The Garbage Pail Kids are coming back to TV.
HBO Max is teaming with Topps, Tornante and Danny McBride’s Rough House Pictures to bring the beloved 1980s trading cards to life as an animated TV series.
The project, which is currently in development at the WarnerMedia-backed streamer, is inspired by McBride and his Rough House partner David Gordon Green’s love for Garbage Pail Kids and Saturday morning cartoons. The expectation is that the animated series will be family-friendly and appeal to audiences of all ages.
McBride, Green and Josh Bycel (Hulu’s Solar Opposites) will write and co-create the HBO Max series. Tornante TV’s Noel Bright and Steven A. Cohen will exec produce alongside Rough House’s Brandon James (The Righteous Gemstones) alongside McBride, Green and Bycel. It’s yet to be determined if McBride will lend his voice to any of the characters in the potential series.
Garbage Pail Kids was created in 1985 by baseball card giant Topps, which is part of Michael Eisner’s Tornante portfolio. The GPK cards — a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids line of dolls — featured gross-out humor and a subversive attitude and became a pop culture phenomenon.
The success of the cards, which were banned in several schools, led to a live-action movie and animated TV series in 1987. The series never aired in the U.S. as a result of its controversial themes. GPK, which counts celebrity fans including McBride and The Goldbergs creator Adam F. Goldberg, recently marked its 35th anniversary, with new cards (from Topps) coming out as recently as a few years ago.
For Tornante, Garbage Pail Kids joins an animated TV slate that includes Netflix hit BoJack Horseman, Amazon’s groundbreaking Undone and Adult Swim’s Tuca and Bertie.
