The Cabbage Patch Kids Riots

When Sarah Lindenfeld Hall was nine years old, she really wanted a Cabbage Patch kid.

I wasn't even a big doll person at the time.

Just seemed like the right thing to have.

I promised to be a good parent to my Cabbage Patch kids.

The Cabbage Patch Kids, each doll is different, and you can pretend to adopt them.

It was 1984.

Cabbage Patch kids, the soft-bodied, plastic-headed dolls with eyes that are just a little bit too close together, had come onto the market the previous year and become an unruly sensation in stores and in the media.

When the doors opened at this Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania store, the pushing and shoving began.

One woman was knocked to the floor and suffered a broken leg.

This scene has been repeated in hundreds of stores across the country that advertise the Cabbage Patch Kids.

Monday, Sarah's mom heard that the KB toy store in their local mall was getting a shipment in.

I remember a big crowd of people.

I believe that we were there for quite a long time.

In my memory, it is from nine to five.

The line snaked through the aisles past the other toys, leading to a back storage room.

Sarah was close enough to see inside of it.

I remember almost like a pyramid of cabbage-patched kid boxes.

You know, it just seemed like a lot.

Really exciting at the time.

When the store finally let the customers go pick out a doll, Sarah made a beeline for one in particular.

And I see the doll that I want, which was blonde because I was blonde.

She had two pigtails

and she was perfect.

And I picked it out of the pile

and I was holding it,

walking back toward my mom.

And then this lady came and just ripped it out of my arms.

Sarah and her mother were both too shocked to make a scene.

They went back to the pile, hoping a doll would be left, but there were only Kusas, the pet version of a Cabbage Patch Kid.

If you can imagine what a character in the musical cats might look like as a Cabbage Patch Kid, that's Akusa.

I don't remember crying.

I remember being sad.

And I remember really trying to get excited about Peaches, the Kusas.

who I'm looking at right now, because I just felt like Peaches needed to be here.

Was that like the first time you'd seen a grown-up behave just like really badly?

Yeah.

I don't know as a kid I ever saw a grown-up behave badly again like that.

Did you think about it for a long time?

I mean, I, if you ask my older daughter, she'll tell you that I used to tell her this story all the time.

I mean, it's a good story for parties.

It's a great cocktail party story.

I can hear that.

But I can imagine you would tell it at a party as funny and it's not.

No, it's not.

No, it's funny.

I mean, i mean it's not even really funny now it's just like right it's some it's like funny now haha now but it was not back then it was bewildering

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

The Cabbage Patch Kids are a dead, simple baby doll that don't do anything of particular note.

They don't talk.

They don't stand.

You can't even really bend their pudgy little arms.

And yet beginning in the Christmas season of 1983, they inspired a pandemonium bordering on rioting.

In a two-year period, Americans would buy 20 million of them worth $1.2 billion,

and the dolls would become known as a quintessential American toy craze, a well-chronicled moment when we lost our minds over something we should not have.

In this episode, we're going to try and figure out why.

Why grown Americans were fighting in the aisles over such a homely looking baby doll.

So today, on decodering.

Why did the Cabbage Patch Kids hit it so big?

There's only one place where history, culture, and adventure meet on the National Mall.

Where museum days turn to electric lights.

Where riverside sunrises glow and monuments shine in moonlight.

Where there's something new for everyone to discover.

There's only one DC.

Visit Washington.org to plan your trip.

I want to begin at the beginning with where the Cabbage Patch Kids come from.

You know, a Cabbage Patch.

In a Cabbage Patch garden, all in a row, magic cabbages live and grow.

With bunny bee crystals and love and joy, they turn into a cabbage patch girl and boy.

Cabbage patch kids growing in the garden.

That's the first track from Cabbage Patch Dreams, a record released in 1984 at the height of the craze.

As the story goes, bunny bees, which are flying bunnies, not bees, sprinkle magic crystals on the mother cabbages who then give birth to babies.

This mother cabbage is going into labor right now.

If you go watch carefully, you can see she's already at three and a half, I'd say four leaves apart.

This kind of trippy, singular backstory would never in a million years come out of a focus group or market research.

And it's just one of the details that are like this, including the dolls' ornate names, their funny faces, and that tattoo they have on their left butt cheek.

