Release Date: September 20th, 2017
Directed by: Jeff Zapata, Joe Simko
Music by: Dr. Chud, Matthew Chojnacki
Cast: Art Spiegelman, John Pound, Tom Bunk, James Warhola, Adam F. Goldberg, Mackenzie Astin, various
Peel Here Productions, 114 Minutes
Review:
This has been in my queue for a long time but it was only available to buy. They recently set it for rent, so I was finally able to check it out. No offense, filmmakers and Amazon but I didn’t know if I wanted to spend like $12 on it. A few bucks for a rental, now that’s more like it. Make everything rentable.
Anyway, I was happy to see this, as I was one of those ’80s kids that spent a good few years obsessed with Garbage Pail Kids, even though they became hard to track down in my area after local parents groups caught on and got them pulled out of stores. You know, the same parents that didn’t care that their kids in the ’80s were watching slasher movies from the video store or flipping through dad’s Playboys.
I pretty much already knew the story about Garbage Pail Kids but it was neat seeing the story retold in an official documentary. Plus, this also gave some background on the creation of the Topps trading card company, as well as a lot of the other non-sports cards they produced before Garbage Pail Kids came along.
My favorite thing about this, though, was where it went into the art side of things. It went through how the Garbage Pail Kids came to be, every step of the way. It also explained the process and the reason why they made each set a certain size and the process in how cards were selected based off of dozens of concepts.
Additionally, this interviews a lot of the key people involved, including the primary artists who worked on these over the years.
After that, I really liked the section about the live-action Garbage Pail Kids movie and being enlightened as to why it was such a terrible film, pretty much destined to fail.
All in all, this was a beefy and informative piece about something I once loved and kind of still do.
Rating: 7.5/10
Pairs well with: other documentaries about niche ’80s and ’90s stuff, as well as specific fandoms.
Talking Pulp 