Cabbage Patch Kids
Cabbage Patch Kids are a line of cloth dolls with plastic heads first produced by Coleco Industries in 1982.
The brand was renamed 'Cabbage Patch Kids' by Roger L. Schlaifer when he acquired the exclusive worldwide licensing rights in 1982.
Additional Cabbage Patch products include children's apparel, bedding, infants' wear, record albums and board games.
According to court records,[4] Roberts, a 21-year-old art student at a missionary school in North Georgia, discovered craft artist Martha Nelson's Doll Babies.
[2] The Little People were first sold at arts and crafts shows, then later at Babyland General Hospital, an old medical clinic that Roberts and his friends-turned-employees converted into a toy store, in Cleveland, Georgia.
In order to attract potential doll manufacturers and to create the entertainment and publishing businesses he envisioned, Schlaifer and his partner/wife wrote the Legend of the Cabbage Patch Kids.
[citation needed] In 1982, Coleco's design team, headed by famed doll designer Judy Albert, devised an industry first: one-of-a-kind, plastic-headed Cabbage Patch Kids dolls with cuter features, softer bodies and a normal toddler's proportions instead of the morbidly obese bodies on Roberts' originals.
[6] It was those comparatively inexpensive ($18 to $28) dolls, branded in packaging designed by Schlaifer and produced in Coleco's factories in China, that succeeded commercially.
In January 1997, Mattel recalled the franchise's Snacktime Kids dolls after numerous complaints that they were chewing on children's hair and fingers.
[citation needed] In 2001, with Mattel's sales stalling, a former Coleco marketing employee, Al Kahn, acquired Original Appalachian's licensing rights and sold retailer Toys "R" Us on producing 20-inch (50.8 cm) Kids dolls and 18-inch (45.7 cm) baby dolls, both with cloth bodies and vinyl heads.
Play Along toys next obtained exclusive licensing rights to produce the Cabbage Patch Kids doll line.
In 2013, Jakks Pacific released the Celebration edition to commemorate the 30th Birthday of the licensed Cabbage Patch Kids.
[15][16] Wicked Cool Toys released new additions like Little Sprouts, a line of tiny collectable dolls, only 1.5 inches tall.
They were equipped with a voice chip, touch sensors, a microphone, short range 49 MHz AM transmitter and receiver for communicating with other dolls.
With the help of local friends, Roberts converted an old doctor's clinic into a general store/souvenir shop and "doll hospital" from which to sell his original "Little People".
Babyland General moved to a new facility on the outskirts of Cleveland, Georgia, in 2010 and has been voted one of the Travel Channel's top 10 toylands.
of programming, Squire Rushnell, and produced by Ruby-Spears with music by Joe Raposo, The Cabbage Patch Kids' First Christmas, premiered on ABC on December 7, 1984, and was the top-rated show in its time-slot.
Roberts rejected an offer from ABC for an hour Saturday show combining Cabbage Patch Kids and Furskins Bears.
She and her husband, Tucker Thomas, told the press that she was more upset by the corruption of her dolls, for which she cared deeply, than the money she'd lost as the result of Roberts' actions.
[26][27] Thomas died in 2013, at the age of 62, with her favorite dolls attending her funeral alongside her family members and friends.
The line was voluntarily withdrawn from the market following an agreement between Mattel and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in January 1997 following several incidents where children got their fingers or hair stuck in the dolls' mouths leading to safety warnings from Connecticut's consumer protection commissioner, Mark Shiffrin.
