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Are you ready for your best life of minus the burnout, I'm sorry, Hall from NBC's Access Hollywood and my new podcast, Hot Happy Mess is all about the most important vibe. You you're the star of your life, so own it. Join us each Monday as we discuss relationships, health care, career and much more. Our podcast is for mindful, ambitious, diverse millennial women who are ready for more happiness, laughter, peace and purpose. Now listen to Hot Happy Mass every week on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh, Josh, Malcolm Clark, there's Charles Lane Bryant. This is stuff you should know about Cabbage Patch kids who have two names, which is why I just did that. That's right, this remarkably the third time we've talked about Cabbage Patch kids on this show.

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I only remember one other time when was the when was the third time or the second time, I guess?

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Well, the last time was not even a year ago on our on our episode on must have Christmas gifts and then that's all I remember.

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Yeah.

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And then while I was telling the story of my Cabbage Patch kid experience, he said, yes, you've told everyone this story before. So I think this will be the third time that we hear these stories.

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I thought you didn't have a Cabbage Patch kid, so you don't remember the other two times I told the story? No, you got to try it again. It's called the it's called the Hatrick Baby. Uh, yeah, uh, my sister has one of the first like seventy five of them of the little people Dolz. Oh, wow. That she bought in October when she was a kid. Now I now I know why it didn't stick with me, because I didn't understand what the heck you were talking about.

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Now I totally get it and I think it will stay with me forever. Chuck, when we do our fourth, fifth and sixth podcasts on Cabbage Patch Kids, I will be the one telling that story. How about that?

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Well, and you also told the story of yours that you ripped the head off and give it a Mohawk.

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Yeah. For yours. Weber Dino made a pretty terrible demise.

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And I have two of them myself that my mom every once in a while says, hey, do you want these? And I say, no, I don't I don't think they're worth much money. And I don't know even know if my sisters is worth a lot of money now, even though it's hand signed. And one of the first ones, I just I don't think the market is as robust as it was at one point. So was hers a calico little people or is it Xavier Roberts?

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Like original Appalachian Artwork's little people know hers was one of the Handmaid Xavier Roberts Oji Craft Fair Dolls.

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I think those go for like one, two, maybe two thousand dollars, I think. Yeah, I just I guess it depends on where you look like.

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I saw the one of mine that was one of those originals and it wasn't one of the first 100. But people are asking like one hundred and fifty bucks on eBay for those.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm surprised to see that. Like from what I've seen, if like if if you really want the big bucks, it's the the original Xavier Roberts little people. But we're probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit because some people are probably like, what's the Cabbage Patch kid. Right. Right. So we'll tell everybody what a Cabbage Patch kid is. It's a little doll.

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That was a huge, huge deal in the Christmas of 1983. And like Chuck said, we talked about this on I guess it was our I think it was our Christmas episode or was it a different standalone episode from last year now?

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I think the first time we did it was a Christmas episode. And then last year it was in November, it was just massive Christmas toys.

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OK, gotcha, gotcha. So that's worth listening to, but in December of 1983, Christmas Eve 1983, everybody was going crazy for these dolls. But at the same time, there was like because it was such a huge craze and they were so part of popular culture at the moment. They were on the news every night. People were doing just absolutely crazy things to get their hands on these these dolls for their kids. There was a lot of talk about, well, what are these things?

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They're so ugly that they're cute. And other people thought, well, no, they're actually just ugly. There is a journal article that came out in 1986 in the Semantics Journal, et cetera, and the Cabbage Patch kids were described as open arms denied, seemingly dull witted with mop haired faces only mothers could love, which I think is pretty pretty.

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It's a pretty accurate description of a Cabbage Patch kid, don't you think? Yeah.

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So on that there was this is something I never knew. Apparently there was a rumor years after the fact that the design was managed by Ronald Reagan because he wanted to get Americans used to what mutant offspring might look like. If we ever go to if the big one ever drops and we go to war with the Russkies, um, we might want to get used to our babies looking like this. So let's just sort of in the classic Hollywood, like, you know, there are theories that that's why we make UFO movies.

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They're commissioned by the government to get people sort of adjusted to the idea that one day there's going to be aliens walking around. Right, exactly.

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But that's probably not the case. Ronald Reagan probably didn't have anything to do with it. But that's just such an 80s thing. Cabbage Patch kids, Ronald Reagan and nuclear war with the USSR. That's about like the greatest 80s combination I've ever heard of in my life.

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Yeah, pretty good. So if you go on to the Cabbage Patch Kids website, you'll find the enchanting, magical story of where Cabbage Patch kids came from or how they came into our human world. And it goes something like this, that when he was a young boy, Xavier Roberts was wandering around the Appalachian Mountains and he saw what is called a bunny B, which is a magical B, that magical bunny that can fly around like buzzes around like a bee.

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And he followed it and the bunny bee went through a waterfall. And Xavier Roberts went and looked and saw that behind the waterfall there was a tunnel and he went into the tunnel being an inquisitive type of Appalachian young boy. And when he came out on the other side of the tunnel, he was clearly in some sort of enchanted land because there were a bunch of bunny bees flying around over a cabbage patch, sprinkling some sort of magical dust. And Xavier noticed that when the dust hit the cabbage, the cabbage would start to move and a little baby would be born from it.

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A Cabbage Patch kid. And one of those kids, a kid named Otis Lee, came up to Xavier and said, hey, will you take me and all of my friends over the human world and help us find homes? And so Xavier Roberts agreed, and he founded Babyland General Hospital for the purpose of adopting out Cabbage Patch kids. And that's where it all came from. That's right.

