SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: Cabbage Patch Kids: Must-Have Toy of the Century

Summary

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Stuff You Should Know: SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: Cabbage Patch Kids: Must-Have Toy of the Century

Date: December 12, 2025
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Podcast: iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

In this festive installment of Stuff You Should Know’s “12 Days of Christmas Toys,” Josh and Chuck take a deep dive into one of the most frenzied toy crazes in history—Cabbage Patch Kids. With their unique blend of weird cuteness and folk-art roots, these dolls incited shopper stampedes, generated billions in sales, spawned parodies (hello, Garbage Pail Kids!), and ultimately left a complicated legacy that touches on originality, mass marketing, and nostalgia. The episode is a tapestry of fun anecdotes, 1980s pop culture, consumer mania, and the little-known true origin of the dolls.

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Main Themes

• Cabbage Patch Kids as a Cultural Phenomenon: The toy’s shocking popularity and its iconic status in Christmas shopping history.
• Origins and Evolution: From Appalachian folk art to mass-produced craze, tracing how the dolls came to be.
• The Darker Side: The true (and scandalous) story of their invention.
• Mass Marketing & The Christmas Toy Craze: How scarcity, mass media, and clever branding hit at just the right moment.
• Legacy and Parody: From Olympic mascots to Garbage Pail Kids and the cycles of nostalgia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Reflections & Cabbage Patch Memories (02:22–05:53)

• Chuck shares he owned a Cabbage Patch Kid named "Weber Dino":
  “I had one. His name was Weber Dino and he was very great. We had very fun times together.” (02:33, Chuck)
• Josh recalls destructive play and family lore around these weird, coveted dolls.
• Early collecting: Chuck reveals his sister owned one of the first handmade dolls from Xavier Roberts, bought in Georgia—a collector’s gem.

2. What Is a Cabbage Patch Kid? (06:13–07:37)

• Description:
  "It's a little doll that was a huge, huge deal in the Christmas of 1983." (06:13, Josh)
• Discussion of their divisive design:
  “They were described as open arm denied, seemingly dull witted, with mop haired faces only mothers could love—which I think is a pretty accurate description of a Cabbage Patch Kid, don’t you think?” (07:12, Josh)
• Absurd 1980s rumors: Reagan conspiracy theories and the dolls as cultural prep for "mutant" children in nuclear war—a tongue-in-cheek comment on Cold War era anxieties.

3. The Enchanted Origin Story (08:35–11:33)

• Fanciful myth:
  Josh recounts the official Cabbage Patch lore: magical “bunny bees” pollinating cabbages, babies “born” from the earth, and Xavier Roberts as the helpful boy who found them.
• Real-life geography: Babyland General Hospital, the fictional “hospital” in Cleveland, Georgia, still operates as the dolls' homebase.

4. The True Artistic Roots (11:33–15:41)

• The real backstory:
  “The official story is that Xavier Roberts… came across a German fabric sculpture technique called needle molding… and he did just that starting in 1977.” (10:35, Josh)
• Early "Little People" dolls: Handmade, sold via craft fairs and the now-famed gift shop at Unicoi State Park for a then-not-insignificant $40.
• Marketing twist: The innovation was about adoption rather than purchase—every doll came with a birth certificate.

5. Going Mainstream: Coleco & Mass Manufacturing (16:57–22:39)

• Coleco partnership:
  With demand exploding, Roberts licensed production to Coleco in 1982.
• Redesign for mass market: Vinyl heads replaced hand-sewn originals. More diversity in skin, eye, hair color, and facial features to “adopt” individuality at scale.
• Price point: $30 adoption fee—about $78 today.

"They figured out the best way to mass produce these things was to get rid of that hand sewn head. That was a real problem. That's what took the most time. It's also frankly what gave those early dolls all the personality. ... A lot of that was lost when they went to the plastic heads, but they did keep the cloth bodies." (18:42–19:35, Chuck)

6. The 1983-84 Christmas Frenzy & Supply Mania (22:39–30:26)

• Demand outstripped supply: 3 million dolls sold in 1983, yet still insufficient. Parents physically fought each other in stores ([24:34], Josh).
• Media sensation: Footage of the Zayre department store manager wielding a baseball bat to control crowds is legendary ([27:03], Josh).

"He's shouting at the customers. He's like, SHUT UP. LISTEN TO ME... It's one of the worst forms of crowd management anyone's ever attempted, ever. And it was caught on film." (27:03, Josh)

• Urban legend meets reality: Milwaukee DJs fooled listeners with a fake “bomber drop” of dolls at a stadium—dozens showed up, gloves in hand ([29:09], Chuck).

7. Sustained Success and Cultural Offshoots (30:26–34:36)

• Repeat phenomenon: Sold out again in 1984—$2 billion in sales.
• Pop culture appearances:
  • Christopher Xavier Cabbage Patch Kid flying on a NASA shuttle (31:06).
  • Mascot for the U.S. Olympic Team in 1992.

8. Decline, Parody, and Nostalgia (34:36–38:18)

• Changing hands: Coleco, then Mattel, Hasbro, Toys R Us, and now Play Along Inc.
• Unsuccessful variants: Talking, swimming, and “Snack Time” dolls (the latter recalled for “eating” children’s hair).
• Nostalgic revivals: Modern iterations mirror the originals; new generations raise their own “adopted” Kids.

"Over the past 32 years there have been 130 million of these babies born, which would make them the 10th most populous country in the world!" (38:18, Chuck)

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9. The TRUE Origin Story: Martha Nelson Thomas (41:38–47:35)

• Revealing the truth:
  Martha Nelson Thomas, a soft-spoken Kentucky folk artist, was making “Little Doll Babies” years before Roberts.
• "Ripped off a lady” – Chuck’s blunt assessment ([41:42]).
• Thomas briefly licensed her dolls to Roberts, but disagreed on prices and pulled out when he hiked prices. Roberts then began duplicating her design.
• Thomas didn’t copyright her work (she considered them “adoptions,” not products), making legal redress difficult.
• After about eight years of lawsuits, Roberts settled for an undisclosed sum. Thomas was satisfied, but the public record continues to credit Roberts as “creator.”

