Cabbage Patch Kids Are the Babies Anyone Can Adopt

Forty years ago, Americans kicking off the holiday shopping season decided to kick one another instead. It was a doll they were all after, and most would stop at nothing to get it. In Charleston, W.Va., 5,000 shoppers began fighting over the 120 dolls that the Hills department store had in stock. “They knocked over tables, fighting with each other,” manager Scott Belcher told The New York Times. “There were people in midair. It got ugly.” Things got even uglier at the Zayre department store in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where a thousand people who’d waited in line for eight hours rushed the store, trapping manager William Shigo behind a counter. “Get back—you’re breaking my legs!” he yelled, wielding a baseball bat. All of this for a 16-inch blob of stuffed nylon called a Cabbage Patch Kid. Every holiday season, a must-have toy emerges that sends parents scrambling. In 1996, it was Tickle Me Elmo. A decade later, it was the Nintendo Wii. In 2020, Baby Yoda assumed the mantle. Brand scientists have yet to determine how a toy achieves "It" status, but a common trait is ephemerality: Once the holiday season’s over, so’s the furor. Yet Cabbage Patch Kids have bucked that trend. While the kicking and screaming might be gone, the dolls are still in demand—and for much the same reason they were in 1983. With their individual names, pudgy profiles and varying eye, hair and skin colors, Cabbage Patch Kids prefigured the importance of diversity two generations before most retailers. “They had the multicultural [element]—these babies looked different,” said communications director Margaret McLean. “[Americans] could relate to these babies. It was so different than what people were used to.” As the National Toy Museum observed on its blog, “For more than 40 years, the brand has intended to convey messages about unconventional beauty and belonging.” Credit for that goes to Xavier Roberts, who learned the art of needle molding in the late 1970s. After his “Little People” won an art competition, Roberts began making dolls to sell. (In the course of a lawsuit later brought by artist Martha Nelson Thomas, Roberts said he was inspired by the soft sculpture dolls she made, but that the designs he sold were his own. The suit was settled.) Shortly after the NBC show Real People aired a segment on his dolls, a licensing agent brokered a deal between Roberts and Coleco, which rebranded the dolls as Cabbage Patch Kids and began mass-producing them. Subsequent agreements with licensees including Hasbro, Mattel and, currently, Wicked Cool Toys have kept them on the shelves. That the mass-produced dolls have plastic heads hasn’t bothered most people, but in case it does, Roberts’ BabyLand General Hospital still makes hand-stitched originals for shoppers willing to part with $260 (and up). And, thankfully, nobody's had to break the manager's legs to get one. Call me by your name Skilled as Roberts was with a needle and thread, he proved just as talented at marketing. He was among the first to recognize the importance of representing diversity (inset) and to pioneer a specialized vernacular. His dolls were “born,” not made. They couldn’t be bought, but they were available for “adoption.” (Naturally, there was a corresponding adoption fee.) The dolls came with a birth certificate, too. And while every Barbie sold is still named Barbie, each Cabbage Patch Kid has a unique name. Gimmickry? Sure. But these little touches charmed the socks off children (if not their hapless parents) in 1983, and they still do. Don't shop, adopt Part of the world Roberts created for his dolls was a 1919 medical clinic in Cleveland, Ga., that he purchased and refurbished as an adoption center. BabyLand General Hospital, as it's known, continues to draw upward of a million visitors a year. They come to see the sales associates dressed as nurses, sit in the rocking chairs and stroll the elaborate flower gardens. “Children are encouraged to come and play,” McLean said, “and if they find a baby they bond with, they can go through the adoption process.” Baby boom Roberts poses with some of his Cabbage Patch Kids (1) at the height of 1983's holiday shopping season. Overwhelming demand for—and limited supply of—the dolls created hordes of desperate, angry shoppers like the ones at this Toys R Us in Huntington, NY, (2) with cops on hand to keep order. The Cabbage Patch Kid craze had simmered down by 1986, but the doll was still famous enough to get a ride on the Space Shuttle (3).

Perspective

Cabbage Patch Kids Are the Babies Anyone Can Adopt

They drove shoppers to riot in 1983, and people still love them

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Robert Klara

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