HBO Max’s Beanie Mania is a fascinating retrospective on a ’90s toy obsession
The documentary revisits the collective mania that would only be rivaled by the release of the Harry Potter books
TV Reviews Beanie Mania
Two decades after the end of the toy phenomenon that swept the U.S., the HBO Max documentary Beanie Mania revisits the history of how Beanie Babies rose to prominence through a combination of archival news footage and colorful interviews with key players of the game. These players include former Ty Company employees, professional Beanie Baby resellers, and prominent collectors turned early influencers who helped take the brand from local fad to national obsession.
Beanie Mania weaves an entertaining, fast-paced narrative that reveals the depths to which collective fanaticism, greed, and the influence of the internet, even in its earliest days, all combined to create an inflection point that led to an unprecedented and unsustainable investment bubble. Visually, Beanie Mania makes the most of its subject, with playful interstitials of Beanie Baby toys intercut with plain text that move the narrative forward in time and introducing interviewees with title cards that feature Beanie Babies as stand-ins.
The source of the hype, the documentary reveals, all began in 1996 in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, not too far from the Ty, Inc. headquarters, where a group of affluent stay-at-home moms living in the same subdivision started collecting Beanie Babies for their children from local gift shops. Determined to complete their collections, the women quickly spiraled into an addiction that involved spreadsheets, phone bills of upwards of $2,000, and an encyclopedic familiarity with all available Beanie Baby inventory nationwide.
This proved to be a boon for the women, because company founder Ty Warner refused to do any advertising or media—as the earliest collectors, the Naperville group of mothers became the de facto mouthpieces for the toys and acted as early influencers, making appearances on local media to talk about the latest Beanie releases and building up hype which quickly expanded nationwide.
While Beanie Mania primarily focuses on the key players who profited from the beanie-filled craze, it does feature interviews with some collectors whose lives were heavily impacted by the toys, including Jeannine Marron Twardus, a former cryptological technician for the FBI turned gift shop owner whose passion for collecting the toys nearly bankrupted her. (Unfortunately, Frances and Harold Mountain, the divorced couple who famously had to split their Beanie Baby collection in the courtroom after failing to do so themselves, do not make an appearance.)
“The collector’s mentality is that you can never have enough… and that’s dangerous,” says Mary Beth Sobolewski, one of the mothers in the original Naperville group and founder of the popular Beanie Baby collector magazine Mary Beth’s Beanie World (which changed its name to Mary Beth’s Bean Bag World after Warner sued her for trademark infringement).
The exponential scale of growth is simply staggering; between 1996 and 1997, sales shot up 1,000% in a matter of months, with 500,000 beanies selling monthly. Sales reached close to $1.4 billion by 1998, followed by a McDonald’s Happy Meals “Teeny Beanie” partnership that sold out five weeks of product within two weeks. The archival news footage—which includes brief interviews with children and shopkeepers—effectively reestablishes both the nostalgia and the absurdity of the collective mania that would only later be rivaled by the release of the Harry Potter books.
Even more fascinating than the rapid ascent of Ty, Inc. itself is what Beanie Mania reveals about the unofficial secondary market universe that revolved around the toys, from collector guides to Beanie Baby jewelry sold at ersatz fan conventions, and the mania brought on by speculative collectors more interested in making a financial investment than actually collecting. By 1997, secondary market resellers would make an average of 500% profit on the retail price. The other prominent takeaway is the outsize influence the Naperville mothers continued to have in controlling the narrative of authenticity within the secondary market—for despite the success and hundreds of thousands of requests coming in from retailers at the height of the craze, and thousands of counterfeiters flooding the market with fakes, Warner continued to refuse to invest in any official Beanie Baby advertising or press. As one former collector notes, “There was no evidence that they would ever be worth anything. We all just believed it.”
Given Warner’s reticence, it is not surprising, though disappointing, that he himself is not included in the group of interviewees. Famously reclusive, his own lawyer states there is “absolutely zero” chance that the director will get an interview, and so, Beanie Mania fills in the details by asking the other interviewees about him. He’s described as a litigious Wizard of Oz/Willy Wonka figure who began his career committed to supporting smaller toy stores and welcoming each new employee, but who soon alienated the people closest to him and the success of the company through his own greed.