"If you Google Martha Nelson Thomas little dolls and you see this very now famous picture... this black and white picture of this woman surrounded by what are clearly and obviously Cabbage Patch Kids." (42:20, Chuck)

"She didn’t copyright these things. … She didn’t want to do that. … Little Chuck has an Xavier Roberts hand signature on his butt." (45:34, Chuck)

10. The Garbage Pail Kids Offshoot (49:04–52:44)

• Trademark lawsuit:
  Topps' Garbage Pail Kids (GPK) directly parodied CPK’s look and branding.
• Enduring impact:
  “They sold a ton of them. … That really goes to show you just how big Cabbage Patch Kids were, that it could sustain a cottage industry for a parody, even. That’s how big Cabbage Patch Kids were in the 90s.” (52:44, Josh)
• Notable GPK contributors: Art Spiegelman, later known for “Maus.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• (On the dolls’ look)
  "Open arm denied, seemingly dull witted, with mop haired faces only mothers could love."
  — Josh quoting a 1986 journal article (07:12)

• (On Christmas frenzy)
  "People were angry because there weren’t enough of them to go around. … They were throwing elbows, they were getting physical trying to get these dolls.”
  — Josh (24:34)

• (On lawsuits & legacy)
  "It's still sort of a sad story to me that this man came along and ripped off this lady's design and then later on complained that he was getting ripped off."
  — Chuck (47:43)

• (On GPK)
  “They were deformed, and they were plagued and diseased, and they had names like Atom Bomb and Boney Tony and, I guess, Squash Josh.”
  — Chuck (50:48)

• (On Cabbage Patch Kids population)
  "Over the past 32 years there have been 130 million of these babies born, which would if they were real little people, make them the 10th most populous country in the world.”
  — Chuck (38:18)

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Timeline of Key Segments

• 02:22–05:53 – Personal Cabbage Patch Kids stories and historical price tags
• 06:13–11:33 – What are Cabbage Patch Kids? Official and magical origin stories
• 11:33–15:41 – Early days: from folk art to Unicoi gift shop
• 16:57–22:39 – Coleco enters: mass production, branding, design changes
• 22:39–30:26 – The 1983 shopping frenzy, scarcity, and media mayhem
• 34:36–38:18 – Rise, fall, and attempts at reinvention; nostalgia-driven revival
• 41:38–47:35 – Martha Nelson Thomas: the true creator’s story
• 49:04–52:44 – Garbage Pail Kids' parody and the copyright fight

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Tone & Atmosphere

The conversation is nostalgic, irreverent, and warm, peppered with 1980s pop culture references, playful ribbing, and the unmistakably affable grit Josh and Chuck bring to every SYSK episode. They balance fun storytelling with hard truths about art, business, and invention, always keeping it engaging and approachable.

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For New Listeners

Whether you grew up cherishing your own Cabbage Patch Kid, or merely wondered what all the fuss was about, this episode delivers the origin, the madness, the controversy, and the enduring charm of one of the most famous toys of the 20th century. It’s a perfect slice of quirky American holiday history—warts, weird rumors, and all.

Transcript

[Josh Clark]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

Hey everybody, it's my turn now.

[Josh Clark]

It's Josh. And for this episode on our Stuff.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

Youf should know 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist. We're talking about Cabbage Patch Kids, one of the all time top contenders for.

[Josh Clark]

A must have Christmas toy.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

I had one. His name was Weber Dino and he was very Great. We had very fun times together.

[Josh Clark]

Important times. At any rate, whether you had a.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

Cabbage Patch Kid or not, I think.

[Josh Clark]

You'Re going to enjoy this episode.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

So turn up your cocoa, throw some marshmallows in there, and enjoy this.

[Josh Clark]

Up.

[Podcast Intro/Outro Voice]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. Josh. Malcolm Clark. There's Charles Wayne Bryant. This is stuff you should know about Cabbage Patch Kids who have two names, which is why I just did that.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. This remarkably the third time we've talked about Cabbage Patch Kids on this show.

[Josh Clark]

I only remember one other time. When was the third time? Or the second time, I guess.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, the last time was not even a year ago on our episode on Must have Christmas Gifts. And then.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's all I remember. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then while I was telling the story of my Cabbage Patch Kid experience, he said, yes, you've told everyone this story before. So I think this will be the third time that we hear these stories.

[Josh Clark]

I thought you didn't have a Cabbage Patch Kid.

[Chuck Bryant]

So you don't remember the other two times I told the story?

[Josh Clark]

No, you got to tell it again. It's called a hat trick, baby.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, my sister has one of the first, like 75 of them of the Little People dolls.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

That she bought in Georgia when she was a kid.

[Josh Clark]

Now I. Now I know why it didn't stick with me. Because I didn't understand what the heck you were talking about. Now I totally get it, and I think it will stay with me forever. Chuck, when we do our fourth, fifth, and sixth podcasts on Cabbage Patch Kids, I will be the one telling that story. How about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, and you also told the story of yours that you ripped the head off and gave it a Mohawk.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Weber Dino met a pretty terrible demise.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I have two of them myself that my mom every once in a while says, hey, do you want these? And I say, no, I don't. I don't think they're worth much money. And I don't even know if my sister's is worth a lot of money now, even though it's hand signed and one of the first ones, I don't think the market is as robust as it was at one point.

[Josh Clark]

So was hers a Coleco Little People or is Xavier Roberts, like, original Appalachian artworks Little People?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, hers was one of the handmade Xavier Roberts craft fair dolls.

[Josh Clark]

I think those go for like 1, 2, 3, maybe $2,000, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I guess it depends on where you look. I saw the one of mine that was one of those originals and it wasn't one of the first 100, but people were asking like 150 bucks on eBay for those.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm surprised to see that. Like, from what I've seen, if you really want the big bucks, it's the original Xavier Roberts little people. But we're probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit because some people are probably like, what's a Cabbage Patch Kid? Right, Right.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

So.

