The Garbage Pail Kids Movie: Celebrating Man-Made Trash

A massive storm swept through Austin the night I saw The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. Full-grown trees were bent sideways, some snapped in half. Streets pooled with water. Sirens blared in the distance, and here I was huffing and puffing my way to Weird Wednesday at the Alamo Drafthouse. It's what I’ve been reduced to as a film lover: rushing to plant a flag in any nearby pile of shitfire that is an organically excreted vision and proudly proclaiming it’s what makes us human. In an era of AI-generated slop, with tech bros boasting the ease of generating “art,” I had to see The Garbage Pail Kids Movie to add one more thing to the list of hallucinations AI could never dream up.

If you’re not familiar with the Garbage Pail Kids, they started as a collectible card series produced by Topps Company in 1985. As a parody of the highly popular Cabbage Patch Kids, the series featured gross-out and absurdist caricatures with a striking, cheeky charm that made them a marketing hit. As a result of this success, Topps Company would go dumpster diving in Hollywood, resulting in the 1987 film adaptation The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. 

The plot is simple: The Garbage Pail Kids are little magic monster children who live in a trash can. Dodger (Mackenzie Astin), our awkward and adolescent protagonist, is told by a magician who runs a secondhand craft store not release them because they are akin to the sins contained in Pandora’s Box. In the midst of a tussle with some stereotypical “gimme your lunch money” bullies, Dodger does what Dodger was instructed not to do. As a result, the Garbage Pail Kids terrorize the bullies, a few local establishments, then sew some clothes, and ultimately get locked up in “The State Home for The Ugly,” a euthenasia facility that somehow managed to get government funding and is plotting to kill Santa, Abraham Lincoln, and others by trash-compacting them. Dodger has to save the kids and, in the process, learn the meaning of friendship. 

Now that you’re caught up, how does any of this trite, capitalist-driven schlock validate human art? Since the premise feels like it could either be plotted out by a coke-fueled, white-knuckle 3 a.m. brainstorming session or a ChatGPT generative prompt, we’re going to need to examine the full composition. 

If you're unfamiliar with how AI works, massive collections of data are harvested and compiled into a giant decision tree referred to as a model. Users submit a request with context to these trained models and, after extensive processing, results are returned. Whether it's a picture of an anthropomorphic egg, a GIF of memes coming to life, or a video of dogs turning into cupcakes, AI has the means to render it with flawless accuracy and blatant disregard for crediting its sources or the resources it requires. 

But AI can only replicate beauty, it can only simulate intent, it knows nothing of what it creates. If I were to tell a computer to replicate the horrific, sagging rubber skin, soulless eyes, and malfunctioning animatronics of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, I’d end up with an algorithmic rendition of the Terminator mixed with The Rock-afire Explosion all coated in uniform-generated gloss.

As I watched The GPK Movie’s nightmare-fueled practical effects seep into the silver screen, I felt this million dollar dumpster baby movie’s earnest texture in the fibers of my being. Rod Amateau, co-writer, producer, and director didn’t just want to tell Dodger’s journey to find acceptance as an outcast dweeb who knows nothing about fashion. Amateau wanted to explore a deeper theme of learning to embrace and be mindful of the consequences you unleash on others. It bears saying, he also wanted to put little people in sweltering outfits and make them run around, shoving each other, bumping into things, dancing, bouncing, singing for Topps Company Cash—all as their absurdly large animatronic heads stroke out with twitching eyes and gnashing mouths—but that is a necessity in rendering the very human vision of Garbage Pail Kids.

The spark of uniquely human soul is in the abysmal execution, and in a paradoxical way this film gave me hope for the future. Seeing a well-weathered 35mm print in motion, hearing the grating ADR, feeling the helpless frustration of being trapped in a plot that didn’t seem to know where it was going—all of these elements wrapped around me in warm blanket of deranged comfort that AI won’t be able to capture that unhinged essence. If a cash-grab film with this kind of vision can exist, completely human produced, surely more arduous and unique failures await us in the future. And we ought to celebrate them.