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Babyland general right here in Cleveland, Georgia. And I just so happen to have driven by there. But two days ago, I went up. Oh, yeah, yeah. We went on a waterfall hike the family did on Sunday. And did you see a bunny?

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B, we didn't see a bunny B, but we drove right by Babyland General. And Emily was like, did you know that was there? I was like, yeah, I've been there.

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So of course I knew it was there. But that's where Xavier Roberts went to college. He went to college at Drewett McConnell there in Cleveland. So that was the connection, right?

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Right. Yeah. If you want to if you want to kind of take it down a notch as far as magical enchantment goes, the the official story is that Xavier Roberts, while he was that true, McConnell, while he was studying art there, he came across a German fabric sculpture technique from the 19th century called needle molding. And if you've ever seen, you know, that that really famous tomato pincushion, Chuck, in the 70s. Hmm. So, you know how how like the top the creases in the top of the tomato are made by like like taut thread pulled through together to kind of create that that molded look that from what I can tell is a form of needle molding.

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But somehow Xavier Roberts was like, I really like sculpture and this is a form of soft sculpture. I also like quilting. And this kind of has to do with quilting. I'm going to get into this and we're going to figure out how to make baby dolls using this needle molding technique. And he did just that starting in 1977.

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Yeah. And for those of you that want to throw your car into a ditch right now because you're screaming about the story. Because, you know, the true story just put a pin in it, we're going to get around to it. That was very merciful of each other.

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Yeah, I didn't want people to think that we didn't know. But in 1977, Xavier Roberts, who sort of look like a sort of like a shorter haired Kenny Rogers type, wore a cowboy hat and had this beard and he developed these the like, he said soft sculpture.

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But they were dolls called little people. And here was the sort of hitch that really drove kids wild, is that they were not dolls that you buy. They were little people that you adopt. So you got adoption birth certificates. It was a it was a brilliant idea that he had put a pin in it. Right. And the and he sold these things little people, originals. He had he went to arts and crafts shows. He sold them.

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We bought ours at uniquely large at Unicode State Park in a gift shop there. So that was the kind of place that would carry this kind of stuff. There were about forty dollars. And I remember distinctly that my father could not imagine paying forty dollars for a doll.

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And I think even I think we even left without little Chuck. And he went back because he felt so bad about how crestfallen my sister was and bought the doll later on for a Christmas gift or something if my memory serves me. But it was a lot of money. 40 bucks is a lot of money for a doll back then.

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Yeah, it was probably getting pretty close to one hundred bucks. And I mean, who goes to UNICOR State Parks gift shop and expects to drop 100 bucks on a piece of folk art. That's really just a baby doll.

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You know, I kind of thought he thought he's going to have to get a Michelle miniature license plate for fifty. Sure, exactly.

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And when you go in with an expectation like that and you are faced with a hundred dollar soft sculpture payment that you have to make, that's a big shock. And sometimes somebody needs to get in their car and drive home and think about it before they can accept that.

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That's right. So like you said, that's exactly the kind of place you would have bought this. You could have also found them at craft fairs or something. And in fact, Xavier Roberts won first place at the Osceola Art Show in Kissimmee, Florida, for the little people that he named Dexter, which is one of the most uncanny, haunting, horrid dolls you'll ever see in your life. But it helped kind of generate some buzz. And at that point, he was like, you know what this is?

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Things are kind of going well. People are paying 40 bucks for for to adopt one of these little people. I'm winning first place prizes. I'm going to get together some friends. And he founded what's known as original Appalachian Artwork's. And they they are the ones that actually opened up Babyland General. They took an old medical center in Cleveland, which is super creepy, that they they they took an abandoned hospital and opened it first. It's basically like a doll store.

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Really creepy if you step back and just look at the contours of the whole thing. But it was a creation.

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No, no, it didn't. I'm just saying, if you just look at the words on paper. Oh, sure. Put it like that. It does. Yeah.

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When, you know, it was little it was like a little house and it was the opposite of creepy, like it was delightful. And I guess it still is because I mean it's still in operation today. But people would show up and like there were like the people who work there were dressed up as nurses and doctors and and they would help the the the babies be born from cabbage, from cabbages. Then they would be incubated. They were preemies that were born like it was a big deal operation to take this this idea of you were adopting a Cabbage Patch kid rather than buying a doll and then like adding that whole extra dimension to it of going to Babyland General to do it, really helped generate a lot of buzz for for these things.

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Yeah. And I should say that my sister's doll, Chuck, who was they come with their name, she didn't name it after me.

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But Chuck had you know, if you see the early versions of these things, like you said, it was kind of horrific looking. They they weren't the cutest dolls at all. Chuck had a very crooked hairline, like it looked like it was made by someone who didn't fully know what they were doing. His little yarn hair line was like a good three inches higher on one side of his forehead than the other, which. Oh, my. Again, further, my dad did not see the charm in this.

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He was like, it's not even made well and I've got to pay forty dollars for these things.

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But supposedly with the premise, Xavier Roberts is given some credit to just raising awareness for premature babies because the premise in the Cabbage Patch land were so cute. They also had C sections, cabbage sections, and by the time 1980 rolls around, he's selling a pretty good amount of these things. But it really explodes in popular culture from sort of the.