[Josh Clark]

Well, we'll tell everybody what a Cabbage Patch Kid is. It's a little doll that was a huge, huge deal in the Christmas of 1983. And like Chuck said, we talked about this on. I guess it was our. I think it was our Christmas episode. Or was it a different standalone episode from last year?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I think the first time we did it was a Christmas episode. And then last year it was in November. It was just mustard Christmas toys.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. So that's worth listening to. But In December of 1983, Christmas of 1983, everybody was going crazy for these dolls. But at the same time there was like. Because it was such a huge craze and they were so a part of like popular culture at the moment. They were on the news every night. People were doing just absolutely crazy things to get their hands on these dolls for their kids. There was a lot of talk about, well, what are these things? They're so ugly that they're cute. And other people thought, well, no, they' just ugly. There's a journal article that came out in 1986 in the semantics journal, et cetera. And the Cabbage Patch Kids were described as open arm denied, seemingly dull witted, with mop haired faces only mothers could love. Which I think is pretty. It's a pretty accurate description of a Cabbage Patch Kid, don't you think?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So on that there was. This is something I never knew. Apparently there was a rumor years after the fact that the design was managed by Ronald Reagan because he wanted to get Americans used to what mutant offspring might look like if we ever go to. If the big one ever drops and we go to war with the Ruskies, we might want to get used to our babies looking like this. So let's just. It's sort of in the classic Hollywood, like, you know, there are theories that that's why we make UFO movies. They're commissioned by the government to get people sort of adjusted to the idea that one day there's gonna be aliens walking around.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly. But that's probably not the case. Ronald Reagan probably didn't have anything to do with it. But that's just such an 80s thing. Cabbage Patch Kids, Ronald Reagan in nuclear war with the USSR. That's about, like, the greatest 80s combination I've ever heard of in my life.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, pretty good.

[Josh Clark]

So if you go onto the Cabbage Patch Kids website, you'll find the enchanting, magical where Cabbage Patch Kids came from or how they came into our human world. And it goes something like this, that when he was a young boy, Xavier Roberts was wandering around the Appalachian Mountains, and he saw what is called a bunny bee, which is a magical bee that or magical bunny that can fly around like. Buzzes around like a bee. And he followed it, and the bunny bee went through a waterfall. And Xavier Roberts went and looked and saw that behind the waterfall there was a tunnel. And he went into the tunnel, being an inquisitive type of Appalachian young boy. And when he came out on the other side of the tunnel, he was clearly in some sort of enchanted land because there were a bunch of bunny bees flying around over a cabbage patch, sprinkling some sort of magical dust. And Xavier noticed that when the dust hit the cabbage, the cabbage would start to move and a little baby would be born from it, a Cabbage Patch Kid. And one of those kids, a kid named Otis Lee, came up to Xavier and said, hey, will you take me and all of my friends over to your human world and help us find homes? And so Xavier Roberts agreed, and he founded Babyland General Hospital for the purpose of adopting out Cabbage Patch Kids. And that's where it all came from.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Babyland General, right here in Cleveland, Georgia. And I just so happened to have driven by there, but two days ago. Oh, yeah, yeah. We went on a waterfall hike the family did on Sunday.

[Josh Clark]

Did you see a bunny bee?

[Chuck Bryant]

Didn't see a bunny bee, but we drove right by Babyland General, and Emily was like, did you know that was there? I was like, yeah, I've been there. So of course I knew it was there. But that's where Xavier Roberts went to college. He went to College at Truett McConnell there in Cleveland. So that was the connection, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Right. Yeah. If you want to kind of take it down a notch as far as magical enchantment goes, the official story is that Xavier Roberts, while he was at Truett McConnell, while he was studying art there, he came across a German fabric sculpture technique from the 19th century called needle molding. And if you've ever seen, you know, that that really famous Tomato pincushion, chuck, in the 70s. So you know how like the top, the creases in the top of the tomato are made by, like taut thread pulled through together to kind of create that molded look that, from what I can tell is a form of needle molding. But somehow Xavier Roberts was like, I really like sculpture, and this is a form of soft sculpture. I also like quilting, and this kind of has to do with quilting. I'm going to get into this and we're going to figure out how to make baby dolls using this needle molding technique. And he did just that starting in 1977.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And for those of you that want to throw your car into a ditch right now because you're screaming about the story because you know the true story, just put a pin in it. We're going to get around to it.

[Josh Clark]

That was very merciful of you, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I didn't want people to think that we didn't know. But in 1977, Xavier Roberts, who sort of looked like a. Sort of like a shorter haired Kenny Rogers type, wore a cowboy hat and had this beard and he developed these. They were, like you said, soft sculpture, but they were dolls called Little People. And here was the sort of hitch that really drove kids wild is that they were not dolls that you buy. They were little people that you adopt. So you got adoption birth certificates. It was a. It was a brilliant idea that he had put a pin in it. And he sold these things, Little People originals. He went to arts and crafts shows. He sold them. We bought ours at Unicoi Lodge at Unicoi State park in a gift shop there. So that was the kind of place that would carry this kind of stuff. They were about $40. And I remember distinctly that my father could not imagine paying $40 for a dollar.

[Tour Announcer]

And.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think we even left without little Chuck. And he went back because he felt so bad about how crestfallen my sister was and bought the doll later on for a Christmas gift or something, if my memory serves me. But it was a lot of money. 40 bucks was a lot of money for a doll back then.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it was probably getting pretty close to 100 bucks. And I mean, who goes to Unicoi State Park's gift shop and expects to drop 100 bucks on a piece of folk art that's really just a b. You know, I can kind of see.

[Chuck Bryant]

He thought he was going to have to get a Michelle miniature license plate for 250.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. Exactly. And when you go in with an expectation like that and you are faced with a hundred dollar soft sculpture payment that you have to make. That's a big shock. And sometimes somebody needs to get in their car and drive home and think about it before they can accept that.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

So that, like you said, that's exactly the kind of place you would have bought this. You could have also found them at, like, craft fairs or something. And fact, Xavier Roberts won first place at the Osceola Art show in Kissimmee, Florida, for little people that he named Dexter, which is one of the most uncanny, haunting, horrid dolls you'll ever see in your life. But it helped kind of generate some buzz. And at that point, he was like, you know what this is? Things are kind of going well. People are paying 40 bucks for to adopt one of these little people. I'm winning first place prizes. I'm going to get together some friends. And he founded what's known as original Appalachian artworks. And they, they are the ones that actually opened up Babyland General. They took an old medical center in Cleveland, which is super creepy, that they, they, they took an abandoned hospital and opened it for. It's basically like a doll store. Really creepy if you step back and just look at the contours of the whole thing. But it didn't look creepy, though. No, no, it didn't. I'm just saying, if you just look at the words on paper and put it like that, it does seem very creepy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. When you think hospital, it was like a little house.

