Filmmaker Andrew Jenks and producer Dan Goodman have teamed up to deliver the engaging and insightful documentary Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids. Narrated by Neil Patrick Harris, the feature is now playing in theaters. The documentary, which is recommended by the CinemAddicts crew, marks the 40th year anniversary of the Cabbage Patch Kid debut! Full interview with Jenks and Goodman are in the post!
Cabbage Patch Kids creator Xavier Roberts with his Coleco creations. (Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids, Abramorama)
Interviewees for Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kidsincludes Cabbage Patch Kids’ creator Xavier Roberts (his first interview in over 20 years), journalist Connie Chung, former Coleco Marketing head Al Kahan, Toy expert Jonathan Alexandratos and collectors Joe and Pat Prosey.
First off, this comes out Black Friday. And what was the initial just thoughts on the release date, which I think is ingenious. And then I guess sort of a left turn on that, getting a really great narrator behind this documentary.
Dan Goodman: I can talk about the release date and Andrew can talk to you a little bit more about Neil. When we first started thinking about this, it was a little while ago because these things take quite a long time to put together. It was just at the tail end of COVID and everybody was coming out of it. I was thinking to myself, man. This Black Friday is going to be the first, not this coming up, but at the time it was like two years ago. I was like, this coming up, Black Friday is going to be the first time people are going back to stores post-Covid.
This is going to be crazy. People are going to go absolutely nuts. They’ve been cooped up this entire time, and we just started thinking about it and we started kicking around this idea was like, remember the Cabbage Patch Kid riots? And we started looking into it, and the more we looked into it, the more we realize that these Cabbage Patch kids, you know, the riots, the craziness was kind of the first time retail shopping turned violent.
It was sort of the precursor for kind of modern day Black Friday. And as we started to investigate it, we just kind of started to delve into it further. And so it just made total sense, you know, if we could, to release it on Black Friday, we just thought there was something poetic about it, especially for the 40th anniversary of of the release in 1983.
Xavier Roberts – Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbatch Patch Kids (Abramorama)
And I’m sure getting Neil for this, Andrew, was really cool as well as part of just rounding out your doc.
Andrew Jenks: Yeah I know. Of course, we wanted to have someone who kind of can speak and represent the 80s in a certain way. And obviously, Neal’s had a prolific career, but certainly, Doogie Howser always comes to mind, I think, for, for a lot of people. And then we wanted a narrator who could really add something to the story, add another dimension to the story, but wouldn’t necessarily take over the film.
I think Neil does a really great balance of really contributing and adding that layer while also letting kind of the documentary and all the different layers unravel.
Dan Goodman: Neil also has this kind of undertone to his narration that’s a little subversive in a way that, you know, there’s some serious stuff we’re talking about, but ultimately it’s also (about the) Cabbage Patch Kids, right? So it’s a really great balance. And he walks that line. We think, really well.
Andrew, I’m a Gen Xer. I remember the fervor and just the idea of the fear my family would not be able to get a Cabbage Patch Kid for my sister. You did a great job at capturing the right tone, because sometimes docs don’t get that. How were you able just to nail that that that?
Andrew Jenks: The urgency and pressure that you’re speaking to in, in terms of getting one is very evident. Just when you like, go on YouTube and you search Cabbage Patch Kids and you start to see the riots and the fights that were breaking out in malls and stores. And so we did think like that was that was crucial.
In fact, one of my favorite stories is that the US government actually ended up fielding a false advertising charge against Coleco, the makers of Cabbage Patch Kids, saying that they were harassing children because they were running ads for dolls which were not available. So Cabbage Patch Kids, they actually had to take down, discontinue advertising, specifically these commercials. And they made a big announcement. You know, the commercials have been pulled because of this issue and that created, if anything, even more of a craze.
There was this unbelievable need that people felt to get their hands on one. Much like your make your family.
Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids (Abramorama)
Aside from the Black Friday stuff, a big theme of this documentary is the idea of who creates what and how how do you scale up your business to spread your dream. Sometimes people might see that as a capitalistic move. And then there are other people who really do it for the love of creating art and don’t really want to scale. They just want to keep it in house. And it talks about the there is no good, there is no evil there. Can you guys talk about that push and pull part of your documentary?
Andrew Jenks: It’s interesting because to give a little bit of context, while we were researching and getting an understanding of the Cabbage Patch Kids in their history, as it turns out, there was a lawsuit in the early 80s and there was a woman named Martha Nelson Thomas who, years before the Cabbage Patch Kids even came out, had met Xavier Roberts, who’s the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids.
And she had been making dolls. As it turns out, her dolls are eerily similar to Xavier’s. Not just the look, but also the concept. And so we look into whether or not one could say was, were Cabbage Patch Kids stolen by, you know, from Martha or inspired by? And so there’s a little bit of a question as to what’s the difference. And, you know, Xavier certainly ended up creating this huge business. They made billions of dollars. That was something Martha was never interested in. And so what’s been interesting is, is that we’ve been able to start to see people’s responses.