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Early 80s, he was featured on the TV show Real People, which I watched a lot as a kid, made Newsweek, made The Wall Street Journal. And so the press is starting to kind of come around and these things are just getting more and more popular at this point.

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Yeah, a lot of those stories just kind of focused on people who were paying a lot more than the original retail price to start collecting these dolls. So there's like a whole underground coal market that was developing around these little people. And it became very apparent that Xavier Roberts was not going to be able to keep up with supply. So he started looking for some help and he found it in 1982. And we will talk all about that partnership made in heaven starting after these messages.

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Oh. Hey, Chuck, you know those times where you're like this is a once in a blue moon moment, like when you have like a really great hang out with your friends digitally? Of course, Blue Moon is on a mission to say, hey, let's have more of those blue moon moments. And while you're having those blue moon moments, once you enjoy a blue moon beer. That's right. The brewmaster and the blue founder was inspired by the very flavorful Belgian wits he enjoyed while he was studying brewing in Brussels said, how about a little bit of Valencia orange?

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How about a little coriander about some oats? Let's leave it unfiltered. And it's going to be nice, smooth and creamy. Yeah. And what he made was a full flavor beer, unlike any other. And that's where it gets its name. Somebody said a beer that's good only comes around once in a blue moon. But you can enjoy Blue Moon far more frequently than that, right? That's right. And you can even have it delivered by going to get to Blue Moon beer dotcom and finding delivery options near you.

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So add a special touch to your holiday season. With the brightness of Blue Moon, celebrate responsibly. Blue Moon Brewing Company. Golden Colorado Ale.

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Yeah, hey, everybody, this is Jill Scott, and I am pleased to introduce you to Jadot IL, the podcast. I am joined by my amazing, brilliant girlfriend, Friends St. Clair What I know. And Aja, great dance. Hey, all, we are going to be talking about a lot of amazing things like individuality, family and blackness.

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Oh, Jill, I don't have time to listen to a podcast himi listen, when you're sulking in your bathtub, listen on your long drive home or when you're shopping at the grocery store, just throw those earbuds in and check out Jadot. If the podcast, listen to Jill Scott presents Jadot Il, the podcast on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. OK, Chuck, so it's 1982 and the little people are just going bonkers, they're flying off the shelves, they can't keep them in stock anywhere, they're selling them.

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UNICOR State Park is on the phone every day being like, send us more, send us more. We don't care what the headline looks like. We got to have them. And so Xabier Roberts started looking for some like a legit toy manufacturer to help him out. And he found it in Calico, who had made a name, I guess, around the same time as maybe a little bit before this year, before maybe as the people who came out with Pacman.

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So they were riding high by this time. And they said, I think there's something to this, these little people and we're going to we're going to buy in here. So Xavier Roberts partnered with Calico and the rest of the story just kind of takes off like a rocket from there.

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Yeah. So this was in 1982. And at first Kalikow said, you know what, we're going to keep calling them little people.

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We think that's a good name. Even though it wasn't so they stuck with a name. They figured out the best way to mass produce these things was to get rid of that handgun Hansen head. That was a real problem. That's what took the most time. It's also, frankly, what gave those early dolls all the personality. A lot of that was lost when they went to the plastic heads, but they did keep the cloth bodies. They machine produced these vinyl heads the size of doll down a little bit to about six inches.

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The initial dolls were pretty big. They varied in size, obviously, depending on how old they were when you adopted them. But they were large, like Chuck was a big doll. The two I have her big dolls. Yeah.

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They were like the size where if they were possessed by a demon and came alive, they could smother you like that. You'd be in big trouble if they came alive while you were asleep.

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Yes, big time. But sizing him and down made a big difference because then you could just box him up, get more shelf space that way. Sure. And they were smart early on to to realize that kids wanted a lot of variety. They wanted different ethnicities. They want a different skin color, different shapes. They wanted some with freckles, some with dimples, obviously different eye color and hair color and stuff like that. And that was one of the big selling points, is it wasn't just this same these mass produced doll that that.

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Right. Every kid could have the same one. Every kid wanted a different version.

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Yeah. Because, I mean, that was the part of the whole marketing that you were adopting, your own individual kid, your own Cabbage Patch kid who had his or her own name, his or her own, like specific birthday. He or she was a unique little baby that you were adopting. So the idea that you could take different head molds and different facial features and different types of hair and you had like a few different from each category, you suddenly had like millions of combinations that you could randomly put together.

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It continued that uniqueness that was like part of the brand from the beginning and like you said, was like part of like the big the big thing that, like, made this craze so, so huge. You know, they were very smart to identify. That is a big part of the marketing and then figure out a way to carry it on while also mass producing these things is pretty clever on Calicos part.

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Yeah. And it was also clever to change the name little people. Yeah. Just didn't have legs basically in the end. And they thought Cabbage Patch kids, they were born in the Cabbage Patch.

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It's and you know, looking back, it's a pretty brilliant name because it ties into being adopted, being born in the little Cabbage Patch. And it's, it was pretty brilliant. I think it was the kind of name like that you could end up making into a bunch of other things, which they did. And we're going to talk about that. But I don't think little people quite had the legs to do that.

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So Klecko also figured out that there was a really good, sweet spot that even if you couldn't really afford it, you would still stretch to reach that point. And they started adopting these. The adoption fees for Cabbage Patch kids came to about thirty dollars, which is seventy eight dollars in today's money. And they they took their, you know, comparatively much larger clout and contacts in the media and started getting way more press for Cabbage Patch Kids and Xavier Roberts ever managed to to generate for little people, which I have to say looking looking back, though, Xavier Roberts did some really good work as just some dude from Cleveland, Georgia, who was hand sewing dolls.

