'The Beanie Bubble' goes back to '90s Beanie Babies craze and the women pushed aside

In the name of nostalgic filmmaking, The Beanie Bubble on Apple TV+, starring Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook and Geraldine Viswanathan, take us back to the '90s Beanie Babies craze.

"There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest, we did," the film starts off by stating, to really get you into the mood of how directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash tackle this story.

What is 'The Beanie Bubble' about?

The Beanie Bubble is based on the book "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute” by Zac Bissonnette. The film not only strives to retell how the obsession with Beanie Babies evolved, but it's also commentary on capitalism and sexism in business.

The film begins by introducing us to three women.

Sheila (Snook) is a single mom of two daughters, the young girls who she says inspired the first Beanie Babies. Maya (Viswanathan) was a young employee, still in college, when she took at job at Ty Inc., and was instrumental in building the online market for Beanie Babies. Robbie (Banks) was Ty's partner in building his company and making Beanie Babies so coveted.

Of course, with the very real sexism that happens in the workplace, what all these women have in common is that they were, essentially, manipulated and duped by toy manufacturer and billionaire Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis). All these women were pushed aside as the company became increasingly more profitable.

“Ty was the one with his name on the tag. The one who made billions. Be he couldn’t have done it without the three of us. He didn’t do it without the three of us," we hear in a voiceover at the start of the film.

The Beanie Bubble begins in the 1980s, when Robbie and Ty first meet, with Robbie's original idea being that they should start a "stuffed Himalayan cat" business together.

The film jumps around between the '80s and '90s, but when we meet Sheila, who was originally hired as a lighting designer for Ty's home, that's when the development of Beanie Babies really begins. With Ty showing romantic interest in Sheila, slowly spending more time with her family, Sheila's young daughters really pushed the idea of smaller toys they could easy take around with them.

In the early 1990s, 17-year-old Maya walks into Ty Inc. looking for a temp job. She's quickly hired as a minimum-wage worker, but really becomes the brains behind making Beanie Babies a sensation. At a toy show, she comes up with the idea of "retirement" for "limited edition" Beanies, which instantly makes buyers interested in getting their hands on these toys before they're gone. Moving forward in the timeline, Maya is also responsible for introducing the internet to Ty and Ty Inc. executives, and really became responsible for Ty Inc. becoming a billion-dollar company, harnessing the power of e-commerce.

This all gets particular messy as Ty takes credit for all the work these women, and Sheila's daughters, did for Beanie Babies.

Is 'The Beanie Bubble' worth watching?

The Beanie Bubble has all the makings of a satisfying movie with an incredibly talented and funny cast, a nostalgic story, and similar capitalism analysis like other business-oriented films, including BlackBerry, Tetris or WeCrashed.

For this movie, we were left feeling like we wanted the story to dig deeper into Robbie, Sheila and Maya. While the film sets up that this story is largely going to be told from their perspective, it really does lean on Ty to move the narrative forward. We just wish we got to spend more time digging into the lives of these women, but in one movie, it's understandable that we wouldn't have enough time to really tap into each of these characters. Perhaps a series approach could have been a better fit.

But The Beanie Bubble is a great choice for a sort of easy, nostalgic summer watch. Galifianakis is positively hysterical as the narcissist Ty. Banks, Snook and Viswanathan portraying these different, but truly fascinating women, who were burned in the rise and fall of the Beanie business, make you really want to lean into the story.

If you lived through the '90s Beanie Babies obsession, The Beanie Bubble will give you that peak of joy and intrigue as you see the story behind some of the toys you'll certainly recognize, like the Princess Diana bear. If you're like us and you know there are massive bins full of Beanie Baby toys in your (or your parents) basement, there's certainly enough there to keep you interested.

What really happened to Beanie Babies and Ty Warner?

The general concept for Beanie Babies, which were released in 1993 at a price of US$5, were these intentionally under-stuffed toys for kids, and each toy came with a heart-shaped tag with a poem.

Beanie Babies essentially "died" in 1999 when it was announced that the toys were being "retired," which caused a frenzy of buyers scouring the internet to try to get their hands on anything missing in their collection.

The character Robbie in The Beanie Bubble was based on Patricia Roche, Ty Warner's partner in the Beanie business, and a romantic partner as well. It has been widely reported that Beanie Baby "Patti the Platypus" was named after Roche.

E-commerce pioneer Lina Trivedi is Maya in The Beanie Bubble, who was responsible for the poems that went on the Beanie Baby tags. Trivedi also created the website for Beanie Baby toys, the first time consumers could buy a product online directly from a company. She did in fact make US$12 an hour and left at the age of 25, after her request for a US$120,000 salary was rejected.

Sheila in the film is a version of Warner's parter Faith McGowan. She did in fact have two girls and was a lighting designer when she met Warner. It has been documented that McGowan's daughters inspired some of the toys.

"I remember the ghost was one that he kind of struggled with," Trivedi told Insider about the creation of "Spooky."

"I think that is accurate that Faith's daughter [Jenna Boldebuck] ended up kind of sketching how to create that design of the ghost so it can sit, so it works with the whole Beanie Baby design model."

Speaking to Chicago Magazine, McGowan's daughter Jenna Boldebuck said after her mother and Warner broke up, McGowan got an undisclosed "lump sum" on money, and the girls, who considered Warner their father, didn't get any financial support.

In 2013, Warner was arrested for tax evasion, hiding millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts. In 2015, a request made by federal prosecutors for jail time for Warner was rejected.

Going back to 2014, a federal district court judge in Chicago sentenced Warner to two years of probation and 500 hours of community service. Warner paid more than US$53 million in civil penalty.

"I never realized the biggest mistake of my life would cost me the respect of those closest to me," Warner said in a Chicago court in 2013.