your own Garbage Pail Kids card or scene, or to describe your favorite movie or crossover, which they would then paint onto a real what would have been a garbage pail card. They restarted the series and continued to make new cards later, making pretty fun nfts on the I forget which network, but they're out there, and they're collectible in the digital world as well, Garbage Pail Kids, the forbidden collectible, an excellent companion and follow up piece to the last film I watched about the Denver dog and the posters and how the psychedelic scene spread through Denver with A small seed from San Francisco, in the same way the NFT scene would be created by these early baseball card, Wacky Packages, garbage pail kid trading projects, which would later lead the same theories of collectibility and enjoyment of art to the online world through nfts Like curio cards, crypto punks and many, many, many, many more, an excellent film. I suggest you see it bought for five bucks on Apple. ITunes. Always good to buy a documentary on iTunes. Maybe the filmmakers get a quarter, but at least it gets more people watching the movie, which is why they made the movie. I'm glad they made the garbage fail cage documentary, and I enjoyed watching it. Thanks for reading. You. Transcribed by otter.ai