[Josh Clark]

And it was the opposite of creepy. Like, it was delightful. And I guess it still is because, I mean, it's still in operation today. But people would show up and like, there were, like, the people who worked there were dressed up as nurses and doctors, and they would help the babies be born from cabbage. From cabbages. Then they would be incubated. They were preemies that were born. Like, it was a big deal operation to take this, this idea that you were adopting a Cabbage Patch Kid rather than buying a doll and then like adding that whole extra dimension to it of going to Babyland General to do it, really helped generate a lot of buzz for these things. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I should say that my sister's doll, Chuck, who was. They come with their name. She didn't name it after me, but Chuck had. You know, if you see the early versions of these things, like you said, it was kind of horrific looking. They weren't the cutest dolls at all. Chuck had a very crooked hairline. Like it looked like it was made by someone who didn't fully know what they were doing. His little yarn hairline was, like, a good 3 inches higher on one side of his forehead than the other, which, again, further. My dad did not see the charm in this. He was like, it's not even made well, and I gotta pay $40 for these things. But supposedly, with the preemies, Xavier Roberts is given some credit to just raising awareness for premature babies, because the preemies in Cabbage Patch Land were so cute. They also had C sections, Cabbage sections. And by the time 1980 rolls around, he's selling a pretty good amount of these things. But it really explodes in popular culture. From sort of the early 80s, he was featured on the TV show Real People, which I watched a lot as a kid, made Newsweek, made the Wall Street Journal. And so the press is starting to kind of come around, and these things are just getting more and more popular at this point.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, a lot of those stories just kind of focused on people who were paying a lot more than the original retail price to start collecting these dolls. So there was like a whole underground cult market that was developing around people, and it became very apparent that Xavier Roberts was not going to be able to keep up with supplies. So he started looking for some help, and he found it in 1982. And we will talk all about that partnership made in heaven, starting after these messages. Hey. Okay, chuck. So it's 1982, and the little people are just going bonkers. They're flying off of shelves. They can't keep them in stock anywhere. They're selling them. Unicoi State park is on the phone every day being like, send us more, send us more. We don't care what the hairline looks like. We gotta have them. And so Xavier Roberts started looking for some, like, a legit toy manufacturer to help him out. And he found it in Coleco, who had made a name, I guess, around the same time as maybe a little bit before this year before maybe as the people who came out with Pac Man. So they were riding high by this time, and they said, I think there's something to these little people, and we're going to buy in here. And so Xavier Roberts partnered with Coleco, and the rest of the story just kind of. It takes off like a rocket from there. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So this was in 1982. And at first, Coleco said, you know what? We're going to keep calling them Little People. We think that's a good name, even though it wasn't. So they stuck with the name. They figured out the best way to mass produce These things was to get rid of that hand sewn head. That was a real problem. That's what took the most time. It's also frankly what gave those early dolls all the personality. A lot of that was lost when they went to the plastic heads, but they did keep the cloth bodies. They machine produced these vinyl heads. They sized the doll down a little bit to about 16 inches. The initial dolls were pretty big. They varied in size obviously depending on how old they were when you adopted them. But they were large. Like Chuck was a big doll. The two I have are big dolls.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they were like the size where if they were possess and came alive, they could smother you. Like you'd be in big trouble if they came alive while you were asleep.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, big time. But sizing them down made a big difference. Cause then you could just box them up, get more shelf space that way. And they were smart early on too to realize that kids wanted a lot of variety. They wanted different ethnicities, they wanted different skin color, different shapes. They wanted some with freckles, some with dimples, obviously different eye color and hair color and stuff like that. And that was one of the big selling points is it wasn't just this samesies mass produced doll that every kid could have the same one. Every kid wanted a different version.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, because I mean, that was part of the whole marketing that you were adopting your own individual kid, your own Cabbage Patch Kid who had his or her own name, his or her own specific birth date. He or she was a unique little baby that you were adopting. So the idea that you could take different head molds and different facial features and different types of hair and you had like a few different from each category. You suddenly had like millions of combinations that you could randomly put together. It continued that uniqueness that was like part of the brand from the beginning and like you said, was like part of like the big. The big thing that like made this craze so, so huge. You know, they were very smart to identify that as a big part of the marketing and then figure out a way to carry it on while also mass producing these things. It was pretty clever on Kaliko's part.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And it was also clever to change the name. Little people just didn't have legs basically in the end. And they thought Cabbage patch Kids, they were born in the cabbage patch. And you know, looking back, it's a pretty brilliant name because it ties into being adopted, being born in the little cabbage. And it was pretty brilliant. I think it was the kind of name that you could end up making into a bunch of other things, which they did, and we're going to talk about that. But I don't think little people quite had the legs to do that.

[Josh Clark]

So Coleco also figured out that there was a really good sweet spot that even if you couldn't really afford it, you would still stretch to reach that point. And they started adopting these. The adoption fees for Cabbage Patch Kids came to about $30, which is $78 in today's money. And then they, they took their, you know, comparatively much larger clout and context in the media and started getting way more press for Cabbage Patch Kids than Xavier Roberts ever managed to generate for little people. Which I have to say, looking, looking back though, Xavier Roberts did some really good work as just some dude from Cleveland, Georgia who was hand sewing dolls. I mean, he got some pretty good coverage.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, that should have been very niche and regional, right?

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. And it wasn't. It became a big deal, but Coleco just put it to shame. They, they, they got a lot of press, a lot of interest drummed up for Cabbage Patch Kids. And all of that kind of culminated in a December 12, 1983 edition of Newsweek when there was a Cabbage Patch. A little girl with her Cabbage Patch Kid on the COVID of that edition. Just in time for the Christmas buying season.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right, because every kid in America was reading Newsweek and saying, mom, dad, look, it's on the COVID We have to get one.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. And that was at the very quaint time when you would just start Christmas shopping two weeks before Christmas rather than eight months before Christmas.