“It was a really nice thing for a while, until the adults ruined it,” reflects Joni Hirsch Blackman on the craze, as another member of the Naperville mothers’ group and a former journalist for People magazine who was the only person to ever interview Warner about Beanie Babies. Still, despite the inevitable decline of the largest toy craze of the 1990s, there are those, like Peggy Gallagher, who still enjoy collecting Beanies and have no regrets. When asked if she feels good about the whole experience and spending so much time and money, she responds, “I do. Because I love them.”
36 Comments
I can’t believe people were so foolish back then. Now it’s off to buy the latest NFT!
Rule of thumb, if someone tells you something is going to be worth millions in10 years and it isn’t a 1 off Ferrari, they’re lying.
Nice Fuzzy Things?
New Furry Toy!
Yeah, reading this article immediately after reading the one on Kotaku about Ubisoft and their deeply stupid thrust into NFTs was a hoot.
If you guys truly can’t see the long term in NFTs, I’m curious if you were alive in 1995. The Internet was silly when Usenet was around. Ten years later it wasn’t so silly… Twenty-five years later it is everything. I met a woman who taught herself basic HTML in 1999. She made 2.5x the median income based on what she learned in one book. Her prior career didn’t matter. If you aren’t watching a ton of videos right now on “Web 3.0″ you’re missing the boat as it’s leaving the dock.
These tulip bulbs are going to skyrocket in price any day now…
As a kid I remember having conversations with Beanie-hoarding relatives, and desperately trying to understand them as an investment vehicle (these get rich, quick! relatives are today’s Trump supporters). Come to think of it, I may have learned about supply, demand, and desperation from the Beanie Baby craze.
Pogs are back…in NFT form!
Hold on, let me seal up my holofoil cover 5th printing of Spawn #1.
I’m old enough to remember Pet Rocks.
‘Course, had they hoarded Pokemon cards, it might just have worked.
People are still foolish now! Ebay is littered with fake sales and listings for Beanie Babies they’re claiming are worth mini-fortunes. Found this useful guide to Beanie Baby prices in 2022, talks a lot about the scams still going on and what the real prices are today – https://www.90stoys.com/dolls-and-soft-toys/most-valuable-beanie-babies/
I had close to 100 I think? I was 10 years old and can still name so many of them lol. They were pretty cute ideas, each with a nice little poem and birthday, but they also remind me of hospital gift shops!My nephew is into pokemon cards now, and I will say it is kind of cool having a generational collectible like that, I still had my old cards and gave some to him(but my child self couldn’t part with my faves).
i’m an old & i collected wacky packs!
Oh God, I loved those (I seem to remember we called them Wacky Packies).
I vividly remember when McDonald’s offered Beanie Babies in happy meals. I had classmates whose parents pulled them out of school that day so they could go sit in the drive thru line to get one. I can remember seeing the queue of vehicle complete encircle my local McD’s and stretch out into traffic. It was nuts.And I was no exception to the frenzy. I knew enough about them to know which ones were especially desirable, and here I got a valuable lesson. At Hallmark, I spotted a Princess Diana bear wrapped up in a gift basket. I thought I had made a real find, and even the store clerk commented that I’d gotten really lucky finding it. I bought it and took it home proud of what I’d accomplished. A day later for some reason I had to go back to that store, and when I went in, there was another giftbasket sitting there, with another Diana bear. I realized at that moment it was all hype and artificiality scarcity. But it made me a better, wiser investor on the whole because of this early lesson.I still have that bear.
I remember hearing about the Diana Beanie and being so disappointed she was in a purple bear form and not a beautiful princess form. But I purchased nonetheless.
I worked at McDonald’s when this was a thing and I was the opening manager. There would be people waiting outside before 6 a.m. to get these things and they were ridiculous about them. No need to watch this documentary, I can still remember how angry people were.
And I can remember how it then spawned an offshoot where everyone was collecting Fast Food giveaway toys. Which again, I was no exception to. I’ve got a box full of Taco Bell dogs mint in the baggies.
misread that as “taco bell dogs’ mints” & thought, “hey, that was nice of them to make breath mints for dogs!”
People are still falling for the Princess Diana bear.
