Perhaps what strikes one the most about The Beanie Bubble isn’t pulling back the curtain behind the “Wizard of Beanie Babies,” Ty Warner, and finding out he was a huge asshole, but rather, the realization of just how millennial the plush toys really were. This doesn’t pertain to the actual era during which they came out, so much as the “toys” being a reflection of what it already meant to be millennial, even (/especially) at tender preteen ages. The fact that even something as theoretically pure as “toys” suddenly had to be slapped with the purpose of “getting a return on one’s investment” couldn’t be more millennial by nature. Having the thing for the sake of having it simply wasn’t an option. It had to “give something back.” Just as millennial children were expected to. And yes, as Malcolm Harris notes in Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, this was the first generation of children treated this way. As human capital.
Look to none other than their baby boomer parents for a large part of that reason. The parents who wanted to ensure that their children had nothing but the best and never endured any amount of previously unavoidable pain whatsoever (hence, helicopter parenting). Their childhoods were going to be different. Safer. No playing outside for hours at a time until dinner. No, no. Now, that time had to be accounted for. Monitored. Monetizable (at least somewhere down the line).
And there’s always more time for self-improvement over “useless” play. This factoring into why Beanie Babies certainly shouldn’t be viewed as actual toys to play with. Gasp! That was a scandalous thought after realizing they were actually laden with value. At times, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of value. So it is that the book The Beanie Bubble is based on, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute (written by none other than a millennial), reminds that it “had turned into a craze that was the twentieth-century American version of the tulip bubble in 1630s Holland.” It, too, was described as a “mania.” Tulip mania.
To that end, the precursor to The Beanie Bubble, a 2021 documentary called Beanie Mania, highlights the ways in which boomer parents took something theoretically innocent and fun, and then turned it into something that more closely resembled a chore, an obligation. A means to secure one’s future. In said documentary, a former Beanie-loving child named Michelle makes that apparent when she says, “…it became a multiple trip, do what we can, keep going until you were tired, until there were no other stores in the area that might have what we’re looking for. And then my mom took that to an extreme and it quickly became her thing over mine.”
The obsession, on the parents’ part, with collecting as many Beanies as possible ultimately had more to do with “winning” at toy-owning/ensuring their child had the best of everything, than it did with “having fun.” For nothing about being a millennial child was ever about just having fun. All of it had to be in service for some “greater purpose.” Some higher aim in service of the competition called life. Something, in the end, that would create a “market bubble” among the buying and selling of millennials themselves. For if every millennial was trained in the same proverbial school of “Be the Best,” it creates a greater likelihood for children (and the adults they become) to be rejected by the various institutions that know “everyone” is both the crème de la crème and willing to work at maximum capacity for minimal payment. That’s what they learned in school, after all. Where “the pedagogical mask,” as Harris refers to it, is meant to conceal that what the children are actually doing is training for a life of unpaid labor (with such labor eventually billed as “just part of the job”), the great Beanie Baby race was a study in how to turn a quick profit. All by asking of a child the one thing you never should: don’t play with your toys.
What could be a more “reasonable” ask of a generation where competition over things that were formerly innocent had never been at a higher level? As Harris remarks over the retooled school structure of the 90s, “[It’s] built around hypercompetition, from first period, to extracurricular activities, to homework, to the video games kids play when they have a minute of downtime. It’s not a coincidence—none of it. The growth of growth requires lots of different kinds of hard work, and millennials are built for it.” Not just because they’ve been conditioned to expect putting in hours of work with little given back in return, but because they’re the first generation that was taught to always be “plugged in.” To the matrix, that is. Always available, therefore always ready for any opportunity that might arise. Like a higher bidding price on eBay. The famed auction site that aligned with the rise of the secondary market for Beanie Babies. A secondary market that served as a collector’s wet dream. And yes, the entire driving force behind the rise and popularity of Beanie Babies were the collectors. Originally just a group of “cul-de-sac moms” from Naperville, Illinois. Meaning that, perhaps for the only time in history, the Midwest was ahead of the trend curve before everyone else.
Dave Sobolewski, the middle child of one of the “original Beanie Ladies,” Mary Beth, himself comes across as a quintessential millennial, simply shrugging off the absurdity with his assessment of market bubbles while also finding the time to flex, “My background, my education, my profession, it’s all finance. Beanie Babies is a case study in just how a few people pushing an idea and enthusiasm…crazy things can happen.” Spoken like someone who has never reckoned with the traumatic experience of being a millennial. Manipulated for profit in much the same manner as Beanie Babies until millennials’ own bubble burst. Instead, Dave writes off the unhinged fanaticism as: “Without the few women that started the entire mania, Beanie Babies never would have been.” It bears mentioning, to be sure, that the women who started it were all white and middle-class, and many of them held formerly high-powered jobs before giving it up to be a “full-time mom” (as though you can’t be that regardless of having a paid job) in the cul-de-sac. Undoubtedly, it sounds a lot like the plot to The Stepford Wives. And maybe there was something “automaton-esque” about their obsession. More, more, more. Feed, feed, feed.