[Chuck Bryant]

So Coleco. And by the way, just to save listener males, Coleco did not make Pac Man. And we just want to save you from that fate.

[Josh Clark]

Is that right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think it was Namco, if I remember correctly.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, they did do video games, but.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, well, thanks for saving me.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no. There'll be plenty of people that write that probably sent the email before I even got to this and that want to retract the email, but that's okay. So they started selling these things like hotcakes. They sold 3 million plus by the end of 1983. And like so many Christmas items that came before and after, it is sort of the frenzy is determined by availability and supply. And they were underprepared and they could not keep up with demand. They weren't like the Rubik's Cube where they just made millions and millions and millions of these things. And it became a supply problem, and it became a really big Deal. And this is. This is the first toy where people were angry because there weren't enough of them to go around.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And I mean, they still made 3 million of them. And they ran out, like, very quickly. And when you say people were angry, like they were throwing elbows, they were pushing one another. They were like they were getting physical trying to get these dolls. And now it's like, well, yeah, that sounds like a Christmas, like, must have Christmas toy. People hadn't done that up to this point. This is very new. And so in addition to, you know, the normal press they were getting, these dolls were also ending up on, like, the nightly news a lot that December with stories about how parents were, like, driving across state lines to get one of those Cabbage Patch Kids. Or there was a story about a post carrier in Kansas City, I think, who flew to London to buy one, which I don't understand why, because London had its own frenzy going on as well. There was a whole lot of stuff going down that hadn't really gone down before Cabbage Patch Kids came along that Christmas.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I wonder if that became a technique to sell more things was to either falsely, kind of falsely say that you don't have enough.

[Josh Clark]

I think we covered that in the Must have Toys episode. That, that is. That is a technique that they use that they purposefully under produce to create scarcity.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but then you can't sell as many. I would think it'd be better to produce the regular amount and then just say you didn't. And then they're like, but we found a warehouse that we didn't know about.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because you still want to move these dolls. I mean, Rubik's cube, they sold 200 million Rubik's Cubes in the first few years.

[Josh Clark]

I know that's nuts because they were.

[Chuck Bryant]

Just pumping those things out.

[Public Podcast Sponsor]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Well, at the very least, I think Coleco was genuinely caught under prepared. I don't think it was a. In any way, shape or form, a purposeful.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, no, of course.

[Josh Clark]

Scarcity. I think it was just straight up scarcity. And there was. There was. There's this footage from Zales department or no, sorry, Zayer Department Store, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Right. This is in Wilkes Barre. Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, or Wilkes Barracks. I've also seen Pennsylvania, but there's this manager who I know we talked about before, but you gotta see this guy. He's the manager of the Zehr Department store in December of 1983, at least. And this guy's, like, unhinged. Have you seen footage of him?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I Saw him last year.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, you gotta see him again. I gotta describe him again. Cause he struck a chord with me this year that he didn't last year. But he's holding a baseball bat very famously. But if you listen to what he's doing, he's shouting at the customers. He's like, shut up. Listen to me. And he's, like, waving this baseball bat. And there's this crowd of people filling every available inch of this department store wanting Cabbage Patch Kids. And this guy decides that the way to satisfy the need is to just start tossing them into the crowd. So the crowd is, like, jostling, going crazy, trying to catch these Cabbage Patch Kids, while the manager of the department store is screaming at them, holding a baseball bat. It's one worst forms of crowd management anyone's ever attempted, ever. And it was caught on film. And you got to see it yourself.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he was. He wasn't doing his best work that day. I think that's. We can all agree on that.

[Josh Clark]

He really wasn't agreed.

[Chuck Bryant]

A lot of times the problems were so big that they didn't even want people in the stores. So they would say, like, we can't have another fistfight in here. So what you do is you can arrive and get a coupon, and then you go around back to the loading dock, and we'll distribute them there. The secondary market started booming. There were actual stores that were buying them up and then marking them up. And then there was the black market that really, really marked them up. And this was not WKRP in Cincinnati, but it was very much in that rich tradition of DJs, kind of conning people into acting like fools. And this happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when some local DJs there said, there's gonna be a B26 bomber plane, and it's gonna drop 2,000 dolls over the brewers baseball stadium. And all you gotta do is show up with your baseball glove to catch these babies and hold up your credit card so the pilot can take a picture and charge you for it. And, of course, this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard. But that still didn't stop.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

A couple of dozen people from showing up with their baseball glove and credit card.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. In negative 7 degree wind chill, which is very cold. If you're in the centigrade parts of the world, that's very cold.

[Chuck Bryant]

They're used to it.

[Josh Clark]

I guess so. But, yeah, the fact that people would do that, I double checked to make sure that that wasn't an urban legend. And it definitely is not. Like that really did happen in Milwaukee in 1983. That was like the level the craze reached. And what's really to Coleco's credit is they managed to keep the party going for a full nother year. Because in Christmas 1984, Cabbage Patch Kids were again, the must have toy. And in just 1984 alone, not 1983, Christmas season, 1984, that year they sold $2 billion worth of cabbage patch kids. In 1984. Money.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, this was. I think one of the things that made it truly unique is, like I said, the Rubik's Cube for a few years, but generally, as these things go, it's sort of like you can count on the one Christmas season if you're overlapping to the next Christmas season. That is a grand slam home run as far as toys go.

[Josh Clark]

Absolutely. So one of the outcomes of that, of being a toy that manages to span two Christmas seasons that thoroughly, is they become, you know, iconic and they start popping up in other places. Like there was one named Christopher Xavier who's a very famous Cabbage Patch Kid, I guess as Cabbage Patch Kids can be famous. And he actually rode on the space shuttle on a genuine legit NASA space shuttle mission in 1985. And that reminds me, Chuck, have you seen the mini doc about. About the Challenger?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, not yet. Is it good?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, boy, it is really good. I mean, it's a high caliber documentary to begin with, but then like, the emotionality that it manages to dredge up is really. It's a really well done documentary in every way. I highly recommend it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Where's that showing?

