Controversies and Hoaxes
Cabbage Patch Kids were parodied by the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. The parody led Xavier Roberts to sue Topps, the maker of Garbage Pail Kids, for trademark infringement.
One line of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, the Cabbage Patch Kids Snacktime Kids, was designed to "eat" plastic snacks. The mechanism enabling this was a pair of one-way metal rollers behind a plastic slot and rubber lips, and the snacks would exit the doll's back into a backpack. They did not have an on-off switch and the mechanism was activated by putting the snacks, or potentially other objects, between the lips and into the slot. They were popular during Christmas 1996. The line was voluntarily withdrawn from the market following an agreement between Mattel and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in January 1997 following several incidents where children got their fingers or hair stuck in the dolls' mouths, which led to safety warnings from Connecticut's consumer protection commissioner, Mark Shiffrin.
Cabbage Patch Kids urban legends include rumors that owners sending dolls to the manufacturer for repairs are issued death certificates, and that they were designed to desensitize the public to the appearance of mutated children born in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Read more about this topic: Cabbage Patch Kids