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I mean, he got some pretty good coverage. Yeah.

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That should have been very Neshin Regional. Right, exactly, and it was and it became a big deal, but Kalikow just put it to shame, they they they got a lot of press, a lot of interest drummed up for Cabbage Patch kids. And all of that kind of culminated in a December 12th, 1983 edition of Newsweek when there was a Cabbage Patch, a little girl with her Cabbage Patch kid on the cover of that edition just in time for the Christmas buying season.

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That's right, because every kid in America was reading Newsweek and saying, Mom, Dad, look, it's on the cover. We have to get one.

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Yeah. And that was at the very quaint time when when you would you would just start Christmas shopping two weeks before Christmas rather than eight months before Christmas.

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So Klecko and by the way, just to save listener emails, Klecko did not make Pakman.

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And we just want to save you from that fate because that.

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Right. Yeah, I think I think it was Namco, if I remember correctly.

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Oh, man. I mean they did do video games, but. Okay, well thanks for saving me. No, no, no.

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There'll be plenty of people that write that probably sent the email before I even got to this and that want to retract that email.

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But that's OK. So they started selling these things like hotcakes. They sold three million plus by the end of 1983. And like so many Christmas items that came before and after, it is sort of the frenzy is determined by availability and and supply. And they were underprepared and they could not keep up with demand. They weren't like the Rubik's Cube where they just made, you know, millions and millions and millions of these things. And it became a supply problem and it became a really big deal.

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And this is this is the first toy where people were angry because there weren't enough of them to go around. Yeah.

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And I mean, they still made three million of them and they ran out, like, very quickly. And when you say people were angry, like they were throwing elbows, they were pushing one another, they were like they were getting physical, trying to get these dolls. And now it's like, well, yeah, that sounds like a Christmas like must have Christmas toy. People hadn't done that up to this point. This is very new. And so in addition to, you know, the normal press they were getting, these dolls were also ending up on like the nightly news a lot that December with stories about how parents were like driving across state lines to get one of those Cabbage Patch kids.

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Or there was a story about a postal carrier in Kansas City, I think, who flew to London to buy one, which I don't understand why? Because London had its own frenzy going on as well. There was a whole lot of stuff going down that hadn't really gone down before the Cabbage Patch kids came along that Christmas.

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Yeah, I wonder if that became a technique to sell more things was to either falsely kind of falsely say that you don't have enough.

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I think we covered that and the must have toys up so that that is that is a technique that they use that they they purposefully under produce to to create scarcity.

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Yeah. But then you can't sell as many. I would think it'd be better to produce the regular amount and then just say you didn't and then I like but we found a warehouse that we didn't know about.

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Right, exactly. Because you still want to move these dolls. I mean, Rubik's Cube, they sold 200 million Rubik's cubes in the first few years. No, it's not because they were just pumping those things out. Yeah, well, at the very least, I think Kalikow was genuinely caught underprepared. I don't think it was in any way, shape or form a purposeful. Oh, no, of course, scarcity. I think it was just straight up scarcity.

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And there was there was there's this footage from Zales depart or no sorry, Zayer department store sales. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. You're right. This is in Wilkes-Barre, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania or Wilkesboro. I've also seen Pennsylvania. But there's this manager who I know we talked about before. But you got to see this guy. He's the manager of the Zere department store in December of 1983, at least. And this guy is like unhinged. Have you seen footage of him?

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Yeah, we saw him last year. OK, we've got to see him again.

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I got to describe him again because I he struck a chord with me this year. They didn't last year, but he's he's holding a baseball bat very famously. But if you listen to what he's doing, shouting at the customers, he's like, shut up, listen to me. And he's like waving this baseball bat. There's this crowd of people filling every available inch of this this department store wanting Cabbage Patch kids. And this guy decides that the way to satisfy the need is to just start tossing them into the crowd.

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So the crowd is like jostling, going crazy, trying to catch these Cabbage Patch kids while the manager of. The department stores screaming at them, holding a baseball bat. It's one of the worst forms of crowd management anyone's ever attempted ever, and it was caught on film. And you got to see it yourself.

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Yeah, he was he wasn't doing his best work that day. I think we can all agree. A lot of times the the the problems were so big that they didn't even want people in the stores. So they would say, like, we can't have another fistfight in here. So what you do is you can arrive and get a coupon and then you go around back to the loading dock and we'll distribute them there. The secondary market started booming. There were actual stores that were buying them up and then marking them up.

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And then there was the black market that really, really marked them up. Right. And this was not WKRN in Cincinnati, but it was very much in that rich tradition of of just kind of conning people into acting like fools. And this happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when some local deejays there said there's going to be a B 26 bomber plane and it's going to drop a thousand dollars over the Brewers baseball stadium. And all you got to do is show up with your baseball glove to catch these babies and hold up your credit card so the pilot can take a picture and charge you for it.

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And of course, this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard, but that still didn't stop. Yeah, a couple of dozen people from showing up with their baseball glove and credit card.

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Yeah. In negative seven degree wind chill, which is very cold if you're in the centigrade parts of the world. That's very cold. They're used to it. I guess so. But the the yeah. The fact that people would would do that is it's like I double check to make sure that that wasn't an urban legend and it definitely is not like that. Was that really did happen in Milwaukee in 1983. That was like the level the craze reached.