[Josh Clark]

That one's on Netflix, I believe. I'm almost positive. And I think it's just called Challenger and then probably Colon something. But it's good. It's by. I think. I think JJ isn't bad Robot. JJ Abrams Production company. Yeah, they did it. They were one of the companies that handled it. But it's very good.

[Chuck Bryant]

I did watch Enola Holmes on your recommendation.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. What'd you think?

[Chuck Bryant]

I liked it a lot. It was good. It was just a good, breezy, light, fun movie to watch, which is just what we needed the night we watched it for sure.

[Josh Clark]

But it was smart too, wasn't it?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it was smart enough. And she's just great. Millie Bobby Brown is. She's got a lot of personality and lovable charisma. So she's great to watch. And it's fun to see her outside of playing 11 with all her personality able to come out like that.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Yeah. Well, I'm very glad that you liked it because I think we would have had some sort of awkward wedge between us for the rest of our lives.

[Chuck Bryant]

You haven't seen the octopus stock yet? No, I did. Oh, okay. So I think if we're gonna talk about octopus, my octopus teacher, you should just turn down your volume for about a minute and you won't have it spoiled.

[Josh Clark]

All right, fair enough. Fair enough. And actually, I think that guy is terrible. I think he's a terrible human being for not rescuing his companion friend on two different occasions.

[Chuck Bryant]

Really?

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And I know that he's a documentarian, so they're not supposed to interfere. I've seen Drop Dead Gorgeous, I know the rule, but this is different. He crossed the line. He crossed boundaries. When he became friends with that octopus, he stopped being a documentarian, started being its friend. And then he, as his friend, wasn't there for his friend when it was attacked, not once, but twice. And I really dislike that guy for that reason.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, interesting. Well, I don't concur, but I guess that's part of the beauty of that movie. You can have different takes, but there's.

[Josh Clark]

Not a gulf between us, a wedge between us now is there?

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, did you hate the documentary?

[Josh Clark]

No, I otherwise thought it was amazing.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, well then there's no.

[Josh Clark]

Gulp. Amazing. It really was, really was great. Except for that one thing times two.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, no wedge.

[Josh Clark]

So let's see. Back to Cabbage Patch Kids. There was another kind of landmark they reached in 1992 when they became, I think maybe Christopher Xavier became the official mascot of the U.S. olympic team and got to go to Barcelona with them. Yeah, I mean, this is pretty impressive.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is 10 plus years after these things were the hot ticket, you know, which is crazy, crazy time. They were on a postage stamp. Eventually, of course, though, his star, well, not his star. It was more than Christopher Xavier. But their collective star was going to fade. Like all toys and all dolls. We've all seen Toy Story, we know what happens in the end. It never completely went away, though. Coleco eventually was like, we gotta offload these guys. We're gonna sell it. We're in the video game industry big time. And so we gotta.

[Josh Clark]

Have you heard of Pac Man?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, the video game industry starts tanking, so they're trying to guess, recoup some money on their investment. So they sell the Cabbage Patch Kid license. And then this is not before trying a few things. They tried talking Cabbage Patch Kids and stuff like that, but eventually they went bankrupt in the 80s and the license moved on to different people over the years. Mattel, Hasbro, Toys R Us, and then right now it's owned by Play Along Inc. Which it just seems like those are. Seems like there's a lot of toy companies named weird things like that now.

[Josh Clark]

I agree, I agree. And I find it unsettling. Like their slogan should be, we're watching you.

[Chuck Bryant]

It just seems like we talk about those a lot. Like, there's still the giants like Hasbro and Mattel. But I feel like when we've done our toy podcast, it seems like the newer ones, they don't have these sort of name brands that you think of as toys.

[Josh Clark]

No, I know. They all sound like Russian fronts. It's really weird and unsettling and kind of off putting.

[Chuck Bryant]

And all the C's are K's. It's really strange.

[Josh Clark]

It's very sinister. So, yeah, along the lines, like, all of these companies were like, we've got to figure out a way to capture lightning in a bottle again a second time. That just doesn't happen. It's hard enough the first time. And so they tried different things. Like you said. Coleco tried that talking one. Didn't work. I think Hasbro had one that swam, which is kind of impressive.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

And then Mattel had one that they had to withdraw. It was called Cabbage Patch Snack Time Kids. And they, these things would, like, eat like, they came with, like, French fries or something, and you'd put like the French fry in their mouth and they'd start chewing and the French fry would go down their throat and actually come out the back of their head and fall into their backpack. And then you could feed it to them again, which is great and fine. But if you're a little kid and you get your fingers in there, your hair in there, that Cabbage Patch doll is just going to keep eating and eating and you're going to start screaming and your parents are going to be like, I don't want this doll anymore. Give me my money back.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And these things also declined in quality. Think of the mid-90s. Mattel shrunk them even more, down to 14 inches. And they were like, forget these cloth bodies even. We're going to make the whole thing vinyl. And people didn't like that at all. And it took, I think, the 20th anniversary in 2003. It took toys R Us, who took over the rights at that point, to jack these things back up to 18 inches. They had cloth bodies. I think they had an 18 inch and a 20 inch. And then they finally brought back those cloth bodies. Which were a big deal. And they debuted them at their flagship store in New York City and they sort of recaptured the magic a little bit. And it's about this time, and I think a year later is when Play along licensed it. But it's about this time that people started buying them again a little bit for nostalgia. Like kids that grew up with them were now buying them for their kids. And I think they sold okay. It's nothing like they were at first, but they're still around.

[Josh Clark]

No. Yeah. And Play Along Inc. If that is their real name, was very wise to basically recreate the original 1983 style cabbage patch Kids. Like they're basically indistinguishable from the ones that the people who are buying them now for their kids had when they were kids. And it's like you said, it's all nostalgia and they're doing pretty good trade on it without having to reinvent the wheel.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. A little quick stat before we take a break. That is remarkable. Over the past 32 years there have been 130 million of these babies born which would if they were real little people, it would make them the 10th most populous country in the world with one being born every 6.8 seconds. But having said that, we're gonna take a little break and right after this we are going to tell you the true origin story of the little.

