If you are a Gen-Xer or older Millennial, chances are you had at least one Cabbage Patch Kid, the slightly odd, cuddly dolls—sorry, children—that are sold as “one of a kind” adoptees, complete with adoption papers, and were the in-demand toy long before the advent of Tickle-Me Elmo. Licensed by Coleco, the toy caused some of the first Black Friday riots in the mid-eighties as US stores ran out of Cabbage Patch Kids to adopt. The documentary Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids chronicles the strange saga of these not-really dolls and the phenomenon they spawned.
Narrated by Neil Patrick Harris, Billion Dollar Babies employs basic talking head interviews with key players in the initial phenomenon, archival footage of riots and newscasts, and commentary from cultural critics. It first tells the public story of the creation and marketing of the toys that eventually became Cabbage Patch Kids—they are always “children,” not “dolls”—and then the subsequent lawsuits when it turned out that the design and concept might have been taken from soft-sculpture artist Martha Nelson, who called them Doll Babies and made them by hand. But more than the history is the inherent weirdness of the phenomenon itself and the people who treat these dolls like they’re…not dolls at all.
The Cabbage Patch Kids supposedly originated with Xavier Roberts, who produced them as “Little People” in a small factory in Cleveland, Georgia where the “children” were born out of doll hospital with a literal cabbage patch. They were eventually licensed to Coleco, a massive toy manufacturer, who produced the Kids many of us had as children: plastic-headed, plush-bodied dolls that were sold as one of a kind, with variations on size, gender, clothing, and hair, eye, and skin color, and that cost our parents a small fortune. (For the record: mine were named Elmer Gordon and Lester Leroy, and they are still in my parents’ attic.) According to Roberts and Roger Schlaifer, who licensed the Kids to Coleco, no one was prepared for the absolute storm that Cabbage Patch Kids would create.
The film deals in oddities. Roberts appears as a clean-cut gentleman in a cowboy hat who refers to himself as the father of all Cabbage Patch Kids and recounts how he created them, including developing a facility where people could come and watch babies being “born” from a plastic cabbage before they were adopted. The Disney-esque weirdness of the concept is still a very smart marketing ploy, pushing the idea of a doll not as a doll at all, but a real child who must be adopted and cared for, with an individual personality and needs. And it worked.
As strange as collectors are—and one couple interviewed have literally hundreds of Cabbage Patch Kids that they plan to be buried with—the fact is that the toy was a legitimate phenomenon that even the manufacturers claim they weren’t prepared for. This is where the film becomes the most fascinating, in the chronicling of the sudden, grasping desire of millions to have a specific toy for Christmas, to the point that shoppers rioted, people were trampled, and stores ransacked. The film sets this in context of the increasing affluence of the mid to late eighties, and the romanticization of greed in the American psyche. Even more sordid is the origin of the concept, told late in the film, by Martha Nelson, who created the original Doll Babies that Xavier Roberts changed just enough to avoid real copyright infringement. The film pulls its punches slightly here—possibly because they were lucky enough to get an interview with Roberts, possibly because the Cabbage Patch Kids brand is notoriously litigious—but the implication is clear: without Martha Nelson, Cabbage Patch Kids would not exist.
Billion Dollar Babies is an interesting if not terribly groundbreaking look into America’s obsessiveness, though there’s little clarity as to why, exactly, Cabbage Patch Kids were such a sensation. The final coda of Martha Nelson’s story goes a long way to at least giving credit where credit is due and reminds us that at the root of even the crassest of marketing ploys there might very well be a real artist who tried to make something that would connect with others. And she obviously succeeded, perhaps a bit too well. Though, as far as I know, my parents didn’t have to trample anyone to get my Cabbage Patch Kids.
Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids is available to stream on Tribeca At Home.