In 1983, a Wisconsin radio announcer joked that a B-29 bomber would drop 2,000 Cabbage Patch Kids into Milwaukee County Stadium. People should bring catcher’s mitts, and whoever grabbed a doll needed to hold up their credit card to be photographed.

At least a dozen people actually showed up.

Such was the epic Cabbage Patch Kids craze of 1983. The doll was in such rabid demand that shoppers camped overnight at toy stores, stormed displays, and mobbed parking lots. One report from the time featured a Texas woman gripping her doll tightly even as another shopper’s purse strap was wrapped around her throat.

“It was as if an army had been turned loose on the nation’s shopping malls, ravaging the ficus trees, sloshing through the fountains, searching for the legendary stockrooms said to be filled with thousands of the dough-faced, chinless, engagingly homely dolls,” wrote Newsweek.

It was the country’s first instance of total consumer anarchy. Sure, malls had sold out of items before — Etch-a-Sketch factory employees worked until noon on Christmas Eve 1960 to fulfill demand, and elusive Star Wars figurines were all but urban legend in 1977 — but this year was different. A months-long marketing scheme, a nostalgic product, and old-fashioned supply-and-demand climaxed into unprecedented holiday hysteria. The Cabbage Patch frenzy became the blueprint for Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, and Black Friday marketing campaigns that we’re all so familiar with. It was engineered mania.

The December 12, 1983, Newsweek cover story pictured a young girl with a shiny bowl cut. She squeezes a ginger-haired doll, with a dimpled smile tucked between loafy cheeks. The girl’s sly wink at the camera pleads, “Buy this for me, sucker. Buy it now.”

Newsweek, December 12, 1983.

By the 1950s the toy industry had discovered the purchasing power of kids and teens. Eager to provide kids with what they couldn’t afford during the Great Depression, American consumers scrambled for Lego, Rubik’s Cube, and Barbie. As technology improved into the 1970s parents purchased Atari games and Walkmans. To have the right toys was a status symbol — for both kid and parent.

When Cabbage Patch arrived in 1983, materialism had reached a new high. At the same time, people were becoming fatigued by electronics (the last popular doll, Baby Alive, ate “food” and pooped it into a diaper). The Cabbage Patch doll promised a return to simplicity. It was something you could just…hug.

Of course, the genius wasn’t in the design — Cabbage Patch was described by many as the ugliest doll in the world — it was in the messaging.

Inspired by the folk art movement of the late 1970s, 21-year-old art student Xavier Roberts began experimenting with hand-stitching and quilting techniques to create fabric sculptures. When he gave them human shapes in 1976, Roberts called them “Little People.” Roberts toured craft shows around the country and ultimately offered his Little People for sale at a converted medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia, which he renamed “Babyland General Hospital.”

Xavier Roberts sits in a pile of the Cabbage Patch Dolls that he created. (Getty Images)

More a gallery than a retail shop, Roberts instructed salesclerks to dress in nurse’s uniforms and interact with the dolls, who slept in incubators and cribs throughout the space. Each doll came with a birth certificate, adoption papers, and a name pulled from 1938 Georgia birth records.

Roberts finally licensed the doll to toy manufacturer Coleco in 1982. He changed the name to Cabbage Patch Kids, based on the childhood fable that new babies were plucked from cabbage gardens. This “discovery legend” was printed on every product:

“Xavier Roberts was a ten-year-old boy who discovered the Cabbage Patch Kids by following a BunnyBee behind a waterfall into a magical Cabbage Patch, where he found the Cabbage Patch babies being born. To help them find good homes he built BabyLand General in Cleveland, Georgia where the Cabbage Patch Kids could live and play until they were adopted.”

Until they were adopted. Genius marketing. Each Cabbage Patch Doll was totally unique, ready to be brought home by a totally unique girl or boy. A special baby for a special kid.

It was perfect timing for such a doll. Manufacturing technology made it so Cabbage Patch would be the first postindustrial toy. No longer was there one mold for a product. The recent computerization of the assembly line had introduced infinite randomized customization. No two Cabbage Patch dolls were alike — they varied in skin color, hair style, clothing, smile, freckles, and even dimple location.

Only now the dolls’ names were chosen by a computer, not curated from charming old birth records.