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[Josh Clark]

Hey everybody, we're hitting the road again.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

Starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026. And eventually Canada will tell you year dates too.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

We're going to do at least three.

[Tour Announcer]

Legs and the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the paramount theater on January 27th. We're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th, and then finally back at SketchFest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

Yep. And then April 16th, 17th and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry, you can get all the info you need and buy [e-mail], click on the tour button and thank us later.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, Chuck, I'm curious. Why did you say true like that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, if you listen to the show a year ago, it's already ruined. But we didn't go into that much depth. Here's what really happened though. Xavier Roberts ripped off a lady. It's the easiest way to say it. There was a very kind hearted, soft spoken folk artist named Martha Nelson Thomas. Went to art school in the 70s. She experimented with the same exact German soft sculpture molding, and she created what was called little doll babies. If you Google Martha Nelson Thomas little dolls and you see this very now famous picture when it, you know, hasn't been swept under the rug by Xavier Roberts people, and maybe Coleco's people. This black and white picture of this woman surrounded by what are clearly and obviously Cabbage Patch Kids.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And there's actually, funny enough, there's another famous picture of Xavier Roberts taken probably about 10 years after that. And he's surrounded by straight up Cabbage Patch Kids, you know, with the vinyl heads and everything. But the fact that that picture was taken of Martha Nelson Thomas in 1975 is photographic documentary evidence that she is the person who came up with Cabbage Patch Kids. Not Cabbage Patch Kids, but what Cabbage Patch Kids were based on. And if that were it, if that were the photo, if that was the only evidence whatsoever, you'd be like. Like, that's a. I don't know. People can have similar ideas. You know, there's only one, you know, old German technique called needle molding. Other people could have found it, but that is not the only evidence. And in fact, Xavier Roberts has gone on public record saying that he was inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas, but he changed it enough. But if you go and look at the actual story and the facts along the way, and there's actually a pretty good 16 minute long Vice documentary on this whole thing that you will see that it went way beyond him just being inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas work. And in fact, like you said, he basically ripped her off.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So he. From what I could tell, and there's a bunch of different sort of versions of this online, but from what I saw is they actually did have an agreement early on that he would sell these for her. He said, hey, these are great. Can I take some of these to my gift shops and sell them for you? And I think I could sell a lot more than you could. And for a little while, they did have an agreement, but as it turns out, he ended up marking them up and charging too much money. And she wasn't happy about that. She was like, no, These shouldn't cost $40. It's 1978, for God's sake. And that's a doll. And he's like, yeah, but they're.

[Josh Clark]

What do you think this is, Unicoi State Park?

[Chuck Bryant]

They're handmade, and you should put a value on your talents. And they had a disagreement about that. And she said, you know what? Forget it. I don't want you to sell these anymore. He follows up with a letter saying, well, you know what? If you don't let me sell your dolls, he basically said, I'm just gonna start making my own. And that's exactly what he did.

[Josh Clark]

Supposedly he wrote her a letter. And I don't remember who mentions it in the Vice documentary, but basically they said that in the letter. He said, if I can't sell your dolls, I will sell something just like them. And she apparently was like, whatever and just went her own way. She was satisfied to have her dolls back and probably thought she was done with the matter. And then supposedly one of her friends said, hey, I saw your little doll babies for sale at the Atlanta airport. Way to go. She said, I'm not selling these at the Atlanta Airport. And apparently that's when she knew she had a big problem on her hands and found out that Xavier Roberts had come up with the little people dollar that were just the spitting image of her little doll babies.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So she filed a lawsuit that went on for years. I think by the time they were selling out in stores in 1983, she was about seven years into this lawsuit, and for her, it wasn't. She asked for, I think, a million dollars, but she said it wasn't about the money. She was like, I don't want to see this as a commodity, and I don't want to be ripped off, and I don't want to want this guy to come along and basically not have the same respect for these little dolls that I had. And if you look at the court case, you think, you know, open and shut. She's got this picture from 75. They had a prior relationship. She's got this letter that says where he basically says he's gonna rip her off. But she didn't copyright these things. And you would have had to copyright because they were all handmade and they were all, I guess, unique unto themselves. You would have had to copyright and sign or stamp each doll. And she didn't want to do that. And he had no problem doing it ours. Little Chuck has an Xavier Roberts hand signature on his butt. If you pull down his little corduroy shorts.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It's one of the famous things about Cabbage Patch Kids, aside from their distinctive faces, is that each one of them has Xavier Roberts signature stamped onto its butt. And I guess Martha Nelson Thomas was like, there's no place to put a signature on a child. And these are like children to me. That's why I. I adopt them out rather than sell them. So I'm not going to sign this. I'm not going to copyright them. And that basically, you would think it would have sunk her case. And after almost eight years, Xavier Roberts finally said, okay, fine, let's settle this. I suspect it had to do with. He sold out. At some point in the 80s, he sold his portion. And I would guess he probably needed that court case to go away to finalize that sale. And for what? In 1985, he was suddenly ready to settle. And they settled for an undisclosed sum that apparently Martha Nelson Thomas was satisfied with.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And he also said, hey, lady, you say you can't copyright these things. You can sign it right next to their little butthole.

[Josh Clark]

Right. He sounded cockney there for a second.

[Chuck Bryant]

Cockney.

[Josh Clark]

Like, I started to get nervous. Like, oh, my God, why does he sound cockney? And then you pulled it out with the real Appalachian Mountain folk twist at the end there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So he said all this shit was enough money to put her kids college. She said, it's still sort of a sad story to me that this man came along and ripped off this lady's design and then later on complained that he was getting ripped off. He complained about knockoffs and said, my point is not take my product to my creation and tarnish it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which was pretty audacious because he said this, I believe, right when he was settling with this other case, in which part of the settlement was he had to acknowledge that he had taken her idea. And for him to. To be complaining about this on tv, it was a little audacious, especially if you know that you know the full story. But the. Even though it was a open secret or even a widely known tale in the toy industry and even some parts of the press, even still today, everybody thinks of Xavier Roberts as the. The creator of Cabbage Patch Kids and you. And technically he was because he came up with Cabbage Patch Kids and Martha Nelson Thomas came up with little doll babies.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And he sold it to. Well, he didn't come up with Cabbage Patch Kids. He sold it to Pac man. And Pac man named them Cabbage Patch Kids.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I guess so. I hadn't thought about that. So one of the groups he was complaining about was Topps Trading Cards. Topps Trading Cards around the. Still, in the height of. Of the Cabbage Patch kid craze in 1985, came out with one of the greatest parodies anyone's ever come out with. The beloved Garbage Pail Kids series.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I didn't. I wasn't into these. I was a little too old. I certainly. I was 14. I certainly remember them in the Zeitgeist. And I knew it was a very big deal, but this was probably more for kids probably around your age. I imagine you were probably into these, Right?