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And what's really to Calicos credit is they managed to keep the party going for a full another year because in Christmas 1984, Cabbage Patch kids were again the must have toy. And in just 1984 alone, not 1983, Christmas season, 1984, that year they sold two billion dollars worth of Cabbage Patch kids in 1984. Money.

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Yeah, I mean, this was I think one of the things that made it truly unique is, like I said, the Rubik's Cube was really hot for a few years. But generally, as these things go, it's sort of like you can count on the one Christmas season if you're overlapping to the next Christmas season, that is a grand slam home run as far as toys go. Absolutely.

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So one of the one of the outcomes of that of being a toy that managed manages to span two Christmas seasons that thoroughly is they become, you know, iconic and they start popping up in other places, like there was one named Christopher Xavier, who's a very famous Cabbage Patch kid. I guess this is Cabbage Patch. Kids can be famous. And he actually rode on the space shuttle on an a genuine legit NASA space shuttle mission in 1985. And that reminds me, Chuck, have you seen that the mini doc about about the challenger?

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No, not yet again. Oh, boy, it is really good. I mean, it's a it's a high high caliber documentary to begin with. But then, like, the the emotionality that it manages to to dredge up is really it's a really well done documentary. And every every way I highly recommend it was that showing that one's on Netflix, I believe was positive.

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And I think it's just called Challenger and then probably Colan something. But it's good. It was it's by I think JJ isn't bad robot JJ Abrams production company. Yeah, they did it. They were one of the companies that that handled it. But it was it's very good.

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I did watch Winola. Holmes, on your recommendation. Yes.

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What do you think? I liked it a lot. It was good. It was just a good, breezy, light, fun movie to watch, which is just what we needed to the night we watched it for sure.

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And and but it was smart, too, wasn't it?

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Yeah, it was. It was smart enough. And she's just great. Millie, Bobby Brown is she's just she's got a lot of personality and loveable charisma. So she's she's great to watch and it's fun to see her outside of playing well, even with all her personality able to come out like that.

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Right. Yeah, well, I'm very glad that you liked it, because I think we would have had some sort of awkward wedge between us for the rest of our lives.

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You know, you haven't seen the octopus stock yet?

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No, I did. Oh, OK. So I think if we're going to talk about octopus, my octopus, he should just turn down your volume for about a minute and you won't have it spoiled.

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All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. Actually, I think that guy is terrible. I think is a terrible human being for not rescuing his companion friend for two different occasions. Really? Yes. And I know that he's a documentarian, so they're not supposed to interfere. I've seen drop dead gorgeous. I know the rules, but this is different. He crossed the line. He crossed boundaries when he became friends with that Octopussy stop being a documentarian, started being its friend, and then he is his friend, wasn't there for his friend when it was attacked, not once but twice.

[00:33:00]

And I really dislike that guy for that reason.

[00:33:03]

Oh, interesting. Well, I don't concur, but I guess that's part of the beauty of that movie. You can have different different takes.

[00:33:10]

So but there's not a gulf between it's a wedge between us now, is there? I mean, did you hate the documentary? No. I otherwise thought it was amazing.

[00:33:19]

All right. Well, then there's no go amazing. It really was really was great, except for the that one thing, too. All right. No way. So let's say back to Cabbage Patch kids. There is another kind of landmark they reached in 1992 when they became I think maybe Christopher Xavier became the official mascot of the U.S. Olympic team and got to go to Barcelona with them. Yeah, I mean, this is pretty impressive.

[00:33:44]

This is 10 plus years after these things were the hot ticket, you know, which is crazy, crazy time. They were on a postage stamp. Eventually, of course, though, his star, not his star, there was more than Christopher Xavier, but their collective star was going to fade. Like all toys and all dolls we've all seen Toy Story, we know is what we know. What happens in the end.

[00:34:09]

Yeah, it never completely went away, though. They, you know, Kalikow event eventually was like, you know, we got to offload these guys, we're going to sell it. We're in the video game industry like big time. And so we got to. Have you heard of Pacman?

[00:34:25]

Well, the video game industry starts tanking, so they're trying to, I guess, recoup some money on their investment. So they sell the Cabbage Patch Kid license.

[00:34:34]

And then, you know, this is not before trying a few things, they tried like talking Cabbage Patch kids and stuff like that. But eventually they went bankrupt in the 80s and the license moved on to different people over the years, Mattel, Hasbro, Toys R US. And then right now it's owned by Play Along Inc, which it just seems like those are it seems like there's a lot of toy companies named weird things like that.

[00:35:01]

Now, I agree. I agree. And I find it unsettling, like their slogan should be, we're watching you.

[00:35:11]

It just seems like we talk about this a lot, like there's still the giants like Hasbro and Mattel. But I feel like when we've done our toy podcast, it seems like the newer ones, they don't have these sort of name brands that you that you think of as toys.

[00:35:25]

No, I know they all sound like Russian fronts. It's really weird and unsettling and kind of off-putting and ibises or KS. It's really strange.

[00:35:34]

It's very sinister. So, yeah, along the along the lines, like all of these companies who are like, we got to figure out a way to to capture lightning in a bottle again a second time. That just doesn't happen. It's hard enough the first time. And so they try different things. Like you said, Kalikow tried the talking. One didn't work. I think Hasbro had one that swam, which is kind of impressive. Sure. And then Mattel had one that they had to withdraw.

