Banned in China: In 1988, Mexico enacted a "so called" anti-Garbage Pail Kids article within their General Import and Export Tax Law that bans the import and export of these cards in the country. The article reads: "any type of stickers printed in color or in white and black, presented for sale in envelopes or packages, even when they include chewing gum, candy or any other type of articles, containing drawings, figures or illustrations that represent children in a degrading or ridiculous manner, in attitudes of incitement to violence, self-destruction or any other form of antisocial behavior, known as Garbage Pail Kids, for example, printed by any company or business name."
Distanced from Current Events: Topps was pressured into recalling the BTS Bruisers/Bopping K-Pop card from the Shammy Awards series due to the card depicting the members of BTS being beaten with a Grammy a la a game of whack-a-mole and the unfortunate timing of being released during a point where anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise.
He Also Did: It may shock you to find out that the person who created something as reviled as Garbage Pail Kids also created the renowned bestseller Maus. Both works have also been critisized by Moral Guardians for being unsuitable for kids, for completely different reasons.
Spin-Off Cookbook: The trading cards received a cookbook in September 2022, consisting of the Kids providing recipes for gross-looking food.
Tie-In Cereal: The Garbage Pail Kids cereal is made of pink strawberry kernels ("crazy crisps") and marshmallows ("marshmallow barf bits"), and each box comes with two collectible franchise cards.
The animated series, which was planned for the 87-88 season on CBS. For the coming years, all that was seen of the show was on foreign-made bootleg tapes before its official release on DVD in 2006.
Galoob was to produce a series of GPK figures tied into said series.
GPK World has the filth on 1989's unreleased OS16, including salvaged sheets, roughs, cut designs, and the journey of one card that took a whole 18 years to make it into a series. Many of these cards were carried over to ANS1 in 2003, others were included in the Flashbacks' "Lost Cards" (along with ones up for series other than OS16), and the rest were exclusive to the album books.
The holdout mentioned above went by Guy Pie/Pepperoni Tony, planned for OS2, then OS6, and seen on the sheet for OS16. This design otherwise existed only as a poster before it was finally included proper in ANS1 as Cheesy Charlie/Pizza Face Chasenote Making it the first "pre-lawsuit" design to be included in a series since the Art Shift of OS10 in 1987.
General trivia:
At the height of the Kids' success, Topps was sued by Original Appalachian Artworks, the makers of the Cabbage Patch Kids, for copyright and trademark infringement; Topps argued that their product was a parody/satire of the Cabbage Patch Kids and thus allowed by Fair Use, but the court proved that it was just a cash-in on the success of the plaintiffs' product, intended to be as similar to it as possible to mislead audiences, down to the similar-sounding title. The GPK were redesigned after the court ruling to be less similar in appearance to the Cabbage Patch Kids (the name was retained, though), although this only decreased their immense popularity, further proving the court correct. To say nothing of what happened when the card's film adaptation was released...
. The article reads: "any type of stickers printed in color or in white and black, presented for sale in envelopes or packages, even when they include chewing gum, candy or any other type of articles, containing drawings, figures or illustrations that represent children in a degrading or ridiculous manner, in attitudes of incitement to violence, self-destruction or any other form of antisocial behavior, known as Garbage Pail Kids, for example, printed by any company or business name."