Topps is launching a new edition of the 1980s classic Garbage Pail Kids trading cards today, five years after pulling the plug on the cards featuring raunchy cartoons.
Ogilvy PR is supporting the launch, which includes a contest to choose five people to be “immortalized” as characters in a future series.
Stephen Dumas, brand manager for the Topps series, said the cards are being “rejuvenated in a way that we haven’t seen in decades.” Topps last tried reintroducing a series of the cards in 2003 to mixed results and has issued commemorative editions over the past few years.
The cards were a pop culture phenomenon in the mid-to-late 1980s for their depictions of children with various abnormalities, including Adam Bomb, a boy with an atomic explosion emitting from his head, the obese Slobby Robby, and Marty Gras, a boy dressed in drag.
Some districts banned kids from bringing the cards to school because they were a distraction or over concerns about the content.
A 1987 movie was a box office bomb.