Inside the Cabbage Patch Kids craze that turned Black Friday shopping into a rite of violence

nypost.com:

Cabbage Patch Kid had such a bloodless introduction to their loving homes.In a new documentary out Friday, “Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids,” director Andrew Jenks peels back the layers of cabbage leaves to tell the zany story how these baby sized cuddly dolls became a pop-culture juggernaut — and ushered in an era of Black Friday retail violence.Forty years ago, adults flooded malls and toy stores, physically brawling to get their hands on this “It” toy.

In November 1983, the stories — and the injuries — racked up quickly. Police were called to a department store in North Miami Beach after a horde of 150 shoppers knocked down a 75-year-old man.

In Bergen County, NJ, a pregnant woman was reportedly trampled at a Child World store. In Paramus, one woman elbowed another to “near unconsciousness.”“The brawls and the melees, that kind of passion — and the idea that they made billions,” Jenks told The Post of what drew him to the topic.First, Jenks tracked down the Kids’ creator, Xavier Roberts, an endeavor that took months and involved hiring a private investigator.“With Xavier, he hadn’t done a [long] interview in like 25 years.

It’s not that we couldn’t get an interview with him, we couldn’t find him. There were whispers he was living in France. There was a mystique about him,” said Jenks who finally landed an extensive sit-down.“I wanted to be wealthy,” Roberts admits in the film.