[00:36:01]

It was called Cabbage Patch Snack Time Kids. And they these things would like eat like they came with, like French fries or something. And you'd put, like, the French fry in their mouth and they'd start chewing in the French fry. I would go down their throat and actually come out the back of their head and fall into their backpack. And then you could feed it to him again, which is great and fine. But if you're a little kid and you get your fingers in there, your hair in there, that Cabbage Patch dolls is kind of keep eating and eating and you're going to start screaming and your parents are going to be like, I don't want this doll anymore.

[00:36:33]

Give me my money back.

[00:36:34]

Yeah. And these things also declined in quality. I think in the mid nineties, Mattel shrunk them even more down to 14 inches. And they were like, forget these cloth bodies even. We're going to make the whole thing vinyl. And people didn't like that at all. And it took, I think, the twentieth anniversary in twenty three. It took Toys R US who took over the rights at that point to Jack. These things back up to eighteen inches.

[00:37:02]

They had cloth bodies. I think they had an 18 Anjanette 20 inch, and then they they finally brought back those cloth bodies, which were a big deal, and they debuted them at their flagship store in New York City. And they sort of recapture the magic a little bit. And it's about this time and I think a year later is when I play along licensed it. But it's about this time that people started buying them again a little bit for nostalgia.

[00:37:29]

Like kids that grew up with them. We're now buying them for their kids. And I think, you know, they sold OK. It's nothing like they were at first, but they're still around now. Yeah.

[00:37:40]

And I play along INQ, if that is their real name, was very wise to basically recreate the original 1983 style Cabbage Patch kids like they're basically indistinguishable from the ones that that the people who are buying them now for their kids had when they were kids. And it's like you said, it's all nostalgia and they're they're doing pretty good trade on it with without having to reinvent the wheel. That's right.

[00:38:05]

A little quick stat before we take a break. That is remarkable. Over the past 32 years, there have been 130 million of these babies born, which would mean if they were real little people, it would make them the 10th most populous country in the world, with one being born every six point eight seconds. But having said that, we're going to take a little break.

[00:38:28]

And right after this, we are going to tell you the true origin story of the little people.

[00:38:44]

Oh, it's no secret that in Washington, D.C., corruption is everywhere, you could say it's gone viral and I should know my mom's the speaker of the House.

[00:38:59]

My name is James Parker. My friends are all in the same boat.

[00:39:03]

Daughters of the D.C. elite. When are this close to power? There's nowhere to hide. And when my friends and I got a little too visible, our parents broke us up.

[00:39:12]

But now I need them back because I'm in deep. You see, I'm a bit of a hacker in here.

[00:39:20]

No one knows me as James Parker. They only know me as Storm Boy and Storm Ally. Well, she went poking around somewhere she shouldn't have. I'm James. I'm Peyton. I'm Celia. I'm Natalie. And we're the daughters of DC. Join me and my friends, four daughters and DC, a new 12 part scripted podcast, political thriller from the team that brought you Liza Lit Einhorn's Epic Productions and I Heart Radio. Listen to Deoxy for Free and I Heart Radio, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[00:40:01]

OK, Chuck, I'm curious, why did you say true like that? Well, if you listen to the show a year ago, it's already ruined, but we didn't go into that much depth. Here's what really happened, though. Xavier Roberts ripped off a lady is the easiest way to say it. There was a very kind hearted, soft spoken folk artist named Martha Nelson. Thomas went to art school in the 70s. She experimented with the same exact German soft sculpture molding, and she created what was called little doll babies.

[00:40:36]

If you Google Martha Nelson Thomas Little Dolls and you see this very famous now famous picture when, you know, has it been swept under the rug by Xavier Roberts people and maybe Calicos people, this black and white picture of this woman surrounded by what are clearly an obviously Cabbage Patch kids.

[00:40:56]

Yes. And there's actually funny enough, there's another famous picture of Xavier Roberts taken probably about 10 years after that. And he's surrounded by straight up Cabbage Patch kids, you know, with the vinyl heads and everything. But the fact that that picture was taken of Martha Nelsa, Tom Nelson Thomas in 1975 is a photographic documentary, evidence that she is the person who came up with Cabbage Patch kids, not Cabbage Patch kids, but what Cabbage Patch kids were based on.

[00:41:26]

And if that were it, if that were the photo, that was the only evidence whatsoever. You'd be like, that's a I don't know, people can have similar ideas. You know, there's only one, you know, old German technique called needle molding. Other people could have found it. But that is not the only evidence. And in fact, Xavier Roberts has gone on public record saying that he was inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas, but he changed it enough.

[00:41:56]

But if you go and look at the actual story in the facts along the way, and there's actually a pretty good 16 minute long vice documentary on this whole thing, that that you will see that it went way beyond him just being inspired by Martha Nelson Thomas's work. And in fact, like you said, he basically ripped her off.

[00:42:14]

Yeah. So he from what I could tell and there's a bunch of different sort of versions of this online, but from what I saw is they actually did have an agreement early on that he would sell these for her. He said, hey, these are great. Can I take some of these to my gift shops and sell them for a year? And I think I could sell a lot more than you could. And for a little while, they did have an agreement.

[00:42:37]

But as it turns out, he ended up marking them up and charging too much money. And she wasn't happy about that.

[00:42:44]

She was like, no, they shouldn't cost forty dollars. It's you know, it's 1978, for God's sake, that's a doll.

[00:42:51]

And he's like, Yeah, but what do you think this is UNICOR State Park. They're handmade. And, you know, you should put a value on on your talents. And they had a disagreement about that. And she said, you know what, forget it. I don't want you to sell these anymore.

