Inside the Cabbage Patch Kids craze that fueled Black Friday

Christmas morning 1983: All the presents in the Fleming household had been unwrapped — or so I thought.

But then a package that had been hidden behind the tree “caught” my Dad’s eye.

It was for me. Ripping into the paper on the oddly shaped box, I came face to face with a chubby face smiling back at me. My very own Cabbage Patch Kid.

The name on her birth certificate? Zena Dena.

She was awesome, and I felt like the luckiest kid in the world.

That year, everyone had asked Santa for a Cabbage Patch Kid — but the big guy could not deliver them to all the deserving kids for reasons too sophisticated for my kindergarten brain to understand.

I recently asked my mom how she procured my precious Zena Dena.

I had long imagined her waking up at the crack of dawn, entering Toys “R” Us, grabbing a wiffle bat and jousting her way to the doll.

But no elbows were thrown.

“Our neighbor had a few, and she asked if I wanted to buy one for you,” she told me.

Not every Cabbage Patch Kid had such a bloodless introduction to their loving homes.

In a new documentary out Friday, “Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids,” director Andrew Jenks peels back the layers of cabbage leaves to tell the zany story how these baby sized cuddly dolls became a pop-culture juggernaut — and ushered in an era of Black Friday retail violence.

Forty years ago, adults flooded malls and toy stores, physically brawling to get their hands on this “It” toy.

In November 1983, the stories — and the injuries — racked up quickly.

Police were called to a department store in North Miami Beach after a horde of 150 shoppers knocked down a 75-year-old man.

In Bergen County, NJ, a pregnant woman was reportedly trampled at a Child World store. In Paramus, one woman elbowed another to “near unconsciousness.”

“The brawls and the melees, that kind of passion — and the idea that they made billions,” Jenks told The Post of what drew him to the topic.

First, Jenks tracked down the Kids’ creator, Xavier Roberts, an endeavor that took months and involved hiring a private investigator.

“With Xavier, he hadn’t done a [long] interview in like 25 years. It’s not that we couldn’t get an interview with him, we couldn’t find him. There were whispers he was living in France. There was a mystique about him,” said Jenks who finally landed an extensive sit-down.

“I wanted to be wealthy,” Roberts admits in the film.

The soft-spoken Southerner in a flashy cowboy hat achieved that goal beyond his wildest dreams.

Then an art student, he first introduced the soft sculpture dolls around 1977 and called them “Little People.”

Inspired by Walt Disney, Roberts created an entire make-believe world at a large home in Cleveland, Georgia, which he called Babyland General Hospital.

There, “Little People” were essentially “birthed” and plucked from an elaborate fake cabbage patch.

Staff dressed like doctors and nurses treated the newborns with a special prescription of TLC.

The babies were not bought by consumers; they were adopted and came with a birth certificate.

Licensing guru Roger Schlaifer’s daughter got a coveted Roberts creation for Christmas.

Charmed by the story around it, he saw the dolls’ “magical quality” — and earning potential.

Schlaifer secured the worldwide licensing rights, insisting this would be the “first billion dollar children’s brand.”

In August 9,1982, Coleco Vision bought the right and changed the dolls’ name to Cabbage Patch Kids.

Marketed to both girls and boys, they came with a wholesome moral framework of how to nurture a child.

“They were saying it was okay for boys to have a cuddly doll. It didn’t have to be a G.I. Joe,” said Jenks.

The dolls were mass marketed but they were also unique, with different combinations of hair and eye color.

Each came with its own offbeat name.

The unifying feature: Their butts all bore a copy Roberts’ signature.

As the craze picked up, Cabbage Patch Kids were splashed all over the media  — and Coleco couldn’t keep up with the demand.

“Coleco had to discontinue their ads and make an announcement, and that created an even bigger demand,” said Jenks.

Thus: the store brawls.

But there was also a legal battle between Kentucky artist Martha Nelson Thomas and Roberts over the dolls’s origin.

Beginning in 1971, Thomas had created soft-sculpture, handmade “doll babies” that resembled Cabbage Patch Kids. Roberts was the manager of a craft store that sold some of Nelson’s creations.

In the film, Roberts says the accusation that he stole the design for his lookalike Little People “hurt.”

He did admit, though, that Thomas showed him her technique, which he combined with his own quilting experience.

“I gained a lot from her,” he added of Thomas.

“It’s two people with a similar idea, taking different paths,” said Della Tolhurst, who was president of Roberts’ company Original Appalachian Artworks. “I don’t think [Thomas] had the same drive that Xavier had … She was more of a folk artist and wanted to stay a folk artist.”

In 1984, they came to an undisclosed settlement.

“There was a larger question of capitalism versus art: Was something stolen or was it inspired by? I didn’t expect those larger questions while making a documentary,” said Jenks.

“Some of the reactions were definitely the opposite of the very earnest and heartwarming place [Cabbage Patch Kids] came from.”