In order to figure out why the dolls were so successful, I'm going to take each of these specific weirdnesses in turn and try to make sense of them, starting with the one on the doll's backside.

Children's toys don't often have an adult man's signature printed prominently on their rear end, but the Cabbage Patch kids do.

The name Xavier Roberts, the creator of the Cabbage Patch Kids, is right there, tattooed onto every single doll in dramatic cursive.

And to explain why, I have to get into the Cabbage Patch Kids' real origin story.

Xavier Roberts was born in 1955 and grew up in Cleveland, Georgia, a rural town about an hour and a half north of Atlanta in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

His father died when he was young, and his mother made ends meet working at a factory and selling handmade quilts.

He grew up idolizing Walt Disney and was both creatively and commercially minded from a very young age.

In the mid-1970s, when he was just 20, he'd taken art classes at the local community college and was running a gift shop in a state park.

At a craft show, he met a woman named Marsa Nelson Thomas.

Nelson Thomas, who had been a student at the Louisville School of Art, was an artist making hand-sewn, one-of-a-kind, squishy dolls using a technique called soft sculpture.

She called her creations doll babies, and she insisted they were more than dolls.

I don't know how much my mom really believed that the dolls were actual people, but she did an interview one time and it was fairly convincing that she thought they were alive.

Martha Nelson Thomas died in 2013, but that's her daughter, Mara.

My mom didn't really want to express herself outwardly with words.

And those dolls were the way she had of making her mark on the world.

There's a great black and white picture of Nelson Thomas sitting surrounded by about a dozen of her doll babies.

They're all different.

Some have yarn hair, some are bald like infants.

One has a beard, one is black.

They're dressed in what look like real baby clothes, a nightgown, a knit sweater, an R2D2 t-shirt.

They all have soft, stubby proportions, painted eyes, and noses and mouths made using a needle and thread instead of add-ons like a button.

Looking at them, I thought two things.

One was that they look like folk art, something you can imagine in a museum where they have appeared as part of a long vernacular economical tradition of homemade dolls.

But my other thought was,

those look so much like Cabbage Patch kids.

And that's because of Xavier Roberts.

After meeting Thomas, Roberts bought a few of her dolls to sell at the gift shop he was running.

But Martha pulled out of their arrangement very quickly.

She thought he was selling them for too much money.

Soon after, Roberts developed soft sculpture dolls of his own, ones that he called Little People.

Little People look a lot like doll babies.

So much so that in 1978, Martha Nelson went to legal aid and sued Roberts for copyright infringement.

We always knew that my mom created dolls, and then one day, Xavier Roberts tried to create dolls that looked exactly like hers.

Roberts' own legal team admitted that Thomas's work had influenced the design of the little people, but the vagaries of copyright law meant that she lost the case.

She would eventually settle another one in 1984, but it wasn't for decades that she became a widely known part of the Cabbage Patch Kids origin story.

And my mom didn't like it when people said, oh, you invented the Cabbage Patch doll because she didn't.

She invented something separate.

In the 1980s, when the Cabbage Patch Kids became a sensation, a lot was made of Robert's own artistic background.

The press talked about how he developed the dolls using quilting techniques he'd learned from his mother.

But Robert's innovations weren't really with the look of the doll, they're with the framework for it.

He took the seeds of Martha Nelson Thomas's idea to treat the dolls like real babies in need of homes and turned it into a totally bizarre but extremely effective concept for selling expensive, one-of-a-kind art objects.

In babyland, come see it for yourself

in babyland.

The concept had two parts.

One was the whole magical cutesy story of the mother cabbages, which is a riff on an old southern wives' tale about how babies come from cabbage patches.

It was an upbeat solution to a potentially downer problem in the very premise of the dolls, which is why they all need parents in the first place.

You can imagine a depressing answer to this.

So instead, Roberts imagined cabbages.

The second part of the concept was not magical at all, though.

It was medical.

In 1978, Roberts started a company called Original Appalachian Artworks that took over an old medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia.

Babyland General is set up like a real maternity hospital with all of its employees dressed as doctors and nurses.

That's from a popular NBC documentary show called Real People, which filmed a segment at Babyland General Hospital in 1980.

