Don’t Talk Garbage (1987)
During the 80s, there were many reasons to hang out at Ramsgate Pleasurama that didn’t involve queuing up for Golden Axe or Double Dragon. One of these was to trade and collect something so priceless and valuable that you didn’t even need to name it: you simply stood there chewing the free bubblegum that came with each pack and waited for somebody to wander up with the question, the ultimate question, the question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
‘You got Oliver Twisted?’
‘Sort of: I’ve got Dizzy Dave?’
‘NO. NO. NO. That’s totally different.’
‘It’s the SAME card.’
‘Oliver Twisted is worth about twenty squids: I wouldn’t give you twenty pee-lings for Dizzy Dave.’
‘It’s the SAME bloody picture!’
‘It’s DIFFERENT writing!’
‘Give me twenty quid and I’ll biro the name on this one.’
‘Listen, ginger kid, you know NOTHING about GPK – nothing.’
‘No, YOU listen, bald kid-‘
‘It’s a CREW CUT!’
‘Whatever. I know everything about GPK and there’s no difference between Oliver and Dave: they’re worth the SAME monies.’
‘Don’t believe everything your mum tells you when she’s cutting round that bowl she uses for your hair.’
‘Take that BACK.’
‘Bet you wish you could take back that haircut.’
‘You don’t know when to stop...’
‘Neither did your mum.’
‘RIGHT. Screw you, Cueball. I’ll just take Bony Tony and head home...’
‘Wait!’ His jaw dropped and a look of frank astonishment camped out on his face. ‘You’ve got...Bony Tony? Like – seriously?’
‘Sure.’ I sneezed and spat my gum onto his shoe to look cool (but missed and hit my own Hi-Techs). ‘I got a few of him.’
‘Show me.’
‘Depends. Have YOU got Oliver Twisted?’
‘Nah. I’ve got Dizzy Dave. He’s basically the same with different writing.’
I just stared at him.
Admittedly, it was a fair argument. Garbage Pail Kids collectable cards were EVERYTHING to a certain type of kid during the 80s, but they were also extremely frustrating to collect. Two cards would always share the same picture but sport different names, making some a lot more collectable than others.
Garbage Pail Kids were frowned upon by a lot of parents, even during the 80s (when you could watch vampire movies and read Stephen King novels without anyone really batting an eyelid). These days, a lot of the images on the cards wouldn’t just be inappropriate; they’d be front-page news.
Images of the cartoon kids being electrocuted, hanging, run over by trucks or cracked like eggs on the pavement were almost drowned out by the lighter, more generally gross-out ones based around strings of snots, exploding bowels and the sort of pukefest streams that would have taken an entire fleet of demented artists months to complete.
The artwork was often brightly coloured and deceivingly beautiful but kids in the 80s completely loved the shock value of the cards. They loved swapping them, collecting them, using them as scrapbook fodder and even posting them to kids in other towns. They weren’t for the football kids (who had their own cards in those World Cup sticker albums); instead, they were for the OTHER kids: the Inbetweeners, so full of nerd rage that the cards came to express most of what they were feeling. As the years went on, the series – as expected – had to adapt to an increasingly aware population where cultural references and comments on physical attributes started to gain more and more focus. Some of the gore was still there but it was greatly diluted or the images were depicted in such a way that the artwork took more of the strain: the shock value was present but required a more practised eye to see it.
Nevertheless, Garbage Pail Kids will always occupy a massively nostalgic place in my heart, a place reserved for Dungeons & Dragons, the Knightmare CITV show, Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and the 1990 WWF Royal Rumble. These were places of magic for us to hide...and a lot of us kids really did need to hide. They also represented in no small way the language and brutality of the playground: cards like Fatt Matt and many others were used to represent actual kids in early versions of the type of scrapbook made famous by Regina George in Mean Girls. This type of thing wasn’t exclusively the domain of the 80s (I’ve seen concepts like The Cheese Touch in the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid used to bully today’s kids, for example).
Nevertheless, in an age where so many products, images and concepts are deemed increasingly unacceptable, the graphic depictions on the Garbage Pail Kids cards still strike like an unexpected boom of thunder. They were – and are – quite literally astonishing. Oh...and I was lying about Bony Tony: EVERYONE had that guy.
