Topps Company has responded to the immense backlash that resulted from their recent Garbage Pail Kids “Shammy Awards” collection that was teased earlier today.
The collection featured a sticker showing the BTS members in a mallet-hitting game similar to Whac-a-Mole, the members are covered in bandages, broken teeth and some of the members appear to be crying and show visible fear in their face.
Fans didn’t react kindly to the sticker and criticized the company for its racially insensitive and upsetting portrayal of the members.
The issue became bigger considering the ongoing “Stop Asian Hate” movement that highlights the violent attacks the Asian community has been suffering from due to the sentiment regarding COVID-19, an activism organization called Stop AAPI Hate reported the Asian American faced almost 3,800 racially-motivated attacks over the past year
In a newly released statement to twitter, the company wrote,
We hear and understand our consumers who are upset about the portrayal of BTS in our GPK [Garbage Pail Kids] “Shammy Awards” product and we apologize for including it. We have removed the BTS sticker card for the set, we have not printed any of the sticker card and it will not be available.
However, their apology wasn’t at all well-received by fans or the Asian community, the original tweet has over 24 thousand quoted tweets as of this writing with fans expressing their shock at the apology statement, many believe the company fails to acknowledge why their cards caused an issue and the implications of these cards considering the current times.
What did you think of their apology? Do you think it was enough?