All of this, in the end, being the philosophy that trickled down to their millennial children, who would not have the benefit of experiencing adulthood in an epoch that allowed for such ease of moneymaking as the boomers did. Ty Warner (played by Zach Galifianakis) himself being such an example of someone who continuously “fell into” money. In large part due to the women he surrounded himself with. Women who are finally given some credit in The Beanie Bubble, structured in an “all over the place” way (that many critics included in part of their panning) to show the different time periods in which Warner was most reliant on them. Patricia Roche was the first on Warner’s list of Women to Fuck Over. Helping him to establish the business, there’s no denying she was instrumental in the initial years of Ty Inc.’s success before Beanie Babies. In the movie, she becomes “Robbie Jones” (played by Elizabeth Banks), while Faith McGowan, his second serious girlfriend, becomes Sheila (Sarah Snook). But the woman he arguably took the most advantage of wasn’t even someone he was dating.
Instead, it was college student Lina Trivedi, who worked there for twelve dollars an hour from 1992 to 1998 despite the fact that she was the direct cause of the many millions (then billions) of dollars the company would go on to make. In no small part because of her suggestion to implement the use of this thing called “The Internet.” In fact, Ty Inc. was surprisingly ahead of the game on the ways in which the internet could be used. From checking out product information to serving as a place for collectors to connect, Trivedi was the brainchild behind all of that.
And the boomers were ready to absorb the technology. This being what amplified and blew up Beanie Mania into pure frenzy. As Joni Hirsch-Blackman in Beanie Mania puts it, “It was a really nice thing for a while…till the adults ruined it.” At least some adults can admit that much. Though they can’t seem to admit that everything about Beanie Baby fever was fueled from a middle-class perspective, with no regard for what else was actually going on in the world (or the havoc they would ultimately wreak upon people’s lives by creating this speculative market). To that point, Joni also foolishly declares, “I think of the 90s as sort of frivolous.” From that skewed view (one that ignores things like the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, the first World Trade Center bombing attempt, the Unabomber, the rise of school shootings, etc.), it left room for the frivolousness of collecting (again, if you were white and middle-class).
As the early days of trolling for Beanie Babies gave way to something far darker, Joni could admit that the taint was starting to settle in fast on what was once meant to be a child’s toy. However, as she remarks, “This was becoming something different. We don’t play with these things because they’re gonna be worth money. If the tag was creased, you’d ruin the value of your Beanie.” To reiterate, this is decidedly “millennial thinking.” Or rather, the thinking that millennials were inculcated with. Always search for the next hustle, the next scam, the next “get rich quick” scheme. All without seeming to realize that “legitimate” jobs require just as much time and effort as the so-called easy way out. Then, of course, there was all the waste that arose from the obsession with collecting. Not least of which was the McDonald’s collaboration that resulted in “Teenie Beanies,” prompting consumers to just throw away the food after buying excessive amounts of Happy Meals to complete their set. At the height of the fervor in 1998, various fights and thefts would break out at McDonald’s locations across the U.S., necessitating police involvement. The fixation on these bean-filled sacks shaped as animals being of high value meant that, suddenly, the market seemed to be filled solely with sellers. Sellers who were starting to get fed up with the secondary market when inventory wasn’t being unloaded so quickly, or for as much as it had in the past when the bubble started to burst around 1999.
Sensing the imminent doom, Warner pulled a stunt announcing Beanie Babies would be discontinued after December 31, 1999 (appropriate, considering their demise would be after the 90s ended anyway). Then, after a buying spike, he polled the collectors (by charging them to vote on the website) if they wanted Beanies to stay—after he had already ratcheted up the demand again in the wake of that “to be discontinued” announcement. This doesn’t make it into The Beanie Bubble, though what comes across overall is that there is no “genius” behind the curtain. In Beanie Mania, Ty even is referred to as the Wizard of Oz. An emperor with no clothes, as it were. Sure, he could be billed as the “eccentric heart” of the designs, but, in the end, he would have been nothing without the women behind him. This was a key element that writer Kristin Gore (that’s right, the daughter of 90s vice president, Al), wanted to convey. Co-directed with her husband, Damian Kulash, The Beanie Bubble does just that. And, although known to many as the lead singer for OK Go, Kulash seems uniquely qualified to co-direct the movie as he contributed a story to a book called Things I’ve Learnt from Women Who’ve Dumped Me. Would that Ty Warner had learned anything from the women who dumped him, least of all humility. And an understanding that his success was a direct result of the rigged system that continues to favor white men.
Per Gore on writing the script, “We’ve talked a lot about how there’s this myth of a lone male genius coming up with things. You see it over and over again, benefiting from a system that’s rigged for him and against everyone else. And we wanted to peel back those layers and look at that myth and really show what everyone knows, which is that there’s always so much more to that story. There are always so many more people involved.” In the case of the millennial mentality that insists, “Always be driven, always be competing…with the potential for no payout,” that, too, had many people involved. From the government to parents and, yes, to corporations like Ty Inc.
What The Beanie Bubble also wants to remind people of is how ugly capitalism makes us. Which is why the film opens with that illustrious truck crash scene (which is, needless to say, hyper-stylized), wherein boxes of Beanies go flying and everyone on the highway starts picking at the remains like vultures. In Beanie Mania, Mary Beth blithely sums a scene like this up with, “The collector’s mentality is that you can never have enough.” But the sentence Mary Beth was really looking for was: “The American consumer’s mentality is that you can never have enough.” And you have to be willing to claw and compete at any (literal) cost to get it. That’s what millennials learned. Yet they’re still somehow shocked that none of their unpaid labor (starting at the school level) has yielded a substantial return.