I have a friend who recently came across one while cleaning out a deceased family member’s old belongings. He excitedly showed me eBay listings with six-figure asking prices.I destroyed his hopes of early retirement by showing him how to search by completed listings to see what people were really paying for them (about $10).
What about the Beanie Barbie?
I actually was a collector of both during the 90s. I lost interest when I grew up and had to spend my money on actual important stuff. I still have some mainly the ones that me or my mom spend more then retail on. I have one by my nightstand that looks like my cat I had in childhood.
I was a child in Naperville in 1996, and I am both surprised and not surprised at all that this started there. I remember my mom suggesting we sell ours when the craze was at a fever pitch but my brothers and I were children who just wanted to keep our toys lol. Too bad we didn’t listen.
My mother used to work at a hotel, which had a gift shop that sold Beanie Babies. Every week, she’d bring a few home because her employee discount made the cost of each one almost negligible. By the time Beanie Fever took off, she had amassed a sizable collection. We came to find out that my had stumbled upon three of the originally-released Beanie Babies.We ended up selling those three little stuffed animals to some woman in the Midwest for $10,000. My parents redecorated their home. She continued to sell the high-value Beanie Babies on eBay until the craze died down.I have two kids now. My mom will occasionally surprise them with random Beanie Babies from the giant storage bucket in her garage.
Ha that’s pretty awesome, good for her!
They have value as toys. I bought one for my 5 year old son, oblivious to the craze. He PLAYED WITH IT.
I gotta give the company some credit for their unique designs. Years after the Beanie Baby trend, when my close friends started having kids, I saw how fun it could be to buy a stuffed animal of an unusual species. Not a bear or tiger, but something that might be the kid’s particular interest like a wombat or pika. In the 1990s, wasn’t this company kinda the first to do this? I recently did buy someone a stuffed pika, and I had to get it from a national park that has a pika research program. However, this rationale only justifies buying a couple of your favorite weird species. I can’t imagine ever buying more than that.
Yeah, and it wasn’t just that the animals were interesting (a Snow Leopard was one of their first!) – they really were well designed. As wild and maybe foolish as the craze seems in retrospect, they still carry their value as being a cute fun toy.
i have a friend that once gave me a stuffed malaria germ.
Well I guess they were better than Cabbage Patch Kids but not by a heck of a lot…
I totally collected back in the day, but I don’t think I spent more than $20 in today’s currency on a single one – and not very often since I used my allowance mostly on Legos. My collection numbered a couple dozen I guess? The bears were my favorite. I still have a couple of them, and they’re really cute! I like ‘em. If anyone gave me one as a gift it would totally be a pick-me-up. No different from any other plushie gift, IMO. It was fun talking about it with my friends at school, who also collected, and a real trip to look at the “values” of certain rare ones. I’m excited for this docu.
Beanie babies and furbies are the two really big fad toys that I remember, with Beanie babies hitting a few years before the Furby. My cousin, who was definitely not a little kid at the time, was into Beanie Babies and would say things like, “It’s going to be so valuable some day!” and “They’re an investment.” Meanwhile, I’m rolling my eyes because c’mon. Inexplicably, she has held onto them into her 40s. They’re just sitting in a bag, virtually worthless.The year that Furbies came out, my school sold raffle tickets for charity, with three winners getting Furbies. They were impossible to find. By some fluke I won the damn thing. Naturally, my inclination as an 18-year-old with no money is to sell the thing to some fool who is willing to pay $300+ for it so their kid’s Christmas wasn’t ruined by not having one. I didn’t give two shits about a Furby—I found them creepy and uncanny—and I could have used that money to buy Christmas presents for my family that year, being a broke college student. I brought it home that night and before I could announce my intention to sell it, my little sister (who was a teenager, mind you) went nuts for it and demanded we keep it. She paid attention to it for maybe two weeks, then it sat on her shelf for years, mocking me.
Doctor WhoooooooOIThe Twardus
I used to know a guy who smuggled Beanies from Canada. He’d said there were some that were released in Canada only and weren’t allowed to be shipped to the US. He made a ton of money with the Beanies. Then, he lost it all with his new found gambling addiction. Seriously, he became addicted to the illegal gambling games in the bar (NY).