In 2011, author Zac Bissonnette went to an auction house to find furniture for a condo near the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While browsing, Bissonnette spotted cardboard boxes with hundreds of small, pliable toys—bears, monkeys, crabs, and more—each stuffed with plastic beans and sporting a heart-shaped tag. He was familiar with Beanie Babies, like any millennial would be, but had never collected them himself. The seller wanted about $50 for a set that 25 years ago could have netted thousands of dollars. Bissonnette walked away empty-handed with a lot of questions.
Google didn’t have many answers. Ty Warner, the elusive founder of Ty Inc., the Chicago-based company behind Beanie Babies, had granted only one major interview, to People in 1996. Since then, the hysteria surrounding the toys had died a dramatic death. Consumers worldwide bought a reported $1.4 billion in Beanie Babies in 1998; by the end of the following year, the market dried up, and production ground to a halt. Bissonnette decided to chronicle this extravagant rise and fall in a book, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, published in 2015.
Eight years later, examining Beanie Baby fever—its addictive cultural foothold, its layered economic backstory, its association with early internet development, and its corporate machinations—has become its own miniature craze. In 2021, the Max documentary Beanie Mania and an episode of the Vice series Dark Side of the 90s peeked behind the curtain of Ty Inc. and the suburban moms who accelerated Beanie Babies’ popularity. This month, Apple TV+ will release The Beanie Bubble, a scripted adaptation of Bissonnette’s book that stars Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook, and Geraldine Viswanathan.
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The conceit of The Beanie Bubble goes something like this: Warner (Galifianakis), the son of a toy salesman and someone who collaborated primarily with mom-and-pop stores, brought a smattering of women into his inner circle to help run Ty Inc., only to take credit for their work and shortchange them financially on his path to billionairedom. “Ty was the greatest bullshit artist around,” says Banks’s character, an analog of Patricia Roche, Warner’s ex-girlfriend and business partner. (Warner later pleaded guilty to tax evasion.) Viswanathan’s character is particularly essential to the hidden Ty history. She’s based on Lina Trivedi, an entry-level employee who wrote pithy poems for the tags and made the World Wide Web’s first consumer-facing site so the company could sell Beanie Babies online.
Before Bissonnette’s book came out, Kristin Gore’s agent at CAA sent her a copy. Gore (daughter of Al) had written for Futurama and Saturday Night Live, and CAA—which also represented Bissonnette—wanted to see whether she thought the material might make for a compelling script. She did, and she eventually enlisted her husband, Damian Kulash (frontman for OK Go and director of the band’s memorable music videos), to codirect. After the movie got set up at Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, Galifianakis quickly expressed interest in playing Warner.
All of this for a book that, according to Bissonnette, “sold terribly.” The Great Beanie Baby Bubble attracted decent media fanfare, but it didn’t fly off shelves the way its publishers expected. The nostalgia just wasn’t there—yet.
So, why now? A few factors are working in the Beanie Babies’ sudden favor. First and foremost, the millennials who amassed Beanies in the ’90s are older, with more reasons to revisit supposedly simpler times. “It was both too recent and not recent enough,” Bissonnette says of 2015. With increased attention to cultural inequities, especially the treatment of women, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, many Y2K icons are being viewed in a new light (see: Tonya Harding, Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey).
On a brainier level, the Beanie bubble resembles what’s happened in the last few years with NFTs—hot commodities whose prices spiked and plummeted. And in simple terms, nostalgia cycles tend to see 20-to-25-year waves. Now is the time when former Beanieheads might want to pay homage to and learn more about their childhood fixation.
“[For people to] critique something that they emotionally loved in their past, we need a certain temporal distancing,” says Dr. Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Le Moyne College who studies nostalgia. “One of the functions of nostalgia is to help people explore and then maintain a continuity of their sense of identity. ... Western culture is very future-oriented, but if you took an evolutionary biology point of view, looking at our past keeps us safe.”