You can hear how wacky the host found the whole thing.

They call it Babyland General, and they sell them in the most unusual way because they try to convince people the dolls are real.

And the weird thing is, the people go along with it.

Elaine, is this the newest addition to your family?

This is our newest one.

What is he?

Is her?

His name is Joey.

Joey?

Needless to say, Joey is not a real baby.

He's a large, bald doll wearing only a diaper, who we would now describe as looking like a Cabbage Patch kid.

When the camera goes inside Babyland, there are all these exam rooms with Cabbage Patch kids in creamy incubators and and the rolling mini beds hospitals use for infants.

And Dr.

Xavier just delivered our first set of quin toplets.

They'll have to be adopted together.

Yes.

How much will that cost?

Well, taking into consideration the tremendous medical costs that they have caused us, we feel that $5,000 in adoption fees, we don't sell any babies.

5 Gs for the BABISs.

Babyland justified these prices by positioning the dolls not as toys, but as art.

I never really considered myself a doll maker.

I considered myself a sculptor.

And when I sat down to do these, I really considered them making art.

Xavier Roberts didn't respond to our interview requests, but that's him in an interview from the 1980s that was included in Weiss's short documentary about the history of the Cabbage Patch Kids, which further explores Martha Nelson Thomas's story.

What I want to point out here is that Babyland General wasn't set up to be a high-falutin toy store catering to kids, but an an experiential, gimmicky destination gallery and craft shop for adults.

At $125 to $1,000, which would be about $400 to $3,100 in today's money, the dolls sure weren't priced like toys.

The adoption papers they came with doubled as certificates of authenticity, proof of purchase of an original artwork.

And that authenticity was indicated in another way as well.

They were signed.

This is why the dolls have tattoos.

Robert started scrawling his first name in Sharpie on the backside of his handmade, expensive, one-of-a-kind art dolls.

And this detail persisted even after the dolls became more affordable, mass-produced commodities for children on whom a signature was out of place.

It's a holdover from when the dolls were aspiring to be a different kind of status object than the one they would become.

That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron and the quiet confidence confidence of ultra-smooth handling.

The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV.

This is electric performance redefined.

Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.

Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine.

It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.

It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.

Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor.

Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms.

Alert your doctor right away, as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection side pain, fatigue, and headache.

Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.

Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

Why wait?

Ask your doctor, visit BotoxchronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-Botox to learn more.

In the early 1980s, Babyland General was still very much a regional success, but it had sold 100,000 little people, was making over $1 million a year, and was starting to get more widespread attention.

One day, Al Khan, the head of product development at a toy company called Coleco, read a small article about it in the paper and thought there might be an opportunity there.

I went to this Babyland General Hospital.

In the middle of the floor was a cabbage, and the baby's heads were in the cabbage.

And I said, you know, what's that about?

And they said, well, we believe in Georgia that babies come from cabbages.

So right away, I said, well, it's got to be called Cabbage Patch because whatever the hell this thing is.

Coleco had been founded in 1932 as a leather company, but in the 1950s, after it started selling Davy Crockett moccasins, it had pivoted to toys.

It had a lot of early success with kiddie pools, but starting in the 1970s, it largely made video games and electronics.

In the early 1980s, the company was really focused on the Atom, a heralded home computer that would totally flop when it came out, also in 1983.

In fact, prior to the Cabbage Patch Kids, the company had never made a doll in its entire history, and Alcon thought that it should.

So coleco licensed the little people which it renamed the cabbage patch kids from xavier roberts and then immediately set out to make sure it hadn't made a big mistake we did a lot of focus groups because we were concerned about what people would think about this some people thought they were not attractive right

So this brings us to the next weird detail about the Cabbage Patch Kids, their funny little faces, which have always been a sticking point, as you can hear in this local news story from 1983.

I don't like them.

I don't like their faces, but I want one.

There's a straightforward reason that people react to the dolls' faces the way that they do.

They violate the cute schema.

The first scientist to study cuteness, to try to figure out what set of characteristics make people respond with the cuteness feeling, was Conrad Lawrence.

Dr.

Paul Dale is a professor at Tokyo Gakuge University who founded the discipline of cuteness studies.

So in 1943, he came up with what he called his baby schema of characteristics that trigger acuteness response in people.

