Cabbage Patch dolls among retro '80s toys making comebacks
By Lauren Bishop
Cincinnati Enquirer
Following in the plush and plastic footsteps of Care Bears, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and My Little Pony, another toy from the 1980s — the Cabbage Patch Kid — is poised to make a comeback.
Gannett News Service
The doll that drove parents to stand in long lines outside toy stores and caused fights to break out in malls 20 years ago sprouted anew on store shelves earlier this month.
Kendra Hull, like many a huge fan as a child of Cabbage Patch Kids, poses with the dolls she shared with her sister in her mother's West Chester, Ohio, home. The dolls are sprouting anew on store shelves.
Unlike late '80s and '90s Cabbage Patch Kids and other relaunched '80s toys, which have become hipper, edgier and more technologically advanced than their ancestors, the new Cabbage Patch Kids again have the familiar pudgy bodies, yarn hair, baby-powder scent, adoption papers, unusual names and creator Xavier Roberts' signature on the bottom. Thanks to random computer generation, no two will be alike.
"The point was to make them look like they did originally," says Scott Goldberg, a youth marketing consultant for Play Along, the Deerfield Beach, Fla., company that now manufactures the toys. The "adoption fee" is the same: about $30.
Like other retro toys, Cabbage Patch Kids' relaunch is aimed at Gen-X'ers who played with them as children and who are now parents themselves.
"The generation which owned them originally is coming of age and looking for nostalgia, and also to expose their children to toys which they themselves enjoyed," says George Sarofeen, a fashion doll and theatrical costume designer.
If the first generation who had them is any indication, Cabbage Patch Kids will again inspire the kind of adoration that won't abate as their owners age.
Play Along expects to sell 1 million to 2 million of the relaunched Cabbage Patch Kids.
But the long lines and mall melees that marked the early '80s may not recur. Teresa Edgington remembers standing outside a Cincinnati area Toys "R" Us in the early 1980s waiting for a shipment of Cabbage Patch Kids.
She estimates she bought more than a dozen over the years for the three children she had with her first husband. Now remarried, she has 6-year-old twins who play with the older children's Kids.
She says she'll probably buy the new Kids for her twins, but she won't stand in line. Thanks to eBay, "I don't wait around for much of anything," she says.
Nancy Carolan of Elgin, Ill., runs a Web site for abandoned Cabbage Patch Kids called Second Chance Orphanage (www.second-chance.info).
Since 1996, she has rescued old Kids from thrift stores, cleaned them and sold them for $8 to $20, wanting to make them affordable enough for children to "adopt" themselves. About 300 dolls find new homes every year, she says.
A collector herself, Carolan says she's excited about the Kids' return — even though she expects it will slow her business.
"The Cabbage Patch dolls send out the message that you don't have to be beautiful to be loved," she says. "And I think that's really wonderful."
