Rankin/Bass animation is beloved for their holiday stop-motion classics like Rudolph and The Year Without a Santa Claus, but they’re also responsible for some of the most terrifying villains in 80s animation.
Take Mon*Star from Silverhawks as a for instance. Even his space squid is afraid of him…
One of the things I love about sifting through vintage ephemera is stumbling on precursors or inspirations for some of my favorite pop culture junk.
An example are the Garbage Pail Kids which bloomed from a concept by Mark Newgarden & John Pound in an unused piece for the 1985 Wacky Packs set. A🧵
This parody advertisement for Cabbage Patch Teenagers came from the Scholastic Magazine called Maniac and was published in 1984, a full year or so before Topps would create a phenomenon that would eclipse Cabbage Patch Kids. While it probably didn't influence GPKs, it's still a rad find...
Current mood (just replace band references with pop culture nostalgia…)
youtu.be/6xG4oFny2Pk?...
The Cabbage Patch Kids craze kicked off in 1983, and Pound and Newgarden created the parody above in early 1985 before the folks at Topps decided to launch and entire trading card/sticker line dedicated to the parody in mid to late 1985.
Back before Topps took their swing, Scholastic took their own
"What are you doing in my waters boy?!?"
OMG, that's hot...
One of my pastimes is searching for copies of my collection of out-of-print books on Amazon to see the asking price so I can feel fake rich for a few minutes…
