Vintage 1980s Trash Can Tots Stickers 🗑️ Cheesey Charlie, Peg Leg & Willy Wart, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired

Remember Trash Can Tots? 🗑️ Trash Can Tots Sticker Strip: Cheesey Charlie, Peg Leg and Willy Wart

Size: 6 1/2" x 1 1/2" ~ One uncut strip of three, never used.

Vintage 1980s Trash Can Tots Stickers, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired! Relive the 80s! These iconic vintage Trash Can Tots stickers were inspired by the Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids. Who could forget the Whacky Ghoulies, Ugly Balls, Burp Balls, Weird Balls, and Spit Balls craze that had parents and teachers up in arms? A classic that never gets old!

This is one of the ten strips in the series, the one I list as number 6, three stickers still on their original pale yellow backing. Each one has TRASH CAN TOTS arched across the top and a pun name in a box at the bottom.

🧒 Meet the Tots

• Cheesey Charlie: a kid full of holes like a slice of Swiss cheese, sitting in a pile of cheese chunks and munching away.
• Peg Leg: a pigtailed girl pirate with an eye patch, a wooden peg leg and a jug marked XX.
• Willy Wart: a kid in a green shirt yelping, with one bandaged orange foot, a nail and a tube on the floor beside him.

The last photo shows the whole series of ten strips laid out for reference; this listing is the one strip named above.

🗑️ Straight Out of the Vending Machine

Trash Can Tots were never sold in wax packs at the toy store. They came out of the coin-operated vending machines of the 1980s, one uncut strip of three stickers at a time, and collectors call them a shameless Garbage Pail Kids knockoff. As the vintage-toy writer at Dinosaur Dracula put it, next to the real Garbage Pail Kids the Tots' gore and cruelty were clearly toned down. Very few of them were truly gross, and many were actually pleasant.

🤢 Garbage Pail Kids and Madballs

The Tots were riding a very big wave. The Topps Company launched Garbage Pail Kids in 1985 as a gross-out parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. Art Spiegelman, a consultant for Topps who had already given the world Wacky Packages and Garbage Can-dy, came up with the idea, which started life as an unused Wacky Packages sticker. He and fellow cartoonist Mark Newgarden edited and art-directed it, and John Pound painted the first series. Original Appalachian Artworks, the Cabbage Patch company, sued in 1986, and in the settlement Topps changed the look of the kids and the logo; plenty of schools banned the cards as a classroom distraction, and there was even a live-action Garbage Pail Kids movie in 1987. Madballs came along in 1986 from AmToy, part of the American Greetings Corporation, dreamed up by its Cleveland character studio, which really did call itself Those Characters From Cleveland: foam rubber balls with grotesque faces and names like Screamin' Meemie, Slobulus, Horn Head and Skull Face. Kids loved all of it, and the knockoffs piled in right behind: Blurp Balls from ERTL, Weird Balls from the Mel Appel Company and Spit Balls from Lanard Toys. The vending machine makers were happy to give them more, and the craze never quite died: Topps brought the Garbage Pail Kids back with an All-New Series in 2003, Flashback reissues in 2010 and a Brand-New Series in 2012.

🖼️ Display

Stick them on a lunch box or a binder the way we did, or keep the strip whole and frame it next to your Garbage Pail Kids. Either way it's a pure shot of 1980s nostalgia.