'Garbage Pail Kids' Animated Series Coming To HBO Max From The Team Behind 'Halloween'

We might just have reached the bottom of the barrel — or rather, the bottom of the garbage pail — in terms of new titles based on known IP. A Garbage Pail Kids animated series is coming to HBO Max, from the team that brought us...the Halloween revivial? Read on to find out more about how these edgy 1980s trading cards are becoming a family-friendly animated series

HBO Max is teaming up with Topps, Tornante, and Danny McBride's Rough House Pictures to make a Garbage Pail Kids animated series, according to The Hollywood Reporter. McBride and his Rough House partner David Gordon Green, with whom he co-wrote 2018's Halloween, both share a love for the Garbage Pal Kids and Saturday morning cartoons, and are combining those two loves into a "family-friendly" animated series that will "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 executive produce alongside Rough House's Brandon James (The Righteous Gemstones) alongside McBride, Green and Bycel. It's unclear for now whether McBride, who has lent his voice to many an animated project including Despicable Me and the Angry Birds movies, will voice any of the characters in the potential series.

Though I refer to McBride and Green's work in Halloween, the two frequent collaborators have worked together on many more comedy projects — including films Your Highness and The Pineapple Express, and shows such as Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones. The Garbage Pail Kids were created in 1985 by baseball card giant Topps as a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, and were known for their gross-out humor and subversive attitude. Oftentimes, the characters suffered some kind of comical abnormality, deformity, or terrible fate, with a punny character name to match like Adam Bomb or Blasted Bill. So it's likely that The Garbage Pail Kids animated series will follow that line of humor, though it's difficult to imagine it being sanded down for a more family-friendly audience.

The cards were banned in several schools, and a 1987 animated TV series was so controversial it never aired in the U.S. There was also a 1987 live-action movie directed by Rod Amateau that is widely considered to be one of the worst films ever made. So we'll have to see if McBride and Green have better luck.