Black Friday is said to have originated in Philadelphia in the 1960s, when members of the city’s police department used the term to describe the chaos that broke out when droves of suburbanites flooded downtown to shop on the day after Thanksgiving. The American tradition swelled to monstrous proportions in the early 1980s, when grainy and horrifying footage of citizens knocking each other to the ground became a fixture of holiday-weekend local news.
These sharp-elbowed consumers were keen to scoop up Atari consoles, Swatch watches, and Cabbage Patch Kids, the doughy dolls with close-set eyes and the signature of a man named Xavier Roberts inked on their bums. Film-maker Andrew Jenks’s zesty Billion Dollar Babies, narrated by 80s child and Doogie Howser, M.D. star Neil Patrick Harris, chronicles a strange corner of recent history, bringing to life a time when little girls and boys were possessed by a mania over ugly dimpled playthings that made Raggedy Ann dolls look like supermodels by comparison.