[00:43:06]

He follows up with a letter saying, well, you know what, if you don't let me sell your dolls, I'm he basically said, I'm just going to start making my own. And that's exactly what he did.

[00:43:17]

Supposedly he wrote her a letter and I don't remember who mentions it in the vice documentary. But basically they said that in the letter. He said, if I can't sell your dolls, I will sell something just like them. And she apparently was like, whatever, just went her own way. She was satisfied to have her dolls back and probably thought she was done with the matter. And then supposedly one of her friends said, hey, I saw your little doll babies for sale at the Atlanta airport, way to go.

[00:43:43]

She said, I'm not selling these at the Atlanta airport. And apparently that's when she knew she had a big problem on our hands and found out that Xavier Roberts had come up with the little people dolls that were just the spitting image of her little doll babies. Yeah.

[00:43:58]

So she filed a lawsuit that went on for four years. I think by the time they were selling out in stores in 1983, she was about seven years into this lawsuit. And for her it wasn't. She asked for, I think, a million dollars, but she said it wasn't about the money. She was like, I don't want to see this as a commodity and I don't want to be ripped off.

[00:44:20]

And I don't want this guy to come along and basically not have the same respect for these little dolls that I had. And if you look at the court case, you think, you know, open and shut. She's got this picture from seventy five. They had a prior relationship. She's got this letter that says where he basically says he's going to rip her off, but she didn't copyright these things.

[00:44:41]

And you would have had to copyright because they were all handmade and they were all, I guess, unique unto themselves. You would have had to copyright and sign or stamp each doll. And she didn't want to do that and he had no problem doing it. Our little Chuck has an Xavier Roberts has. Signature on his butt if you pulled on his little corduroy shorts, yeah, it's one of the famous things about Cabbage Patch kids, aside from their distinctive faces, that each one of them has Xavier Roberts signature stamped on to its.

[00:45:10]

But and I guess Martha Nelson Thomas is like there's no place to put a signature on a child. And these are like children to me. That's why I adopt them out rather than sell them. So I'm not going to sign this. I'm not going to copyright them. And that basically you would think it would have sunk her case. And after almost eight years, Xavier Roberts finally said, OK, fine, let's settle this. I suspect it had to do with his sold out at some point in the 80s.

[00:45:41]

He sold his portion and I would guess he probably needed that court case to go away to finalize that sale. And for whatever the reason, in 1985, he was suddenly ready to settle and they settled for an undisclosed sum that apparently Martha Nelson Thomas was satisfied with.

[00:45:59]

Yeah. And he also said, hey, lady, you see, you can't copyright these things. You can sign it right next to their little butthole. You're right.

[00:46:07]

He's said a cockney there for a second Cockney. Like, I started to get nervous, like, oh, my God, why does he sound cockney? And then you pull it out with the real Appalachian mountain folk twist at the end there. Yeah.

[00:46:18]

So he he said all this shit was enough money to put her kids through college. She said it's still sort of a sad story to me that, you know, that this, you know, man came along and ripped off this lady's design and then later on complained that he was getting ripped off. He complained about knock offs and said, you know, my point is not not take my product to my creation and tarnish it.

[00:46:41]

Yeah. Which was pretty audacious because he said this like, you know, I believe right when he was settling with this other case in which part of the settlement was he had to acknowledge that that he had taken her idea. And for him to be complaining about this on TV, it was a little audacious, especially if you know that you know the full story, but that even though it was an open secret or even a widely known tale in the toy industry and even some parts of the press, even still today, everybody thinks of Xavier Roberts as the the creator of Cabbage Patch Kids.

[00:47:18]

And technically, he was because he he came up with Cabbage Patch kids and Martha Nelson Thomas came up with little doll babies and he sold it to.

[00:47:30]

Well, he didn't come up with Cabbage Patch kids. He sold it to Pacman. And Peckman named them Cabbage Patch Kids.

[00:47:34]

Yeah, I guess so. I hadn't thought about that. So one of the groups he was complaining about was tops trading cards, tops trading cards around the still in the height of the Cabbage Patch Kid craze in 1985 came out with one of the greatest parodies anyone's ever come out with, the beloved Garbage Pail Kids series.

[00:47:56]

Yeah, I didn't, I wouldn't into this. I was a little too old. I certainly I was I was fourteen. I certainly remember them in the zeitgeist and I knew it was a very big deal. But this was probably more for kids probably around your age. I imagine you were probably into these, right?

[00:48:15]

I loved garbage pail kids. I believe that you had a pretty impressive garbage pail kid collection yourself. Oh, really? Yeah. And she actually yeah. She actually bought me a couple of garbage pail kids I have somewhere. I think one is squash Josh. I can't remember the other one, but they are for people who don't own a garbage pail.

[00:48:35]

Kids go look up g.p gay.com and I think it's like GPE Kawika I'm not sure, but they have every single series scanned so you can see all fifteen series that came out between 1985 and 1988 and they're just awesome. But they're basically like.

[00:48:57]

If garbage if Cabbage Patch kids were meant to get us used to what mutant offspring of nuclear war survivors would look like, garbage pail kids were the mutated version of that.

[00:49:11]

Yeah, that's a good way to say it. They were they were deformed and they were plagued and diseased and they had names like Atom Bomb and Bony, Tony. And I guess squash Josh and yeah. Roomi you. Me? I don't know.

