Since I work from home, I tend to turn on documentaries as background noise. Sometimes they are true crime documentaries but usually I pick something where I’m already familiar with the subject. That way I can easily pick the thread back up if I can’t listen too closely. Unfortunately, I am all too familiar with the Beanie Baby craze.

Beanie Mania is the story of Beanie Babies as told by collectors and former Ty employees. The bean-filled animals went from another plushie in the store to an absolute frenzy where adults would travel to neighboring states just to get a particular doll. Yes, it was as crazy as it sounds.

Like most people in the 1990s, I owned Beanie Babies. I wouldn’t say I was an avid collector but I did have most of the cats before they went out of fashion. Then, toward the end of the craze, I worked at a store that sold them. I never had to deal with adults calling every day looking for certain dolls or people getting too out of hand in the store. So I was definitely interested in seeing what the documentary had to say about how everything went down.

Sadly for me, the movie didn’t reveal any new information. Since the documentarians were unable to get an interview with Ty Warner himself, they had to rely on stories from the more widely known collectors. The people who started websites or wrote books about the dolls. If you lived through that time and were lucky enough to have access to the internet (the internet was still pretty young at the time), you probably knew these people or read all of this material already. That means the target audience must be young adults, right?

Well, my 19-year old daughter watched part of Beanie Mania with me. I think she got bored of it because she left about 2/3 of the way through the movie. She didn’t even stay long enough to see the only person she would know (Colleen Ballinger, also known as Miranda Sings on YouTube). To be honest, my daughter liked the McMillions documentary about the big McDonald Monopoly game scandal. Beanie Mania just didn’t have an oomph to it.

If you are thinking about watching it, do it for the nostalgia factor. Especially if you are already familiar with Beanie Babies. However, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you might find it interesting. Just be prepared to turn it off halfway through if get bored. I really wish the documentarians were able to find more interesting people to talk to. Or at least find some more dirt to talk about. The scandals are what makes people stay til the end.