Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Beanie Bubble’ on Apple TV+, a Frustratingly Fractured Story of A ‘90s Fad

The Beanie Bubble (now on Apple TV+) encompasses two current movie trends: 1990s nostalgia and hooray-for-the-brand biocomedies. This one’s the Saga of the Stuffie, dramatizing the origin of the Beanie Baby craze, directed by husband-wife Kristin Gore (offspring of Al and Tipper Gore) and Damien Kulash (singer for OK Go), with Zach Galifianakis playing creator Ty Warner, and co-starring Sarah Snook, Elizabeth Banks, and Geraldine Viswanathan as the three women he treated poorly on his way to becoming a billionaire. At least that’s how this treatment tells it – the movie opens with a title card reading, “There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest, we did,” so this BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie should very much be taken with a grain of salt.

THE BEANIE BUBBLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Meet Robbie (Banks), a former auto parts store clerk who co-founded toymaker Ty Inc., maker of Beanie Babies, alongside Ty Warner. Meet Sheila (Snook), mother of two daughters who helped Ty Warner design and name some of the first Beanie Babies. Meet Maya (Viswanathan), the Ty Inc. employee who led the company to great sales success on the internet, revolutionizing web commerce. Now we see brand logos willy-nilly all over the screen – the recognizable Ty heart, on cardboard boxes that happen to be flying out of a crashed semi. The boxes bust open and a purple monkey hurtles toward the camera; its fate remains unknown, but one assumes he was scooped up by a crazed passerby who assumed he was valuable because he was a Beanie Baby and then realized he wasn’t really worth squat and ultimately stashed him in the attic. THIS, as they say, is the wild and crazy story of Beanie Babies, baby.

But first, a flashback. It’s 1983. Robbie is miserable in her work jumpsuit, and in her marriage. She ends up hanging out with her neighbor Ty Warner, and one night over a few glasses of wine, they decide to start a stuffed-toy company and fall in love, perhaps not quite in that order, but these things tend to be a bit squishy, just like, I dunno, a cute little plushie platypus or something. Now it’s 1993, and Robbie heads out of the Ty office with a suitcase just as teenage Maya lands the receptionist job; she’s a college student whose parents really really really want her to be a doctor. It’s still 1993 as Sheila sits in Ty’s mansion, waiting for him to show up; she’s there to design his lighting, and he’s hours late. Later, he sends single-mom Sheila and her two daughters an I’m-sorry package full of stuffies.

From here, we jump between the mid-’80s and mid-’90s often enough to make our heads spin a little. Ty and Robbie sell plush Himalayan cats at trade shows and grow their humble little enterprise into a lucrative small business with a handful of employees; they also break up and make up a bunch of times, because Ty’s a philanderer. Ty and Sheila fall in love, in spite of her reluctance; he takes a real shine to her daughters, who suggest that maybe he should make smaller, softer stuffies, and he listens, because they’re kids, and therefore experts in these things. Ty and Maya park themselves at a trade show, where the smaller, softer stuffies, dubbed Beanie Babies, aren’t selling very well. He pushes her to use a little salesmanship, so she starts ad-libbing some BS about this Baby being “retired” and that one being “a special limited edition” – and the rest, as they say, is history, baby.

And we jump, jump, jump and jump some more through time as Ty and Robbie lay the foundation of the business, and Ty and Sheila and the girls design and name Beanies, and Maya innovates the business by showing Ty all about this newfangled thing known as the internet, where the Beanie Babies secondary market is exploding, with collectors convening in chat rooms and buying and selling their stuffies on this auction website called eBay. I know I’ve already mentioned the philanderer thing, but as these stories unfold and the Beanies become a billion-dollar media-fueled capitalist phenomenon, Ty’s quirks and idiosyncrasies – read: egregious personality flaws – come to light, including vanity, greed, childishness and jealousy. Not a nice guy, this Ty, and it’s only a matter of time until these three women in his life grow weary of being used and abused.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Tetris, Air and Flamin’ Hot, of course (what’s next? The Cabbage Patch Crisis? The World According to Furby? I Was a Teenage Tickle Me Elmo?). The inevitable dramatization of the Teeny Beanies/Happy Meal insanity brings to mind the immortal Mac and Me. And for a hews-closer-to-the-truth treatment of the Ty story, fire up the documentary Beanie Mania (on Max).

Performance Worth Watching: The core cast does pretty good work despite pretty average material. Snook and Viswanathan are the standouts, with the former’s earnestness and the latter’s lightly comic spiritedness giving the film some necessary depth of character.

Memorable Dialogue: At a trade show, Ty reveals the first inkling that he may be a sexist creep:

Ty: We don’t want fatties near the booth.

Robbie: Are you joking?

Ty: No. They sweat on the fur.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: OK, so that cutesy opening title card is a tad infuriating, a winking it’s-nonfiction-except-when-it’s-not cliche telling us not to take any of this seriously. And why would we? The movie is about a deeply flawed Wonka wannabe who made his billions selling frivolities that became a 1990s pop-cultural footnote. It’s utterly ridiculous; why does it need to be fictionalized? And by that token, should we take The Beanie Bubble’s light feminism seriously? Gore’s screenplay – based on Zac Bissonette’s book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute – frames Warner’s success as the result of ideas and hard work from three key women in his life, who he deceived and undervalued on his way to fame and fortune. While Maya innovates with her market analysis and Robbie makes inroads with international sales and Sheila lets him plunder his daughters’ “expertise,” Ty takes all the credit and puffs up his ego by being the subject of photo shoots and scheduling another facelift. The women are sturdy and reasonable while he pursues mercurial whims that seem to manifest out of nowhere.

Whether any of this is truly true or not is beside the point – Gore and Kulash’s goal here is to entertain us. Easier said than done when the screenplay is so very enamored with its own ambition and cleverness, tangling the three womens’ points-of-view and jumping through time with annoying frequency. And the filmmakers land on a bland comedio-dramatic tone that offers few significant laughs or revelations; it could’ve been amusingly flippant or soapy and poker-faced, but instead feels pseudo-serious, almost noncommittal. Is it satire? Is it original? Is it aiming for something bigger than the story of a greedy manchild and the women he exploits? No, no and no. Beyond being a somewhat cheeky, somewhat wearisome nostalgia piece – look at this flannel shirt, get a load of this hairdo, listen to this hit by INXS, etc. – it doesn’t seem like much of anything at all.

So it doesn’t really function as a portrait of a craze of capitalist culture (the Beanie Mania doc does an admirable job of that). It’s ostensibly a character-driven story, albeit one that stretches its characters a bit too thin – and that’s where the cast comes in to enliven the whole endeavor. Banks is a pro; post-Succession, Snook strikes me as a future Oscar nominee; Viswanathan seems ripe to anchor a prestige sitcom; Galifianakis summons a compelling combination of impenetrability, creepiness and off-putting vulnerability. Without their diligence, The Beanie Bubble might be unwatchable. Even with it, it’s frustratingly flimsy.

Our Call: Is The Beanie Bubble soft, floppy and full of fluff? Yeah. Sure. Why not. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.