[00:49:29]

No they didn't, they didn't have names for everyone, but it was, it was a big deal. They sold a ton of them and Xavier Roberts was was not happy with this and I think ended up in the lawsuit being successful in getting them just to change enough to where it didn't look like it was officially tied to the Cabbage Patch kids. Yeah.

[00:49:52]

Like they had the cat. You know how it says, like on the box for the Cabbage Patch kid. It's like in a banner kind of like Semicircle banner they had that originally is garbage pail kids. They had to turn that into a straight bar. They made them look less like lifelike and more like plastic dolls in the later series. There are a few changes, but I mean, it was still pretty clear what the whole thing was a riff off of.

[00:50:15]

But one thing I didn't realize is that one of the art directors who helped conceptualize garbage pail kids from the outset was Art Spiegelman, who created Mouse. Yeah, you know that.

[00:50:28]

I mean, I've heard of Art Spiegelman, but I really don't know anything about him, so I didn't know that. But I know the name.

[00:50:34]

I've not read Mouse, but I know it's like it's like a like a just a legendary graphic novel about fascism. But that guy helped create garbage pail kids just a couple of years before he created Mouse. Amazing.

[00:50:48]

And there was a bad TV show that eventually only aired in Europe. There was a bad movie that is pretty legendarily bad, but there was a big deal, though. They sold a ton of them. They didn't quite have the spinoff power of the speakers, but the GPCRs did OK for themselves.

[00:51:07]

Yeah, I mean, like that really goes to show you just how big Cabbage Patch kids were that it could sustain a cottage industry for a parody. Even that's how big Cabbage Patch kids were in the US.

[00:51:20]

So hats off to Cabbage Patch kids. I can't wait to talk about them again next year and another episode.

[00:51:26]

They'll be great.

[00:51:28]

We'll figure it out. We'll spend 2021 figuring out how to do that, Chuck. And in the meantime, everybody, since we're thinking about how to talk about Cabbage Patch kids more, it's time for Listener Mail.

[00:51:43]

That's right.

[00:51:44]

Before we do listener mail real quick, I just want to give a shout out to the BUDG family, not really going to get into what's going on with them, but just want them to know that we're thinking about them and sending them lots of love and support over the Internet airwaves. But this email is called.

[00:52:03]

Oh, I know.

[00:52:03]

I'm going to call it the Beav. This is this is about beavers again. And it starts out as this is seriously not a please read me on the air email.

[00:52:13]

And that's a pretty good way to get on the air. By the way, thanks for the amazing show.

[00:52:18]

Been a listener since they were paltry. Twenty minutes. Love everyone.

[00:52:21]

Keep me company while walking, driving, cleaning, cooking and providing an endless source of interesting topics for my English students in Spain. Uh, kind of thing. Chuck is my podcast soulmate. As we grow up in much the same circumstances around the same age, we have very similar cultural outlook on different things. I do have a small difference of opinion, though.

[00:52:40]

Your big Bigfoot podcast was great and I was happy to hear you say the possibility exists.

[00:52:46]

Did we say that? Because, yeah, I think we were. I don't know if it was we so much as you.

[00:52:54]

Yeah, maybe so. Uh, but a while back you were teasing. I think it was way you were adamant that Nessy does not exist. Buddy show Nessy some love. Wouldn't it be amazing if she did exist. So she has her fingers crossed on that.

[00:53:08]

But the real reason she wrote in she listen to the Beaver episode and came across Beav the Beaver. I said, just get online and Google Bee. That was this beaver that was found, I think, abandoned by its parents and then adopted as a young baby and then raised for a while to eventually be put maybe a wildlife center or something.

[00:53:30]

But the long and short of it is beaver makes dams in their house. So there are all these videos of bees dragging stuff into this one specific doorway that beavers trying to dam up and like dragging a shoe rack, pillow's tissue boxes. Like anything, beef can get a hold of it. His little paws and teeth, he'll. Drag over to this doorway and try and damp, and it's really one of the cutest, funniest things I've ever seen. Yeah, it is very cute because he looks like should this go here maybe a little bit to the left.

[00:54:07]

OK, that's all right right there. Like when he brought the pillow over, he's like, oh, this is very useful. I can just squish this into place. It was very cute to watch him do that. It is amazing. And that email, by the way, is from Carrie Kelly.

[00:54:20]

Thanks, Carrie. That was a great email and yes, a way to get it on the air by saying it's not meant to be on the air. We fall for stuff like that all the time. And if you want to try to make us fall for something, have at us. You can send us an email to stuff podcast that I heart radio dot com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio, because the radio app Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[00:54:57]

There's a phrase I love in Hindi, could you be Hossack, that it means anything can happen? And growing up in Shimla in the Himalayan foothills, I knew it was true.

[00:55:09]

I'm acting on Obamacare back then, Shimla was a remote institution in India, and for a boy like me, it was a world of possibilities. It's where I had my first kiss, where my father put all of his faith in our local bread. And when I learned my most important lesson about failure, I'll tell you those stories on my podcast, Anupam Curse. You might know me from my films like Silver Linings Playbook or my show New Amsterdam, but here I want you to do something different.

[00:55:42]

So I'm bringing you stories from my life and from around the world to lift our spirits and remind us of everything life can be. After all, it's the stories we tell ourselves that shape how we live, the good, the bad and the surprising.

[00:55:58]

But let's focus on the good find on the Pumpkins on Apple podcast that I had read your app or wherever you get your podcasts. That is a new B.M. Anupam Keres launching December 7th.