S3E25: Cards, cards and more cards
Garbage Pail Kids and Pokémon cards are perfect reflections of the junior leisure class of the 80s and 90s
Kids Culture of the 80s and 90s
Collection-building has long been the sign of extra time and money among segments of society. The Strong Museum in Rochester, NY, for instance, got its start based on the extensive collections of its namesake, Margaret Woodbury Strong, who began building her trove of treasures while on holidays as a young girl. This was in the first two decades of the 20th century, an era where like many things, leisure and recreation was reserved only to well-off families like hers.
This is also the same era when trading cards began to appear—mostly involving sports—but the high value of early cards today indicate that they weren’t in high supply (or demand) back then.
Fast forward to the second half of the 20th century and trading cards’ prevalence matched the widening Kid-centric society and culture. Still, though, collecting pictorial pieces of cardstock was not done for financial prowess, as evidenced anecdotally by the Baby Boomer generation with their stories of “shooting” cards and placing them in bike spokes to replicate the sound of motorcycles. Mickey Mantle’s facial expression on his rookie card is one of someone who has had metal spokes smacking him a thousand times a minute, and is getting really annoyed.
Go even farther along the timeline to the 80s and 90s and to an era where an entire culture and industry formed around trading cards. Sports cards still reigned supreme, but peppered in with them were collectable cards of movies, TV shows, musicians, superheroes, even characters made up solely for card lines such as Garbage Pail Kids.
These weird and often downright disturbing sticker-cards were a direct response to the popularity of the wholesome Cabbage Patch dolls that were sweeping Western Civilization in the early 80s. While appearing subversive and definitely something from the underground, they were actually made by Topps, the established giant of the trading card world. This certainly helped with distribution to all ends of the youth-spectrum and contributed to parents’ concerns that their kids would be corrupted by cultural decay.
The popularity among kids and teens of these cards, and lines like Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon in the 1990s, report that collecting-culture had reached a very wide audience. Card collecting and trading were just one of many pastimes of a juvenile leisure class that had joined the ranks of their wealthy peers of several decades earlier.