“The Beanie Bubble,” the new Apple TV+ movie tracing the rise and bottoming out of the market of small stuffed animals, opens with a disclaimer: “There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest, we did.”
Naturally, we wondered: Which parts are fact and what parts have been embellished?
“The substance of (the film) is real, but the last thing we wanted to do was to claim that this is a documentary,” says Damian Kulash, who co-directed with his wife, Kristin Gore. What they found interesting was the erroneous assumption that "a $5 bean bag, mass produced in Asia, is suddenly worth its weight in gold at a distance, that's sort of a crazy thing to think.”
It’s does sound crazy to recount the 1990s Beanie boom, when the world became obsessed with collecting the under-stuffed plush toys. Ty Inc.’s strategy of "retiring" Beanie Babies created scarcity, and most believed their value would only increase over time. But screenwriter Gore had more than Beanie fever to work with.
Here’s how the movie (streaming Friday) compares to the stranger-than-fiction tale.
Sadly, not $500,000:How much is the Princess Diana Beanie Baby worth?
The movie is based on Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 deep-dive “The Great Beanie Baby Bubble.” Ty Inc.'s billionaire founder H. Ty Warner, now 78, declined to be interviewed for the book, but warned Bissonnette "the Beanie Baby thing is a lot of good and a lot of bad, and a lot of nice and a lot of not so...
Images of the Whitegate fuel protests earlier this month were altered to make it appear gardaí were violent towards protesters. The AI-doctored images were shared widely online, including by inter...