In June 1985, “Garbage Pail Kids” trading cards were released by Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., and the universe, as we now know it, was created. Garbage Pail Kids, spoofing Cabbage Patch Kids baby dolls, took the world by storm. For tens of millions of American children growing up in the mid-1980s, as well as for hundreds of millions of other children in more than twenty countries worldwide, GPK were a life-changing phenomenon.

Garbage Pail Kids, or “Havurat HaZevel” (the trash gang) as it is known in Hebrew, left a deep impression on Israeli children as well. Growing up in an isolated village in northern Israel in the 1980s, Garbage Pail Kids were undoubtedly the most amazing thing I had ever seen as an 8-year-old and—fast forward three decades—the most fascinating subject I had the pleasure to work with as an art historian and curator who uses material culture to write cultural history.