Part of what’s fascinating about Beanie Babies is their intergenerational appeal. It wasn’t just another toy fad, like Pet Rocks or Tickle Me Elmo. Many baby boomers raising young millennials were ardent Beanie collectors themselves. Without a handful of moms who lived in a particular cul-de-sac in Illinois, they might not have become a craze at all. As shown in Beanie Mania, one of the parents started a monthly magazine called Mary Beth’s Beanie World, which featured articles and listed the worth of specific Beanies once they hit the lucrative secondary market on an emerging site called eBay. Eventually, secondary channels overtook the primary retail market, causing the bubble to burst.
Beanie Mania director Yemisi Brookes wanted to focus her film on those women, some of whom made big bucks off of their Beanie expertise. That humanistic approach won her the job: Max (then known as HBO Max) wanted a relatively affectionate film that would make sense as a Christmastime release. Mania addresses Warner’s shadier practices and the toys’ economic crucible, but really, it’s a profile of people who invested their hearts and souls in Ty Inc.’s tiny creations.
“Adults—primarily adult women—have a fondness for stuffed animals,” says Richard Gottlieb, founder and CEO of Global Toy Experts, which does consulting for toy companies. “Unlike boys, who leave them fairly early, girls hold on to them into their teens. As adults, it is an extension of childhood. It is also a means of comfort.”
Batcho takes that idea a step further. Boomers often grew up with four or five siblings, but by the time they were raising children, the average family size across the United States had shrunk. With fewer kids to nurture, adults could turn their attention (and money) to something like Beanie Babies, which satisfy what Batcho calls “the science of cuteness”—round, soft, protectable. (As an only child who grew up in the ’90s, I can attest: My mom really liked Beanie Babies.)
“If you went back 50 or 60 years, mothers would form their own informal groups,” Batcho says. “They would get together to knit booties for somebody else’s baby coming along. Women always had their own little niche of connecting, and that sort of fell by the wayside as modern culture changed significantly—especially the feminist movement, putting women into the workplace. As all of that was disrupted, I think the collectors market started to substitute for that.”
When Gore first drafted The Beanie Bubble, she wrote a linear script that charted Ty’s evolution via a few core women employed there. Something wasn’t clicking. It felt more like Warner’s story than theirs. She and Kulash decided to rearrange the timeline so that the film hopscotches among the three protagonists’ perspectives, coalescing around their similar experiences with the Ty overlord. It’s a treatment the Beanie Baby cohort is likely to respond to: a pop exposé about the very real people whose voices weren’t made public in the less-enlightened ’90s.
In a weird way, the decline of Beanies arrived right on time. Y2K instilled a sense of paranoia in us about our increasingly digitized lives, and here was a product that owed its esteem to brand-new digital platforms. Beanie Babies’ collapse represented an omen for the collective anxieties that were mounting, which would only proliferate after 9/11 and the 2008-09 recession. But from today’s vantage point, economic agita about a plaything feels quaint. If only that’s what everyone was worrying about instead of cryptocurrency, inflation, artificial intelligence, and a possible second Donald Trump presidential term.
Despite the renewed media attention, Beanie Babies don’t seem poised for a significant comeback. They do still hold cultural capital, though. At 90s Con earlier this year, some attendees came dressed as life-size Beanies. At the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, Beanie Babies are on display near American Girl dolls, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures, and Furbies. Christopher Bensch, the museum’s vice president for collections, compares Beanies to the Rainbow Loom, a bracelet-making kit that became a top trend for a few years in the 2010s and then fizzled out. Like Beanie Babies, the Rainbow Loom had modest origins, first selling online and in small chains like Learning Express Toys.
“These financial bubbles and crashes keep happening,” Kulash says. “If you weren’t from the States or you didn’t live through that time and somebody told you that everybody in America simultaneously decided that a mass-produced tchotchke would become so crazily overvalued that people would think they could retire on it and buy homes on it, you would just be like, ‘That is so ludicrous.’ But the things driving that were all of the same things driving the technological utopianism that we’re going through today, or what we went through with social media a few years ago: ‘Oh, this is gonna fix everything.’
“That’s its own kind of bubble,” Kulash added. “And wait: Maybe democracy was one of those too.”
Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on Twitter @majacobs.