When they actually leave a screening, they have different points of view. Oh, well, Xavier stole it. No, no he didn’t. He was inspired by and he’s a great businessman and that. So it’s really we try not to tell you how to think, but just to kind of question and wonder what really happened.
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Does that hit home for you, Dan? Because you are sort of you’re creating so much stuff as well, and I’m sure you can see both sides of the picture as far as collaboration and creating art goes.
Dan Goodman: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, again, I think as Andrew said, it’s really kind of two sides of the same coin when you look at how Xavier built and marketed this business, creating Babyland. I mean, he built a baby hospital with cabbage births and nurses and doctors and created all kinds of stuff around. It was able to, you know, build this licensing business with Coleco.
If you look at a similar, I guess, not a similar story, but kind of this, this idea of like even something like Apple and you look at Steve Jobs, who, you know, didn’t necessarily create the programming per se, but he was a marketing genius. And would Apple have been what it was without him and his business acumen and marketing genius? So I just there’s a lot of different ways to look at it.
And we’re not suggesting one is right or wrong, but it is a very much representative of what a capitalist society is, you know, and at the end of the day, 1s Xavier had copyrights in everything. There wasn’t anything that he, you know, that he did, that he didn’t register or, you know, put copyrights for. Martha, that’s just not what she did. She didn’t have aspirations to do those things.
He didn’t tell her not to do these things. He didn’t tell her to stop. She had issues with selling the dolls to him in the first place. And so it’s just kind of this interesting circular argument of, you know, where’s the lines, where’s who’s who’s right and wrong? And it’s just not that clear cut. It’s just a lot of areas of gray, which I think is very much like I said, representative of capitalism and society and kind of how people bring things to market.
Andrew, your documentary is standalone, singular. I love it, it’s great. But while you’re actually editing and doing this, did you ever think to yourself, wow, this, this is just sort of stranger than fiction? This could have been this could be a great miniseries or a movie or whatnot.
Oh, yeah. No, certainly. (There were so) many layers and and moving parts to this and something else that we’re proud of was that Xavier hadn’t really done an interview in 25 years and had kind of become like a mystery figure. There wasn’t even photos of him. I would hear whispers of like, oh, he’s in France and all. I tracked down high school classmates of his, and it took months and months and months, and so we didn’t know that we would, going into this, even even have an interview with him.
What would be cool about doing something that, that you’re kind of speaking to is that, he says a lot of things that we’ve never heard before. This isn’t kind of a, you know, a documentary that’s like a Wikipedia entry kind of rehashing things you’ve heard. We really have a lot of new information and new perspective from him and many others that that just hasn’t been out there.
A final couple of questions. And being a basketball fan, I’ve got to ask the deer basketball question. Dan, you know, I think what makes when I first saw it, what made Dear Basketball so special for me is it’s not just about basketball, it’s about life, about pouring your heart and soul, knowing the inevitability of giving something can really wreck your right. What? What is that like? Just over the years, hearing to know that you made it such a transcendent piece of work that can be applied not just to the hardwood, but to to real life as well.
Dan Goodman: Well, I think you just said it perfectly, frankly, which is that’s that’s really what the message is. It’s for dreamers. It’s for people who are not afraid to follow their passions. It’s way beyond basketball and it’s about basketball, obviously. But that message transcends for so many of us. It’s really kind of a similar theme that you see when you hear about Xavier, who, you know, Xavier kind of came from nothing. He talks about the art he was making. He wanted it to be art, but it was things they needed. He started quilting because they needed blankets, you know, but then he would make extras and they would sell them on these Appalachian art craft stores and festivals. I think for a lot of successful people who create these enduring or iconic legacies, you see a similar theme.
It’s much bigger than what they do. It’s this drive to achieve your dreams. And it’s this drive to build something bigger than yourself and kind of believe that you can do that. You see that I think in this film, too, in a big way. In a lot of ways, Xavier represents kind of a very similar story of self achievement and following your dreams. I think Kobe captured in his poetry in Dear Basketball.
Right off the top of your head, can both of you name one of your all time favorite films, and what is it about the specific film that resonates with you still today?
Andrew Jenks: God, that’s a long list. I mean, The Fog of War. Grizzly Man, The Imposter. All of them just, you know, being able to get access to a story and a character that had never really opened up in front of the camera and talked about so many of the different layers of their life.
So those are three off the bat that that I’ve always really taken to.
Dan Goodman: Cool. I’m not sure mine are is high brow (laughs). Ever since I was a kid, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. But the original Gene Wilder (film), I think it’s maybe one of the greatest things that Gene Wilder ever did. There’s just something so artful and magic about that performance. And then I’ll be honest, I think maybe my all time favorite movie is Steve Martin’s The Jerk. It’s just genius.
That’s amazing.
I’m an old school guy. I’m a comedy guy. Yeah.
Did you introduce that? I don’t know, do you introduce that movie to your to your fellow friends or your family over the years?
One hundred percent. My kids have all seen all this stuff, all the Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, all of them, everything, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, we’ve run the gamut of all of it, and it translates throughout the generations. They’re my kids for sure.
Really love the documentary. Thank you guys so much for your time.
Dan Goodman: Thanks, Greg. Thanks so much for joining
