30 Years of Garbage: The Garbage Pail Kids Story

I'll cut to the chase here. This is a bog-standard 21st century pop culture documentary. If you collected GPK's as a kid in the 80's, you'll get a kick out of this, but don't expect anything salacious or mind-blowing, in either format or content. Partially because 30YoG is meant to be a celebration of, not a dissection, and partially because it's Garbage Pail Kids. There's not a lot of meat on the bone as far as behind-the-scenes information goes. Sure, there's the lawsuit with Cabbage Patch Kids (which the doc uses to take a shot at the hypocrisy of Xavier Roberts' claims, given he stole the design from someone else), and some parental outrage over the cards at the height of their popularity, but nothing you didn't know about if you weren't there, and for those that weren't, they don't dig deep. Just enough about these moments to give the viewer the gist of the situation. This is all about who made the cards, how they came into being, the brief rise and fall, and why people of a certain age remember them. It's fluff, but it isn't trying to be anything more than fluff anyway. It is a little overlong at two hours, and the trimming could be done in the last half hour, which did not need to go over the 00's revival in as much depth as it did. And this is definitely for fans only; if you didn't like them as a kid, you won't find any revelations that peel back the veil and make you suddenly understand. It's a "yay, let's remember a thing!" pop culture doc, and that's it, and it does a good enough job of that.