Beanie Babies and Betrayal Prevail in ‘The Beanie Bubble’ Trailer
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The Beanie Baby empire is stuffed until it pops in the first official trailer for The Beanie Bubble, premiering on Apple TV+ on July 28. The film isn’t some twisted live-action imagining of the stuffed plushies that ruled the mid- to late-nineties, especially on the internet — it’s an over-the-top, dramatized portrait of the salesman Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis) who launched the toy craze and the three women he betrayed to making himself a billionaire.
“You have the power to create your own future,” Warner amps up in the trailer. “You can be anything. You can do anything.” The motivational speech would land harder if it was backing up some kind of real-life breakthrough about self-worth or something, but here he applies it to a business pitch to sell intentionally under-stuffed stuffed animals.
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Sitting beside Warner in that pitch meeting is Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), one of those three women who helped build his empire but were never properly credited for it. “Ty would tell you he did it all,” she says in the clip. “Which is as crazy as believing stuffed animals are gold.”
The Beanie Bubble is based Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: The Amazing Story of How America Lost Its Mind Over a Plush Toy — and the Eccentric Genius Behind It. OK Go’s Damian Kulash and his wife, Kristin Gore, daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, co-directed the film. It also stars Sarah Snook and Geraldine Viswanathan.
“It was one of the biggest, most absurd speculative crazes in American history,” Gore recently told Rolling Stone. “The fact that it involved these little five-dollar bean-bag animals that people treated like gold for three years was insane. It came about because it coincided with eBay and the rise of the Internet.”
She added: “It was more a fun opportunity for us to tell a story about what America values. We talk about it as being a funeral for the American dream, but a New Orleans-style parade through the French Quarter. That’s the feeling it has, since our cast is so fantastic. We want to understand for ourselves how we got to where we are now.”
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