And they're all characteristics of either human babies or different animals.

And those included large head relative to body size, predominance of the brain capsule, sort of large forehead, large eyes that are low in the forehead.

round bulging cheeks, short and thick extremities, soft body, and wobbly movements.

Cabbage patch kids have some of these qualities and others not at all.

Their eyes are quite small and very close together and kind of pretty high up on their head.

Those are things that are not part of the baby schema.

It's one of the things that tips them into the slightly grotesque.

The operative word for Josh isn't grotesque though.

It's slightly.

He thinks the cabbage patch kits flout the rules of cuteness, but in a really effective way.

They go just far enough so that some people think that's grotesque, but other people think, oh, how cute.

And I think that the fad for Cabbage Patch Kids was in some part propelled by the fact that it did cause this dual reaction.

Firstly, this dual reaction was attention-grabbing and made the dolls something to talk about around the water cooler and on TV news and decades later, on podcasts.

Secondly, it put them right on trend.

In the early 1980s, the American public seems to have found variations on gross cuteness really appealing.

Think also of E.T., the gremlins, the Ghostbusters, stay-puffed marshmallow man, and of course, the garbage pail kids, the trading cards that made explicit the Cabbage Patch Kids' grotesquery.

And thirdly, it primed people to feel protective of them.

But for the people who already thought them cute, this was a, I think this was part of the draw, something that needed them.

The slight amount of grotesqueness could feed into that and make them seem even more vulnerable and in need of care and protection.

The Cabbage Patch Kids are like the scraggly Christmas tree or the three-legged dog, the thing you like more because you imagine it needs you to love it in all its imperfections.

Another way to say this is that the Cabbage Patch Kids' weird faces were integral to their popularity.

They needed them.

They set them apart.

But this is only clear in hindsight.

At the time, Coleco was worried they might be about to start mass producing a really fugly baby doll.

So they did a disaster check, a focus group where you don't ask if people like a toy, you just ask if they hate it.

And it seemed like people were tentatively open to the Cabbage Patch kids' look.

So Coleco went ahead and copied the faces that looked the way they did because of the limitations of a needle and thread, because of the way Martha Nelson Thomas had stitched her doll babies and Xavier Roberts had stitched his little people, and then recreated them in much more affordable plastic.

Coleco made the dolls a little cuter, a little more standard, but mostly the faces, like the names on the tush, are a holdover and not at all what you'd get if you were creating something from scratch for mass production.

The dolls were released in June of 1983, accompanied by a big TV advertising push.

When you open your arms to a cabbage patch kid,

your heart opens wide and lets the love come in.

And these ads were not targeted at kids.

They were aimed at adults.

Al Khan, who was the head of product development at Coleco at the time, again.

What I was hopeful for is adults would see this and then they would buy it for their kids because the kids wouldn't give a shit about this.

It didn't have, didn't do anything.

You know, it didn't walk, it didn't talk.

You know, it just sat there.

So we ran the commercials in mostly adult time, which was unusual.

That's another reason it was unusual.

Let's the love come in.

Everyone is

The insight here wasn't just that kids might not care about the Cabbage Patch kids.

It's that parents might care a lot.

The Cabbage Patch Kids seem like they're teaching little girls in particular about nurturing and parenting, and they make no noise, require no assembly, and have none of the barely subterranean sexuality of a Barbie doll.

There is nothing sophisticated or edgy or precocious about them.

They They seem and look like a throwback to simpler times, to Raggedy Ann and her yarn hair, and they did even in the 1980s.

As a parent, you didn't have to grit your teeth and buy one.

They seemed safe.

And you can see that in their homely little faces.

This only makes what happens next even more ironic.

This incredibly wholesome toy, this toy that looks like it could not harm a fly, this toy that seems like it's imparting all these lessons about square domesticity, it goes on to inspire abhorrent adult behavior.

It looks safe, but it's not.

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.

RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.

So if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.

They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.

See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RVinsurance at Progressive.com today.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet injuries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms.

CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships.

Instead, it's shorthand for customer rage machine.

Your CRM can't explain why a customer's package took five detours?

Reboot your inner piece and scream into a pillow.

It's okay.

On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better.

