To say the Garbage Pail Kids cards where THE thing in my school when we were kids is to state bald unopposed fact. Like saying that Jeremy Kyle is everything that is wrong with humanity or that anyone raising a child on chips and ITV alone is the very worst kind of terrorist.
For a start the GPK cards were for boys only, girls weren't really interested. Understandable really though as they had their Cabbage Patch Dolls the sweet, innocent playthings that were being so colourfully and monstrously debased by the GPK.
They also appealed to boys more, the humour was mostly grotesque or visceral. The names of each character usually included some sort of word play and maybe girls would like that, if it weren't for the fact that the names were things like Little Barfin Anna, Lucas Mucas, Shredded Paige, Drew Blood or Tommy Gun.
The cards though were only the start of it. Card trading tended to be an extension of something else. The Simpsons had cards as did the WWF WWE so you could enjoy muscley pictures of the Million Dollar Man even when the wrestling wasn't on TV. These were the very dawnings of our modern multimedia relationship with the media we consume. This is where GPK is unique.
Whereas cards were a spinoff item from other things, primarily TV, the GPK cards themselves were the original media and that then spawned other iterations. For a very long time at my school there was talk that a film existed. A film that had been made about the Garbage Pail Kids. But nobody knew for sure. This was in the days before every known fact had been recorded in easily accessible form on the Internet. One kid would claim to have seen the trailer on holiday in the states and another would say his older brother had a pirated copy of it and that it was horrific and gruesome and had been banned in the UK like Evil Dead or Cannibal Holocaust. Then one day, in my local video store, it caught my eye...
There it was, the box for the Garbage Pail Kids Movie. It was hard to believe it had finally just appeared down at Empire Video 2, but it had. I quickly grabbed it before anyone else could (the shop was empty except for me and the clerk behind the desk.) I took it up to him and after exchanging boxes and money i was on the short walk/dash home.
Almost reverently i loaded it into our toploading VHS player, carefully closing the glass doors of the cabinet before sitting rooted to the spot. Waiting.
The film started with a notable lack of GPK it was set in a junk shop and there was a boy, but he didn't have any GPK cards! What a loser! Until, a standard issue garbage pail is knocked asunder. Then the goo, the kids and the mayhem are unleashed.
I was so thrilled to see that Ali Gator had made it into the film. He was the perfect balance between dangerous cool and sideshow grotesquery; discreetly violent and yet somehow only mischievous, somewhere this reptile child had a heart.
That first viewing was sublime and GPK the movie became one of my favourite films to rent. Then one day it wasn't there any more. The clerk told me that someone who rented it had chewed it up too bad. That was a bad day from my childhood, a bleak lesson in nothing lasts forever.
Close enough to 20 years have passed and now I'm an adult. I still collect things like DVDs, guitars, books and bills. I had essentially forgotten about the GPK movie. The cards lived on as part of a "group conciousness" amongst my generation part of a whole "thing" we used to do with its own vocab and rituals. Got, need, need, need, got, got, got, got. Swapsies was when you'd switch a surplus duplicate card you had for one that your friend had that you didn't. Sometimes this was called twosies, but in my school twosies was when you would swap two cards for one. Particularly useful if you had plenty of surplus but only a few more to get before having the full set.
Then about six weeks ago the cinema of which I'm a member, The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, announced a series of Good Bad Movies. Four films across four months. Killer Clowns from Outer Space (see this post for how that was), Mac and Me, Masters of the Universe and Garbage Pail Kids The Movie. It all came flowing back. Not the memory of the cards but of VHS movie nostalgia, the old persons affliction.
Sure i could have bought the VHS on eBay, the DVD on Amazon or even illicitly downloaded a copy of the film; but I'd still be watching it at home. Every viewing of my childhood was in the same front room of my mother's house. All I'd be doing by doing any of those things would be watching the film in the same way i always did. So instead, I'm going to watch it in a cinema. Something I never had a chance of doing as a kid and in all likelihood won't have again for a long while. This isn't just reliving the experience it's elevating it to a new level.
The six week wait is over, tonight it screens and tomorrow? Well, tomorrow I might have some shopping to do on Amazon.
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