The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
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"Out of the garbage pail and into your heart!"
—Tagline
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The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is a 1987 film adaptation of The Garbage Pail Kids trading card series. The Kids are gross parodies of the Cabbage Patch Kids.
Dodger, a fifteen-year-old kid, works at an antique shop owned by the wizard Captain Manzini. While working there, four bullies stop by and wreck the place, leaving Dodger in the sewer. He is later rescued by The Garbage Pail kids, a group of misfit children that love to break the rules and be disgusting. They were released from a garbage pail owned by Manzini and much to his chagrin, they refuse to go back.
As Dodger gets to know the kids, he finds out they know how to sew clothes and uses their talents to impress Tangerine, one of the female bullies. Unfortunately, before Dodger can really hit it off with her, the kids are captured by The State Home for the Ugly, an institution that incarcerates anybody considered too ugly for society. Dodger and Manzini decide to infiltrate the prison and save the kids from being euthanized.
The film's box office reception was abysmal, earning one and half million dollars while the film cost thirty million to make. It received three Razzie nominations the year it was released.
- Evil Counterpart: To the Cabbage Patch Kids.
- For the Evulz: Not only are the bullies much older than Dodger, but they also have no motivation for bullying him.
- Hitler Ate Sugar: Inverted. Somehow, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Santa Claus are locked away in the State Home For The Ugly. The movie seems to imply that if they are "ugly" ("too bald", "too tall" and "too fat", respectively), then any ugly individual is therefore a good person.
- Moral Dissonance: Manzini wants to save the Kids from the State Home For The Ugly, but he still plans to imprison them again in the garbage pail.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The garbage pail that contained the kids.
- Shout-Out: To My Mother the Car, of all things. Captain Manzini shares his name with the main villain of that series, whose producer and main director, Rod Amateau, also directed this film.
- That Reminds Me of a Song: The Garbage Pail Kids sing about working together, while stealing stuff in order to make clothes.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: What happened to the other Garbage Pail Kids? It is implied that they were euthanized by the State Home for the Ugly, but the details are not very clear.