Stuff You Should Know
SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: Beanie Babies: Reigning Toy Craze Champion
12 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello again, guys. Up next on our playlist is our episode on Beanie Babies. They may have actually upstaged Cabbage Patch Kids because the craze for Beanie Babies stretched way beyond Christmas. There was a divorce case that saw the couple having to divide up their Beanie Babies on the floor of the courtroom. We talk about that, don't worry. Anyway, enjoy this episode on Beanie Babies.
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Chapter 2: What sparked the Beanie Babies craze in the 90s?
Right, exactly. But he did, he got into acting and it kind of, either he was already like a theater kid at heart or it turned him into a theater kid because he ended up taking that way of living or that way of looking at the world or being in the world with him essentially for the rest of his life. Yeah, he seemed fairly flamboyant. He was Flame Boy.
There's a really oft-cited story about him showing up when he became a salesman for the toy company that his father worked for. He would show up to these sales calls in a Rolls Royce wearing a floor-length fur coat and a cane and a hat. Amazing. Essentially like Kramer when he accidentally is wearing the Technicolor Dreamcoat and ends up with that big Jamiroquai hat and a cane. Yeah.
That's essentially what Ty Warner showed up to these sales meetings looking like in the early 60s. And apparently it worked because he said that his premise was if he showed up to a sales meeting looking like that, people would say, I want to see what's in that guy's briefcase. Yeah. Or do you? Yeah. It depends on the kind of party you're in for.
Yeah, he was a really good salesperson, apparently. He thought a lot of himself, though. And in 1980, he worked for this company, I guess, what, for like 18 years because he got the job in 1962. So that's a nice long run. But at least the way his former boss told it, a guy named Harold Nazamian,
who is the CEO, basically accused him of moonlighting on the company and using their sales list and his personal relationships with people as a salesperson to sell his own stuff while he was working as a sales manager for this company. And so he got fired. Yeah, on those sales calls, he would be like, yeah, I've got these great Dakin products, but also I want to show you these, too.
So he was not only using company contacts, he was using company time, too. It's about as bad a thing you can do as a salesman, essentially. Yeah. And it wasn't long after that that the Beanie Baby came along. No, that was, so it was 1980 when he lost the job. He apparently moved to Rome. He went to go visit some friends and ended up living there for a few years.
And when he came back, he was inspired to keep going in the toy industry. I guess it kind of got under his skin. And he'd seen some toy cats there in Rome, he said. And he was inspired to create not Beanie Babies at first, but his first plush toys, which was a line of cats laying down, pretty fluffy. They were fully stuffed, which is a big difference between them and Beanie Babies.
And then for every cat, there was a Himalayan version of it. And they were pretty cute little cats. But the thing that he did that I think really kind of helped sell these things, because they were like a modest success I've seen it described as, that he gave them names. They weren't just some stuffed cat. This was Smokey. This was Peaches. Like these cats were individuals.
They had an identity and that made them that much more lovable.
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Chapter 3: Who was Ty Warner and what was his role in Beanie Babies?
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My dad had a whole other life that we never knew about.
Like my mom started screaming my dad's name and I just heard one gunshot.
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Chapter 4: How did Ty Warner's marketing strategies influence Beanie Babies' success?
Hmm.
The one thing that cracked me up, though, was that when the movie came out and he kind of, which was just recently, I think this summer or last summer or whatever, he said, you know, I really wanted, I would have preferred somebody like Warren Beatty or Daniel Day-Lewis to have played me. I'm like, when this was going on, he was in his 40s. Warren Beatty is 89 years old. Yeah.
He's aged these things. Daniel Day-Lewis is 66. They're not even close in age. He's 23 years younger than Warren Beatty. Like, this guy's all over the place. Well, his thing with Daniel Day-Lewis is that he really did beat somebody to death with a bowling pin once, so he thought Daniel Day-Lewis could really bring that to life on screen like he did in There Will Be Blood. Oh, boy.
You got anything else? I got nothing else. Have you forgotten all the mean things I've said to you this episode? I don't even know what you're talking about. Great. Well, since Chuck doesn't know what I'm talking about, everybody, that means that it's time for Listener Mail. You know, we're going to forego Listener Mail this week.
It's late in the year.
And we would just like to remind everybody. We're going to say our official Christmas greetings on our Christmas episode. But we've got some great live shows coming up. Next year, we're doing our Pacific Northwest Swing. And as we do every year, almost every year, in Seattle, Portland. and San Francisco at Sketch Fest. And we went to some bigger theaters this time, in Seattle especially.
So we would love to see everybody and for you to fill those places up. Start 2024 off right. Just go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com and click on the tour page and buy tickets from legitimate sources. Please do not go to scalper sites. You might think it's the real site, but if the tickets are more than like 40 bucks or something, then it's not a real site.
Or if they want to be paid in gift cards, not a real ticket seller. That's right. But we hope to see everybody in January, late January. Absolutely. And in the meantime, everybody, if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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