"Garbage Pail Kids" The Complete Series DVD

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Let’s face it, chances are that any TV show that produced a full 13 episodes and still never aired is not going to be some undiscovered gem. In 1989, the height of the Garbage Pail Kids trading card craze, a Saturday morning cartoon series must have seemed like a sure thing. But this cartoon makes Pokemon look like The Simpsons.

Garbage Pail Kids has no idea what it’s about. The very first skit is about invading aliens and giant army ants with no Garbage Pail Kids to be found. It’s looks like it’s going to be an origin story as the military dumps trash on the invaders. Does that create the Garbage Pail Kids? No, it’s just a bizarre joke about aliens loving trash. Even in the world of a children’s cartoon, why is the air force arming their jets with garbage?

Then there’s a mini-skit in between that’s also a normal kid, not a Garbage Pail. Finally, the second full segment is an adventure with the Garbage Pail Kids, in which they turn normal at the end. So wait, are they going to turn normal every week? None of them look like the characters introduced in the opening credits either, but that’s okay. There were so many trading cards, they could use different characters in each episode.

Mostly, it’s just lame. The voices are lame, like they picked a bunch of interns to do the dubbing. The jokes are lame. The theme song is lame. I suppose it’s gross but not to a degree that it would really get in any trouble. Bart Simpson was distracting everyone enough by then. If Garbage Pail Kids was any good, they would have aired it. This DVD is a curiosity piece only and it only takes an episode and a half to know why a network didn’t even bother retooling it for use.