Black Friday is said to have originated in Philadelphia in the 1960s, when members of the city’s police department used the term to describe the chaos that broke out when droves of suburbanites flooded downtown to shop on the day after Thanksgiving. The American tradition swelled to monstrous proportions in the early 1980s, when grainy and horrifying footage of citizens knocking each other to the ground became a fixture of holiday-weekend local news.
These sharp-elbowed consumers were keen to scoop up Atari consoles, Swatch watches, and Cabbage Patch Kids, the doughy dolls with close-set eyes and the signature of a man named Xavier Roberts inked on their bums. Film-maker Andrew Jenks’s zesty Billion Dollar Babies, narrated by 80s child and Doogie Howser, M.D. star Neil Patrick Harris, chronicles a strange corner of recent history, bringing to life a time when little girls and boys were possessed by a mania over ugly dimpled playthings that made Raggedy Ann dolls look like supermodels by comparison.
But there was something irresistible about the Cabbage Patch Kids, who came with individual physiognomies and sets of adoption papers. “The factories were able to use technology ensuring that no two dolls were the same,” Jenks said of the Cabbage Patch craze. “And they were also vulnerable looking. You wanted to take care of your doll, to look after it.”
Jenks’s film is a nostalgia-fueled romp through the Reagan era, as well as a lively primer on the lore and legacy of a weird hit toy. “I didn’t want this to just be a Wikipedia recap of the Cabbage Patch Kids,” Jenks said, explaining why he sought out interviews with a panoply of designers, doll collectors and even Connie Chung, whose news segments contributed to the idolatry at the time.
Born in 1986, a few years too late to experience the Cabbage Patch insanity firsthand, Jenks has only the dimmest of recollections of Cabbage Patch mania. But when the production company Believe Entertainment approached him about signing on as a director for a film focused on the toy, one that would be an addition to the brainy-nostalgia shelf that includes works about Beanie Babies, BlackBerries and Barbie, he saw an opportunity to tell a story of egregious American hustle and hype.
“When you look up Cabbage Patch Kids, what quickly comes up are the melees and fights and people threatening each other, and that piqued my interest,” he said. Further research led him to discover another dark narrative within the world of Cabbage Patch Kids. Roberts, the Georgia-dwelling, cowboy hat-wearing, 21-year-old art student who presided over (and made millions off of) the Cabbage Patch craze was heavily indebted to a soft-spoken Louisville, Kentucky, folk artist named Martha Nelson Thomas. Her pudgy Little People dolls bore a striking resemblance to the items that would go on to appear on cereal boxes and US postage stamps and inspire an Eddie Murphy skit on Saturday Night Live. Roberts had already met Thomas at a folk art fair, admired her work, and paid a settlement when his copycat brand blew up. The intellectual property wars would rage on; Roberts waged his own litigious battle against the Garbage Pail Kids, whose chubby faces, he said, resembled “his” product.
In order to find Roberts, Jenks tracked down old high school yearbooks and was able to locate some of Roberts’s old classmates. He finally found his way to the tooshie-autographing man himself. “He hadn’t done an interview for 25 years or something,” said Jenks. “He was this mystery figure and you’d hear whispers like, Oh, I think he lives in France.” In fact, Roberts, who outfitted a mansion with a waterslide that led from a jacuzzi to an indoor pool one floor below at the height of his fame, was still on American soil. He agreed to an extensive interview, one in which he does not downplay the importance of Thomas’s role in his success. He seems more or less comfortable with the fact that he seized her idea and retrofitted it for the Reagan era.
In addition to being a talented sculptor and businessman, Roberts was a masterful mythmaker. The dolls that he brought to market did not originate in the cardboard boxes at Toys R Us. Per Cabbage Patch lore, a swarm of BunnyBees – flying creatures with bunny ears – came circling over a cabbage patch and sprinkled magic crystals over the leafy vegetables. When the babies were fully cooked, they emerged from flabby flaps in the cabbages.
This could all be witnessed at Baby Land General Hospital, the Georgia-based Disney-like destination where kids under the Cabbage spell could bear witness babies being delivered by a staff cosplaying doctors and nurses. (The doll hospital is still up and running.) There was a code of conduct, including the number one rule: don’t call them “dolls”. They were “babies”.
Once Roberts paid Thomas for the copyright to her invention, he jazzed it up with a compelling backstory and branding. Within a couple of years, he had sold 20m “babies”, worth $1.2bn, as Harris informs viewers in audible disbelief.
In addition to his having grown up in the Cabbage Patch era (and being known to many a former doll owner as child doctor Doogie Howser), Harris had a subversive quality that Jenks thought played well to the project. “I felt a narrator would work well if it was someone that would add to the story but not take over the story,” the director said. “Sometimes narrators make it about themselves, but he was interested in propelling the story forward.”
For Jenks, the Cabbage Patch phenomenon is a heightened example of senseless supply-and-demand economics. “They reinforced old-school Econ 101, how [hunger] and scarcity for products creates a fear,” he said. It was this scarcity mentality that sat at the root of the riots that broke out when shoppers wanted to get their hands on dolls at any cost.
Thomas was not interested in money. The dolls were her friends. When she died of ovarian cancer, in 2013, the front row at her funeral was occupied by her Little People.
In the film, Roberts is open about having learned the foundations from her. “The people who have seen [my film] so far, it seems like half the people walk out saying he categorically stole this, and the other half walk out and saying he was inspired and that’s how art works,” Jenks said. Roberts does not seem terribly conflicted about the course of events that led to his becoming a multimillionaire. “He was like, yeah, that’s where I got the idea. And we paid her money, and we created this amazing fantasy. And I’m proud of what we did.”
Billion Dollar Babies is out in US cinemas on 24 November and in the UK at a later date