AI agents don't just track issues, they resolve them, transforming the entire customer experience.

So breathe in and breathe out.

Bad CRM was then.

This is Service Now.

So the Cabbage Patch Kids were released in the summer of 1983, and by the holiday season, people were desperate for the dolls, and there were not nearly enough of them.

The resulting frenzy turned into a huge news story.

You did not get a Cabbage Patch doll this morning.

No, I did not.

How badly do you want want one?

Very, very badly.

That's a local news story that aired on a New York-based ABC affiliate in December of 1983, and there were many more like it.

The dolls made the cover of Newsweek, a human interest story ran all over the country about a dad from Kansas City who flew all the way to London to get a cabbage patch for his five-year-old.

Another story making the rounds was about radio hosts in Milwaukee who successfully pranked dozens of residents into believing a B-29 bomber was going to drop Cabbage Patch kids into the city's baseball stadium.

And all they needed to do to get one was to arrive with a credit card and a baseball mint.

Everybody's calling up, and they're screaming at you.

We need more dolls.

You know, what are you doing?

You know, we're basically saying we don't have them.

And they're going, bullshit.

You got them.

Ship them to us.

You know, there was speculation at the time that Coleco was intentionally suppressing the supply to create a frenzied demand.

But it would have been impossible to predict the appetite for these dolls, and it seems more likely they had a hard time ramping up manufacturing so fast.

Even so, Coleco was shipping about $200,000 a week and would sell about $2.5 million that year.

It still wasn't enough.

Demand was so high that a very out-in-the-open black market popped up.

Stores were offering to pay more than market price to customers who had extra dolls, which they would then turn around and sell for a small profit, as was also covered in that local ABC News story.

You just spent $50 for a doll that cost $20.

Why?

Because by the time I go looking in the stores, it'll cost me $30 in gas and aggravation.

Inevitably, all the coverage of the dolls and the impossibility of getting them only made people want them more.

If people can't find them, their veracity for it gets larger, you know, especially children.

Peer pressure is unbelievable.

So a child who wanted the Cabbage Patch kid who couldn't find it became a

hysterical salesperson, you know, for this, you know, I was my Cabbage Patch Kit.

This cozy, cutesy doll had become the biggest it toy ever, more coveted than hula hoops, Davey Crockett hats, pet rocks, and even Star Wars figurines.

And that struck people as extremely bizarre.

From the start, they were doing what I'm doing right now, asking why.

Why is this doll inspiring this insanity?

And that brings me to one more singular thing about the Cabbage Patch Kids.

A detail that doesn't seem so odd anymore, but that was really strange at the time.

Each doll is different.

So I played with Cabbage Patch Kids a bunch as a child, but I had no idea until working on this piece that each one was unique.

I had just assumed there were a handful of different kinds, but no.

By using a number of different and variable traits, hair color, hair length, eye color, skin color, freckles, dimples, mouth shape, sex, and so on, no two are alike.

This presented a huge technical challenge for Coleco.

The doll may have been greeted as low-tech, but that wasn't really true.

It's just that all the new technology and technique that had gone into making it had happened in factories in China on the back end and weren't obvious in the finished product.

You can get a sense of how newfangled the dolls were from how one of the Toys Are Us buyers reacted to Al Con's pitch.

So, you're telling me you want people to go through my shelves to pick out the doll they want, to rummage through my shelves and pick out which one you want.

You're crazy.

You are crazy.

You know, that was the term.

You are crazy.

It's hard to cast my mind back to a time when individualization would have seemed crazy, given that now you can literally get anything in the world personalized.

And it seems self-evident that people like that.

But it was a huge and new selling point for the Cabbage Patch kids.

By the 1980s, toys

were a cookie-cutter process.

You go to the giant Toys R Us store and there would just be rows and rows of individual, of identical boxes.

And along comes this one toy, which was huge corporate product.

They sold millions of, but that one toy says, everyone is unique.

It almost...

brought back a little bit of an artisanal feeling to what was a commodity.

That's That's Laura Wattenberg.

She's a baby name expert and the author of the baby name wizard books.

I'd called her to talk about the Cabbage Patch Kids' names, which are another odd thing about them.

Each doll comes with two unique names, something that started with Xavier Roberts.

