New Documentary Recalls the Cabbage Patch Kids Craze of the Mid-'80's

Former Coleco CEO Arnold Greenberg estimated in 2018 that about 5 million Cabbage Patch Kids dolls were sold by his company in just a few years in the mid-1980’s.  Greater Hartford, where Coleco was headquartered, suddenly; became the center of the toy universe – and that unforgettable history is now the subject of streaming documentary that premiered this past weekend.

The documentary about the Cabbage Patch Kids, from NBCUniversal Syndication Studios and Believe Entertainment Group, is narrated by Neil Patrick Harris. “Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids” tells the success story of the dolls, according to the website thewrap.com, “from the marketing of BabyLand General Hospital in Georgia, where children ‘adopted’ the dolls and solemnly pledged to love and care for them, to the subsequent business deal that gave rise to utter retail pandemonium.”

“We’re thrilled to have partnered with Believe on this incredibly fun film that pulls the curtain back on one of the most beloved toys of all time,” said Tracie Wilson, Executive Vice President of NBCUniversal Syndication Studios and E! News. “Looking to the future and expanding the breadth of content we produce is vitally important to us and this project is an entertaining and modern take on a completely unexpected retro occurrence that jolted pop culture. That made it an easy choice for our first film co-production.”

If you had youngsters in the mid-‘80’s – or were one – it was a crazy like no other, and as with many things of that intensity, burned out relatively quickly, in just a few years.  But what years they were!

As The New York Times described the company in July 1985, “Coleco is a toymaker known for its nervy and brilliant hunches … chubby-cheeked, chinless Cabbage Patch Kids (these, of course, are the ones that come with birth certificates and adoption papers and that customers stood in lines for hours to get).

“They needed love. People responded to that. Their outstretched arms said, ‘Love me. Take me. Adopt me,” Greenberg recalled in an interview featured on the Hartford Stage website.

Consumers didn’t just buy a Cabbage Patch Kid, they adopted one. Once purchased, the consumer sent in paperwork to register their doll, and Coleco sent them back a certificate of adoption. This created an unusually strong bond between the child and their doll, the article explained.

A December 1983 article in TIME magazine noted that “Coleco, which introduced the Cabbage Patch Kids last February, expects to sell 2.5 million of them this year, which would be a record for any doll in its first year. Nobody knows how many more Coleco could have sold had it not been caught unprepared by its own success.”

TIME also retraced the history:  “The dolls have actually been around for years. Back in 1977 a Georgia artist named Xavier Roberts, now 28, began to turn out handmade cloth models that he insisted on calling "little people," each different from all others. Roberts invented a syrupy ritual for selling the dolls. They were not made but "delivered" and "adopted" at a former medical clinic in Cleveland, Ga. His employees had to wear nurse's white uniforms, and each prospective "parent" had to raise a right hand and vow undying love.

“Roberts has sold 250,000 dolls, many to adults for themselves, at prices ranging from $125 to $1,000. But the national madness began only when Roberts' Original Appalachian Artworks Inc. negotiated a licensing agreement with Coleco. The Coleco computers began churning out $25 models in Asian plants, giving each a slightly different face. Says Roberts: "I'm just amazed. Sometimes I just stand there watching, and no one knows that I'm the one who started it all."

"Cabbage Patch Kids were not only an indelible part of growing up in the ’80s, but it was also an inauspicious turning point for us that went far beyond the toy itself and would redefine holiday shopping forever,” Executive Producer Dan Goodman of “Billion Dollar Babies” recently told The Wrap.  [The new  film can be streamed for a $15 charge]

In an extensive local interview on West Hartford Community Television in 2018, Greenberg looked back at Coleco’s evolution, into electronic games and then Cabbage Patch Kids and other products.  Cabbage Patch Kids, he recalled, “gave the company worldwide recognition, and brought, more importantly, worldwide joy to so many children and their parents.”

If you could manage to get one, of course.