Doc Watch: Beanie Mania (2021)

Watched:  01/01/2021

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Yemisi Brookes

Hoo-boy.  I think I have more to say about the topics covered in Beanie Mania (2021) than I have to say about the film itself.  

But, so.  

Beanie Mania covers the 1990's Beanie Baby fad and tulip-like frenzy around the little doorstops that became an obsession with some people at the time.  There are interviews with people who were Beanie celebrities, former employees of Ty (the company that made the bean bags), with distributors and a last, passing glance at how YouTubers are maybe reviving Beanie Mania.  

It collects news stories and people who were there at the time are remarkably candid about what they did and why and what was happening.  And many of them are still in the Beanie Business, which is still a thing, I guess (look, eBay has taught us secondary markets are there for *everything*).  There's no gory murders of sex scandals, but it is fascinating to remember that this really was a nation-wide obsession for a minute there, and that it really tapped into so many parts of how we can project our hopes and dreams into something as ridiculous as a bean bag made to look like a frog.

Here's what I knew at the time:  the market around Beanie Babies was not being driven by children, it was being driven by adults who had never seen actual speculation on a collectible before (somehow the press never quite grokked this).  And these same enthusiasts maybe couldn't afford to play the stock market, but could invest $10 in a toy flamingo in the hopes it would be worth far more to someone else.  It may have been a more respectable crowd than the folks who lost their shirts speculating on comics in the 1990's, but that cratered just prior to Beanie Babies, and both had seemed absurd when they were happening.

Sometimes the manufacturer leans into the collectability, sometimes they do not.  Ty did, and among other questionable moves, it meant chaos in the market and for people who had helped make his goofy little product a sensation.

Of course, there are charlatans people who will always tell you that you stand to do nothing but make money investing in the thing, but you also need to buy their guide for how to do this properly.  And they seem like very nice suburbanites.  And I don't blame them at all.  I think they believed what they were saying, to a point - even as they smile awkwardly at the camera now.

I may have followed comics collecting and speculation for about 35 years now, and even as a 20-something, I took one look at the Beanie Babies and thought "these people are crazy and will go bankrupt".  There's a way these things do and do not work and it's not that hard to spot once you've seen it happen once, from Beanie Babies to comics to speculation in real estate.  

Indeed, deep credit card debt and other financial difficulties can Beanie-mount, and I would have appreciated had the producers done some math or been more willing to dig deeper into what financially actually happened to some of the subjects.  Some of these folks' falls were highly avoidable.  Others seem more like a victim of the mounting bad business practices of the actual Ty Warner, the Ty behind Ty toys, suddenly losing everything when Ty pivoted how we wanted to work with distributors.  There are lessons to be gleaned and not saying specifically what occurred to people doesn't help.  Because the doc kind of wants to still sell the idea that *someone* who was clever enough is still making money on all this, and newly interested folks maybe could, too..?

Anyway, it's a good, quick watch where you will want to pause and talk trash about the players.  Because collectors are weird people (he said, taking a long, long look in the mirror).  But, yeah, when you hear The Beanie Rap, you will know you've found a truly great doc.  Or The father/ daughter team that appears in last 1/3rd that will make you have SO. MANY. QUESTIONS.

I don't know if this is a hard recommend, except that I'm currently watching the NFT market and thinking:  a bunch of people are going to realize they spent 10's of $1000's on a hyperlink at some point, and - like a Beanie Baby, if no one is there to buy that Beanie Baby/ NFT, at that point, it's worth whatever someone will pay for it (nothing.  They will pay nothing for that link you own to a cartoon doodle of a monkey).

Did I have Beanie Babies?  My dude, everyone had a Beanie Baby.  I didn't buy one, but a few showed up as gifts at various times.  I also remember staring in wonder that there was a cart in the mall I worked at in 1997 that only dealt in Beanie Babies, both new and collectible.  The guy who ran it told me that the owners were crazy rich people and never checked up on him, but he sat there day in and day out, and business was good.  I am pretty sure he was skimming.  I am also pretty sure people were stealing Beanies off the side of the cart he couldn't see.

Maybe most chilling is watching the end as good natured 30 year olds find their parent's storage boxes of Beanie Babies and - because young people's brains are mush - the YouTubers are convincing their audience that these Beanies are worth cash money.  So it's possible this all starts all over again.  

I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of "but what even is money?" but I'll just say now:  do not spend more than $5 on a Beanie Baby.  Ever.  Go to Thrifttown - because that's where people have been dumping their collections since 2005, I assure you.