Garbage Pail Kids COMPLETE [DVD][Extremlym]

n the days leading up to Christmas, we brought you the street date, cost and early box art for The Garbage Pail Kids - The Complete Series. The "Garbage Pail Kids" started life in 1985 as a series of trading cards put out by Topps (well-known for their baseball cards). In 1987 a live-action film was released, and it was successful enough along with the continued success of the cards to inspire a TV cartoon to be created. CBS put that together in 1989: thirteen episodes worth, with plans to air that on their own network. But these never aired in the U.S.A. (although the show did air in some overseas markets). Surprisingly, however, it wasn't the "gross factor" that got the series canned. As the Internet Movie DataBase explains, it was a lobbyist group which challenged the show based on the idea that it was an "obvious marketing ploy" to use the TV show as a "commercial" to convince kids to purchase (or convince parents to buy for them) the trading cards that the show was based on. Since there were major concerns earlier in the decade about TV-show-and-toy tie-ins with He-Man, She-Ra, Voltron, G.I. Joe, The Transformers, M.A.S.K., Jem!, and so many others, and the U.S. Congress had threatened to get involved if it seemed like TV shows were all about marketing toys to kids, the folks at CBS reluctantly pulled the plug on the Garbage Pail Kids.

Now that it's 15 years later and we're all grown up and don't need the so-called "protection" of the lobbyist groups to decide what's best for us to watch, CBS and Paramount Home Entertainment are joining forces to bring us the April 4th release of The Garbage Pail Kids - The Complete Series. Paramount has confirmed that this is a 2-DVD set running 304 minutes with all 13 original uncut episodes. The studio hasn't talked price yet, and different retailers are each claiming slightly different SRPs ($26.98 being the most popular), but the best advice we can give you is to pre-order it from Amazon.com at $18.99, the lowest price we've seen among the most popular DVD e-tailers.

Paramount has changed the coloring on the box art a bit in places from the early pic we showed you before, most notably on the logo and on the "blob" that tells you what's on the DVDs. There are no extras on this release, and video is the original 1.33:1 full frame and audio is English Stereo. The closed captioning logo is visible on the spine. Here is the wording from the back of the box, followed by the new front art and the rear cover art below:

From deep within the historic TV Animation vaults comes this nostalgic, hilarious blast from the past: the Garbage Pail Kids television series! Based on the wildly popular "Garbage Pail Kids" trading cards produced by the Topps Company (and coveted by collectors) in the 1980s, these 13 animated TV episodes produced in 1989 have remained unaired and unseen - until now. Join the adventures of a seemingly normal group of kids who have the ability to quickly "trash out" to their superhero identities - "Split Kit," "Eliot Mess," "Clogged Duane," "Patty Putty" and "Terry Cloth" - to right whatever wrongs come their way. It's a wacky, funny comedy gross-out with all 13 individual episodes of this rare, never-before-seen animated series - now offered in this collectible two-disc DVD set.