The first a thousand little people were named out of a 1937 southern baby name book.

But with millions of Cabbage Patch kids out there and counting, the names got pretty weird.

Some examples include Delilah Lorena, Farika Scarlett, and Gilchrist Patty.

I think the fact that the names were not cheatsy dolly names fit with that odd position the Cabbage Patch dolls occupied.

Just as being found under a cabbage leaf is a little bit odd and wearing grown-up clothes as an infant is a little bit odd.

Pairing that with a name like Helen Gertrude really puts that doll apart.

So I had called Laura to talk cabbage patch names specifically, but she was really smart about them in general and why their oddities, the tattoos, the faces, the names made them so desirable.

Every kid has the conflicting impulses of desperately wanting to fit in and desperately wanting to feel unique.

And I think the Cabbage Patch dolls played to both sides of that.

You had the same kind of doll as your friends, but yours was special only to you.

This duality helped drive sales even after the holiday season violence abated.

In 1984 and 85 each, Coleco moved $600 million worth of dolls and introduced whole new product lines like Preemies and Twins and those pets called Cusas.

Xavier Roberts built a 30-room mansion and bought a number of Picasos.

The Cabbage Patch Kids are one of the most successful toys ever.

By 1986, they had started to plateau.

Alcon left Coleco and would go on to incredible success, licensing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Pokemon, which he actually named.

By 1988, Coleco, which had overextended itself on other properties, declared bankruptcy.

These days, the dolls are primarily thought of as a nostalgia item, shorthand for a wild toy fad, the 80s version of Tickle Me Elmo or Beanie Babies, even though you can still buy them online or at a toy store.

Their hair isn't yarn anymore, but they do generate about $50 million a year in revenue.

You can also still buy a hand-stitched one for hundreds of dollars at Babyland General Hospital, where they still do the baby birthing ceremonies, as captured by Georgia Public Broadcasting in March of 2020.

With all this rain we've had lately, oh my goodness, looks like another baby on the

okay, got that baby.

Dr.

London here will need a clip, just a tiny little clip.

Oh my.

Oh my goodness.

Looks like another girl.

Another girl.

How great.

So I started this episode asking why the Cabbage Patch Kids had hit hit it so big.

But scrolling through the new Cabbage Patch Kids currently available for purchase on the internet, I started to wonder, could they do that now?

I had assumed going into this that of course they couldn't.

Just look at them.

They're such an obvious artifact of the 1980s.

Their paltry eye size alone marks them as toys of another era.

Seriously, if you've perused children toys lately, we are living through a real big eyes moment.

But the more I came to know about the Cabbage Patch Kids, the more complicated this question seemed to me.

I still don't think they would be a hit now, but it's not because the dolls are so 1980s.

It's because they were one of the first really contemporary toys, and their innovations have become a commonplace.

The cutting-edge technologies that set the Cabbage Patch kids apart, the manufacturing differences that enabled them to be both mass-marketed and just for you, have been wildly improved and become totally pedestrian, customizable, personalized, cute in a kind of garish way.

That's so many dolls now.

Thinking about them only in terms of other dolls, other toys, is maybe thinking too small.

The mass production of something that seems artisanal, that makes it to market feeling authentic.

That's what so many companies aspire to do.

The Cabbage Patch Kids came out of Georgia in 1983, but what they achieved is what just about every advertiser on Instagram is going for, trying to position itself as bespoke and special, even though it's a widely available commodity.

It's the mass marketing of uniqueness, and the Cabbage Patch Kids nailed it.

But the Cabbage Patch Kids actually did start out as an oddball art object.

And I think that really is the root of everything that's compelling about them, why they contain so many sticky contradictions, unique and common, cute and ugly, wholesome and dangerous, a ragdoll throwback, and a computerized herald of what was to come.

It's outrageous and dark that people fought over these dolls, that people got hurt because of them, that they were ripped out of children's hands, that they became a showcase for our limitless avariciousness.

But all this bad behavior does make more sense to me than it used to.

Those dolls, they have a lot of freaky soul.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch.

Decodering is produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to Harry Rinker, Paul Ringle, Oliver Schlacky, Jack Wheat, Emily Gavalp, June Thomas, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

See you next month.