The Beanie Babies craze of the late ’90s wasn’t exactly a scam, but there were surely scam-adjacent elements. The community of collectors buying and selling and hoarding the lovable plush creations wasn’t exactly a cult, but there were surely cult-adjacent elements. The entire phenomenon wasn’t exactly birthed around the Internet, but it surely thrived thanks to adjacency to the earliest offshoots of online commerce.
Yemisi Brookes’ new HBO feature Beanie Mania isn’t, therefore, exactly like seemingly every other TV documentary released in 2021, but it’s adjacent to every cult, scam and cyber-curiosity portrait that we’ve collectively fixated on. At only 80 minutes, Beanie Mania offers only limited depth and it’s hard to imagine any viewer not being left with serious questions throughout, but as a superficial, hastily glossed nostalgic oddity, it’s a tidy way to wrap your 2021 viewing.
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Beanie Mania
For those who have forgotten, toy manufacturer Ty Warner and Ty Inc. launched the Beanie Baby line in 1993 and around 1995 and 1996, they became a sensation. Floppy, poseable and indisputably cute, what began as a Chicago-area fad went global with the help of the fairly newfangled Internet, and for a while people were obsessed with “retired” dolls, regional variations and allegedly limited-edition toys. They prompted sold-out promotion runs at McDonalds, piles of price guide magazines and an active market on eBay or elsewhere, with some people earnestly believing that Beanie Babies were an investment opportunity.
Since Ty Warner himself is a notoriously press-shy eccentric — at least one interview subject compares him to Willy Wonka — Brookes’ ability to explore Ty Inc. is limited. She has interviews with certain somewhat random executives who offer little by way of insight, as well as the brand’s early Canadian distributor and Linda Trivedi, who, despite being an hourly wage telemarketer, is credited as the originator of both the trademark poems that accompanied the adorable dolls and the company’s first website (which couldn’t be more 1995 if it included an “All your base are belong to us” reference).
Brookes’ focus is much more on the people the director wants to credit as being responsible for the actual eponymous mania who you may or may not be surprised to learn were primarily a circle of suburban Chicago housewives. The thing Beanie Mania does best is trace the line from obsession to compulsion as these women, many of whom set their professional lives on pause to raise families, went from casual amusement to fanaticism.
More than with a holiday hit like Cabbage Patch Kids or Tickle-Me-Elmo, the tempest around Beanie Babies stemmed more from economic principles than actual enjoyment. Sure, somebody must have played with Beanie Babies and cuddled with them and actually loved them, but this is not their story. This is the story of women who traveled the backroads of Illinois targeting far-flung gift shops, who purchased dozens of Happy Meals and discarded the food, who reached high enough status that they were appearing on TV as mouthpieces for a secondary market that had nothing to do with Ty Inc.
Everything you need to know about Beanie Mania can be summed up easily: While a documentary of this type normally might be expected to provide an economist or business journalist as a talking head for educational purposes, Brookes instead lets Dave Sobelewski, son of aficionado and Beanie Baby magazine editor Mary Beth, give loose bullet points. He’s in finance in some capacity, so he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, but his primary qualification is as a son.
Along those lines any time Beanie Mania has the opportunity to offer rigor, it instead goes for good-natured chuckles, which to my mind cheapens its ability to offer more than “Ha, wasn’t this a weird thing that happened 25 years ago?” insights. A title card tied to the idea of a “market bubble,” for example, mentions the disparate comparables of Tulip Fever and cryptocurrency, but if you want to know what, if anything, Tulip Fever has to do with anything, you have to google — and if you want any sense of whether or not Beanie Babies have anything to teach us about all things crypto, you’re out of luck. There’s very little by way of context or cautionary advice here, but there are lots of endearingly silly shots of Beanie Babies floating through the cash-filled air and plopping onto the ground. It’s a metaphor, you see.
The determination was made somewhere that it was better to keep things light, so you have one talking head who jokes about “Beanie Bankruptcy,” without suggesting she went into anything more than light credit card debt. The documentary is littered with things that sound bad, yet are treated with levity here, from general heartless corporate bureaucracy to the actual legal difficulties Warner faced. From counterfeits to frauds to the bursting bubble of alleged investments stuffed in Tupperware cases in the backs of closets, Beanie Mania is ever hinting at bad side effects to this craze. But the total number of people featured in the documentary who were meaningfully hurt in this speculative market is zero.
The problem, I guess, was that people took Beanie Babies too seriously for a couple of years and, in criticizing Beanie Mania for not digging deeper, for not finding a way to give viewers a real takeaway after an hour and a half, I’m probably doing the same.
