America, it’s said in the film, is “the land of comebacks and second chances.” Here, that means an excuse for betray one woman after another. It’s the same story for the Beanie craze, and, as the film notes in a montage, countless other bubbles that have come and gone. Robbie, Sheila and Maya all follow the same arc: Initial infatuation followed by the harsher onset of reality. But it also makes a compelling reflection of history repeating itself. (Warner was convicted of tax evasion in 2013.) In mixing up the Beanie Baby timeline to play out each storyline simultaneously, The Beanie Bubble needlessly complicates itself. The script, by Gore, comes from Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 book, The Great Beanie Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute. hire who presciently leads the company’s lucrative dive into the internet yet is kept on an hourly wage. And there’s Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), a young Ty Inc. There’s Sheila (Sarah Snook), a single mother of two who’s initially won over by Warner’s charisma and playfulness with her children, only to eventually discover a warped, immature side to him. co-founder who finds herself pushed out once success arrives. There’s Banks’ Robbie, a friend and Ty Inc. “We didn’t set out to make America lose its mind, but that’s what happened,” says Warner’s business partner Robbie (Elizabeth Banks). With a softer, under-stuffed design, limited editions to drive up demand and the help of the then-nascent online second-hand market of eBay, Beanie fever took hold before, a few years later, dissipating as fast as it began. Zach Galifianakis plays Ty Warner, the chief executive of Ty Inc., the maker of the stuffed animals that - thanks to a few ingenious innovations and lucky twists of fate - became, as one character says in the film, “little plush lotto tickets.” The Beanie Bubble, which lands on Apple TV+ Friday, may be part of a ‘20s trend but its interest is unpacking a late-20th century phenomenon and some of the women exploited along the way. It may not say entirely wonderful things about our capitalistic society that we’re pumping out big-screen movies and streaming-service content that exalts the stories behind snacks, sneaks and stuffies. We once debated the ethics of product placement in movies - now the product IS the movie.
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