Zach Galifianakis And Elizabeth Banks Are Starring In A Movie About The Beanie Baby Craze

It’s been a while since there was a major toy fad, the kind that turned parents, desperate to please their kids, into psychotic maniacs. We’re talking the kind America saw in the mid-‘90s, when the nation was gripped with Beanie Baby mania. People couldn’t get enough of the line of otherwise unremarkable plush animals, which were like Care Bears only…not as fun. They didn’t even have their own TV show! What they did have was the newly popular internet, which helped turn them into a collect-them-all sensation. Indeed, they’re often cited as the information superhighway’s first craze, and their impact can still occasionally be felt.

The Beanie saga was recently recounted in the HBO Max doc Beanie Mania. But now we’re getting the narrative version, with actors and everything. As per The Hollywood Reporter, Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks have signed on for The Beanie Bubble, a movie for Apple based on Zac Bissonette’s book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute. The script will be penned by Kristin Gore, daughter of former vice president Al Gore and alum of shows like SNL and Futurama. Gore will co-direct the film with Damian Kulash, who’s both the lead singer of the band OK Go and director of many of their inventive, popular videos.

So if you weren’t alive when parents and non-parents alike lost their stuff over stuffed animals, you’ll finally get to see what it was like to live through times arguably stranger than now.