[Josh Clark]

I loved Garbage Pail Kids. I believe Jubie had a pretty impressive Garbage Pail Kid collection herself.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really? Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And she actually. Yeah, she actually bought me a couple of Garbage Pail Kids I have somewhere. I think one is Squash Josh. I can't remember the other one, but they are for people who don't know what a Garbage Pail Kid is, go look up gpk.com and I think it's like G-E-E-P-E-E-K-A-Y.com I'm not sure, but they have every single series scanned. So you can see all 15 series that came out between 1985 and 1988. And they're just awesome, but they're basically like if garbage. If Cabbage Patch Kids were meant to get us used to what mutant offspring of nuclear war survivors would look like Garbage Pail Kids were the mutated version of that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's a good way to say it. They were deformed, and they were plagued and diseased, and they had names like Atom Bomb and Boney Tony and, I guess, Squash Josh and Roomie Yumi. I don't know. No, they didn't. They didn't have names for everyone. But it was a big deal. They sold a ton of them. And Xavier Roberts was not happy with this, and I think ended up in the lawsuit being successful in getting them just to change enough to where it didn't look like it was officially tied to the Cabbage Patch Kids.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, like, they had the cat. You know how it says on the box for the Cabbage Patch Kid? It's like in a banner, kind of like semicircle banner. They had that originally as Garbage Pail Kids. They had to turn that into a straight bar. They made them look less like lifelike and more like plastic dolls. In the later series, there were a few changes, but, I mean, it was still pretty clear what the whole thing was a riff off of. But one thing I didn't realize is that one of the art directors who helped conceptualize Garbage Pail Kids from the outset was Art Spiegelman, who created Maus.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Did you know that?

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, I've heard of Art Spiegelman, but I really don't know anything about him, so I didn't know that, but I know the name.

[Josh Clark]

I've not read Maus, but I know it's, like, just a legendary graphic novel about fascism. But that guy helped create Garbage Pail Kids just a couple years before he created Maus.

[Chuck Bryant]

Amazing. And there was a bad TV show that eventually only aired in Europe. There was a bad movie that is pretty legendarily bad. But it was a big deal, though. They sold a ton of them. They didn't quite have the spinoff power of the CPKs, but the GPKs did okay for themselves.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, like, that really goes to show you just how big Cabbage Patch Kids were, that it could sustain a cottage industry for a parody, even. That's how big Cabbage Patch Kids were in the 90s. So hats off to Cabbage Patch Kids. I can't wait to talk about them again next year in another episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

It'll be great.

[Josh Clark]

We'll figure it out. We'll spend 2021 figuring out how to do that, Chuck. And in the meantime, everybody, since we're thinking about how to talk about Cabbage Patch Kids some more, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Before we do listeners, real quick, I just want to give a shout out to the Budge family. Not really going to get into what's going on with them, but just want them to know that we're thinking about them and sending them lots of love and support over the Internet airwaves. But this email is called. Oh, I know. I'm going to call it the Beave. This is about beavers again. And it starts out as this is seriously not a please read me on the air email. And that's a pretty good way to get on the air. By the way, thanks for the amazing show. Been a listener since they were a paltry 20 minutes. Love everyone. You keep me company while walking, driving, cleaning, cooking, and providing an endless source of interesting topics for my English students in Spain. I kind of think Chuck is my podcast soulmate. As we grow up in much the same circumstances, around the same age, we have very similar cultural outlook on different things. I do have a small difference of opinion though. Your Bigfoot podcast was great and I was happy to hear you say the possibility exists. Did we say that?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think we were. I don't know if it was we so much as you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, maybe so. But a while back you were.

[Josh Clark]

I was just teasing. I think it was we.

[Chuck Bryant]

You were adamant that Nessie does not exist. Buddy, show Nessie some love. Wouldn't it be amazing if she did exist? So she has her fingers crossed on that. But the real reason she wrote in she listened to the beaver episode and came across Beeve the beaver. So just get online and Google Bee. That was this beaver that was found, I think, abandoned by its parents and then adopted as a young baby and then raised for a while to eventually be put maybe a wildlife center or something. But the long and short of it is Beev makes dams in their house. So there are all these videos of Beev dragging stuff into this one specific doorway that Beev is trying to dam up. And like dragging a shoe rack, pillows, tissue boxes, like anything Beev can get ahold of in his little paws and teeth, he'll drag over to this doorway and try and damage up and it's really one of the the cutest, funniest things I've ever seen.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it is very cute because he looks like, should this go here or maybe a little bit to the left. Okay, that's all right right there. Or like when he brought the pillow over, he's like, oh, this is very useful. I can just squish this into place. It was very cute to watch him do that.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is amazing. And that email, by the way, is from Carrie Keeley.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks Kerry. That was a great email. And yes, way to get it on the air by saying it's not meant to be on the air. We fall for stuff like that all the time. And if you want to try to make us fall for something, have at us. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Podcast Intro/Outro Voice]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you you listen to your favorite shows.

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Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like EFTs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member finra, SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures tired.

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[Josh Clark]

Hey everybody, we're hitting the road again.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

Starting in January 2026 picking up again in April 2026. And eventually Canada will tell you year dates, too.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

We're going to do at least three legs.

[Tour Announcer]

And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado, at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. Seventh, we're going to go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th, and then finally back at Sketchfest on the 29th at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.

[Podcast Co-host (possibly Chuck Bryant)]

Yep. And then April 16th, 17th and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets@stuffyou should know.com, click on the tour button and thank us later.

[Tour Announcer]

That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

[Josh Clark]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.