Stuff You Should Know
SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: Cabbage Patch Kids: Must-Have Toy of the Century
12 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What are the origins of Cabbage Patch Kids?
They're commissioned by the government to get people sort of adjusted to the idea that one day there's going to be aliens walking around. 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, and nuclear war with the USSR.
That's about like the greatest 80s combination I've ever heard of in my life. Yeah, pretty good. So if you go on to the Cabbage Patch Kids website, you'll find the enchanting magical story of 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 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 of 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. That's right. Babyland General right here in Cleveland, Georgia. And I just so happened to have driven by there but two days ago. I went up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We went on a waterfall hike. The family did on Sunday. And did you see a bunny bee?
I 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 a connection. Right, 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 really famous tomato pincushion, Chuck? From 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.
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Chapter 3: How did the Cabbage Patch Kids become a Christmas craze in 1983?
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. 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
I think we covered that in the must-have toys episode, that that is a technique that they use, that they purposefully underproduce to create scarcity. 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. Right, exactly.
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. I know, that's nuts. Because they were just pumping those things out.
Chapter 4: What role did media play in the popularity of Cabbage Patch Kids?
Yeah, well, at the very least, I think Coleco was genuinely caught underprepared. I don't think it was in any way, shape, or form a purposeful scarcity. I think it was just straight-up scarcity. And there's this footage from Zayer Department Store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Right. This is in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, or Wilkes-Barre, I've also seen, Pennsylvania.
But there's this manager who I know we talked about before, but you've got to see this guy. He's the manager of the Zare department store in December of 1983, at least.
Chapter 5: Why did Cabbage Patch Kids create a frenzy among parents?
And this guy is, like, unhinged. Have you seen footage of him? Yeah, I saw him last year.
Yeah.
Okay. You got to see him again. I got to describe him again because 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 of the worst... Forms of crowd management anyone's ever attempted, ever. And it was caught on film and you got to see it yourself. Yeah. He was – he wasn't doing his best work that day. I think that's – we can all agree on that. He really wasn't. Agreed. A lot of times the – 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 going to be a B-26 bomber plane, and it's going to drop 2,000 dolls over the Brewers Baseball Stadium. And all you got to do is show up with your baseball glove,
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 a couple of dozen people from showing up with their baseball glove and credit card. Yeah, and negative seven degree wind chill, which is very cold if you're in the centigrade parts of the world.
That's very cold. They're used to it. I guess so. But the, yeah, the fact that people would do that is like, I double checked to make sure that that wasn't an urban legend. And it definitely is not. Like that was, that really did happen in Milwaukee in 1983. That was like the level the craze reached.
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