The Physical Media Advocate #11!
Disc-Connected has built a wonderful physical media community on social media & YouTube, and has now expanded into the actual physical media world, with the magazine The Physical Media Advocate!
I’m proud to contribute to Issue 11 with my review of the new MediaBook BluRay release of “The Garbage Pail Kids Movie,” one of the all time great “so bad it’s good” films.
You can order a copy from Amazon, or if you live in Los Angeles, you can grab one at Videotheque or CD Trader!
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What makes “so bad it’s good” movies so entertaining? If a film is simply subpar, we are disappointed, but we move on and forget about it. But if a movie is truly awful, making so many wrong and absurd artistic choices, you almost have to admire it. Sometimes, when a film falls completely on its face, it reveals something so unique, so beyond good judgment or taste, that it feels fresh and alive in ways you never dreamed possible.
That’s a long way of saying that “The Garbage Pail Kids” is a truly special film. Based on the notorious 80s trading card series, the tale of a boy who befriends a group of disgusting alien creatures with a garbage pail spaceship was an instant failure in 1985, but has slowly built a bizarre cult following. By making so many bad left turns, it ends up being… not good, but unforgettable. With every crude fart joke, whiplash plot twist and sentimental monologue, it burrows into our brain and cannot be erased, right alongside such other “classics” as “Mac and Me” and “Super Mario Bros.”
Why do these films refuse to die, despite box office failure and critical ridicule? Because, unlike so many average films, their terribleness makes them immortal. And that’s not to say that real work didn’t go into making these films. The animatronic costumes for the Garbage Pail Kids are incredible for their time, and the little people actors inside them had to act while carrying that enormous weight and enduring unbearable heat. The plot and characters are insane, but always engaging; a lesser film would be simplistic and dull. Director Rod Amateau had a long career directing TV and films since the ’50s, but this would be his last theatrical movie. Professional filmmakers did their jobs, not knowing how it would turn out.
The movie was previously released on BluRay by Shout Factory, now out of print. This handsome new Region B Mediabook release is from Altitude Film Distribution & Capelight Pictures, with both English and German menus. It includes the film on BluRay and DVD, and carries over the interviews with cast and crew from that prior edition, but adds a significant new featurette: the feature-length documentary “30 Years of Garbage: The Garbage Pail Kids Story.” From its humble beginnings as a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids (which naturally lead to a lawsuit) to their lasting legacy today, the film goes into great detail about the hard work that went into creating hundreds of unique designs for the cards and the talented painters who brought them to life.
The card creators — including MAUS author Art Spiegelman — speak proudly of their contribution to ’80s counterculture, much to the furor of parents and schoolteachers. They do not, however, have nice things to say about the movie. It’s true that trading cards and a motion picture have almost nothing in common, and trying to adapt one into the other was probably an impossible challenge. They also attempted an animated TV adaption, which certainly seems like a safer bet in capturing the heart of the cards, but that was canceled before even making it to TV (though it is available now on DVD). One of the film’s stars, Mackenzie Astin, jokes that he thought they were making the next “Goonies,” but instead he’s still processing “The Garbage Pail Kids Movie” with his therapist. At least Kevin Thompson is still proud of his work, as he should be — how many actors can say they played an anthropomorphic talking alligator called “Ali Gator”?
Perhaps one day someone will unlock the secret solution to making a “great” Garbage Pail Kids adaptation. Or it could be that a movie based on a card series about gruesome, disgusting and iconoclastic babies shouldn’t be…good? Isn’t it the perfect joke that millions of dollars were spent to produce and release a Garbage Pail Kids movie, at the height of its popularity, and everyone hated it, only for it become a cult staple years later? That, I would say, captures the spirit of the Garbage Pail Kids pretty well.
