The 1980s were the golden age of animated shows based on toy lines. Transformers, G.I. Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Care Bears, Pound Puppies, Go-Bots--all ended up with daily or weekly animated series at one point or another. Some of them even made the jump to movie theaters, allowing parents the opportunity to pay for themselves and their kids to watch a 75-minute commercial. Oddly enough, however, arguably the quintessential toy of the 80s, The Cabbage Patch Kids, didn't get a series, even though all the elements were in place for them to become TV stars themselves.
The doll line, which has quite the sordid history behind it that I'm not going to go into here, became the must-have toy for Christmas 1983, to the point that riots actually broke out in stores between desperate parents fighting over the last remaining dolls in stock. Any toy line that hot was going to get spin-off media, and in 1984, a ten-song record was released, giving the Kids' backstory, introducing individual Kids, and revealing that, yes, the Kids are actually grown in the patch, emerging from actual cabbages (thanks to, I kid you not, flying bunnybees, which are exactly what you think they are). That holiday season, the Kids' first TV special, The Cabbage Patch Kids First Christmas, would debut, taking much of its backstory from the record.
The kids are apparently raising themselves, with their only two friends being a talking stork named Colonel Casey and a pre-teen named Xavier (based on the doll's supposed designer, Xavier Roberts). When Xavier tells the Kids about Christmas, they decide to take off for the big city (revealed eventually to be Atlanta, marking a relatively rare occasion in which a real-world city is the setting for an animated special) in search of the Christmas Spirit, which they believe to be a real, actual being.
There, they meet up with a young orphan, Jenny, who wants a family, but has a bad leg, so believes no one wants to adopt her, a couple that can't stop talking about how desperately they want kids, and a gang of thieves who go to ungodly lengths to steal a wallet that belongs to the man that the Kids find after he dropped it, not to mention press Jenny and the Kids into working for them (apparently not thinking through that the consequences of kidnapping are a lot more harsh than for pickpocketing).
What I found most interesting about the special was not the relatively predictable (and somewhat creepy) storyline (in which the kids try to track down the couple so they can present a ready-made kid for them to adopt, while avoiding the gang of thieves, and discovering exactly what the Christmas Spirit is), but how the special was clearly intended to be a pilot for a Cabbage Patch Kids series. From the fact that the special introduced 7 of the Kids (plus babies), to the fact that there was a completely different set of villains at the beginning also wanting to capture the Kids to force them to mine gold (yes, seriously) who, after getting a big introduction, promptly disappear for the rest of the special, this was clearly setting up the characters for further adventures. If it was intended to be a one-off, I suspect we might have met only three or four Kids, since seven is a whole lot to introduce for a half-hour special, plus the first set of bad guys, who also came from the record and were clearly meant to be the recurring villains for the series, wouldn't have been featured at all.
So why wasn't this followed by a series? It wasn't because of ratings, as this was ABC's highest-rated show of the night. Indeed, ABC already had plans for a 13 episode series to be shown on Saturday mornings starting the fall of 1985. Apparently, those plans ended up being nixed by Roberts, and that first Christmas ended up being the last TV adaption for over a decade, until a few stop-motion animated specials (including another Christmas special) were made from 1996 to 1999.
The world probably didn't lose much by not having a Cabbage Patch Kids TV series. Saturday morning animation wasn't exactly top-quality during the mid-1980s, and the other shows based on toys, while holding a lot of nostalgia for the now-adults who watched those shows as kids, were simply not very good. It's highly unlikely that the Kids show would have been any better. So, we're left with The Cabbage Patch Kids First Christmas, a mildly cute, if predictable, special that serves as a reminder of a time when these dolls were the hottest thing out there.
Next time: We come full circle with a look at a special starring someone who appeared in this year's first two entries.
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