Wacky Packages were hard currency in my schoolyard in 1985. Every recess turned into a stock exchange where kids traded cards with the urgency of Wall Street brokers. A full set wrapped in a rubber band made you a playground legend. But then something happened that toppled our carefully built card empires: those Garbage Pail Kids reared their ugly heads.
They hijacked the zeitgeist and left us 11 year old Wacky Package moguls holding worthless card stock. Adam Bomb and Leaky Lou were the new kewl, and my fat stack of pre-pubescent consumerist satire didn’t impress anyone anymore. I never forgave them for that.
But I was fascinated by those nasty, plump little grotesqueries. I collected the GPK cards too – of course, I did. But the days of trading to build a full set were over. I peaked at 11 and the wind had been cut from my sails. By the time the movie came out, the brand was still on my radar, but I was far from invested. It had a lot of work to do to impress me.
It didn’t. Obviously, it didn’t. This is one of the most notoriously bad movies ever made. But you can almost sense the good intentions buried somewhere in some draft of the script. A misfit kid trying to find his place in the world, teaming up with outcasts who are misunderstood, learning a lesson about friendship and acceptance – it’s almost Spielbergian. And Mackenzie Astin genuinely gives it his all as Dodger, the quintessential kid adventure hero. He’s earnest, likeable, and you can’t help but feel he deserved better.
But not so with Tangerine and her gang of fashionable goons, who are somehow more despicable than any bully ever served up in an 80s kids’ movie. These aren’t just mean kids, no – they’re sociopaths who exploit, humiliate, and generally behave like they wandered out of a Troma movie made for children. Even by 80s standards, they’re needlessly sadistic. And that’s saying something.
The Garbage Pail Kids themselves are… Ugh. There’s never a second where the little people in the suits look believable, and I’m not convinced anyone even tried. The puppetry is a step below mutant Chet in Weird Science, and you have to stare at these things for an hour and a half. None of them capture the feel of the cards’ characters, certainly not their creativity. What made the cards cool was their grotesque exaggeration and satirical edge. Here, they’re just unsettling.
And yet, you can’t look away. It’s a movie that’s so misguided, so deeply confused about what it’s trying to be, that it becomes almost watchable.
I mean, it’s absolutely a cynical cash grab, no question about that, but it’s also a fascinating glimpse into a pop cultural landscape that spawned something so bizarre. A studio desperate to quickly capitalise on a pre-sold trend that they threw money at a script they didn’t understand, slapped together some barely functional animatronics, and even managed to cram in a motivational song and dance number that doubles as a montage.
They threw everything at it, even the kitch n’ stink.
Topps might have had more success with a Wacky Packages movie.
Just saying’. -Pop
The Garbage Pail Kids Movie was dumped on home video this week in 1988, after stinking up an August 21, 1987 theatrical release.