It is, alas, time for the last Kim Justice video of 2017. But I do have a bit of a doozy to finish on, something that takes us out of the world of games for a bit and into the world of toys! And not just any toyhs -- a craze that sent fully grown adults mad with the thoughts of making fast money, driving them to blockade gift shops, quit their jobs, amass thousands of the little blighters and even in one case, commit murder. I am of course, talking about the Beanie Babies -- and you can see the video here.

There are so many interesting parts to this story: The origin of the Beanies themselves, a product of Ty Warner -- a man who is something of a mess in tis personal life but is the undisputed god of both creating and selling plushies -- is just one branch. Then you have the simple bit of psychology that turned Beanies into a phenomenon, the fact that Beanies dovetailed very nicely with the DotCom bubble and were a major factor in the survival of eBay in it's first few years, and of course the darker stories from the time. There was once a period where folks were almost speculating on a Beanie Baby market, treating as if it were stocks, thinking that it was all going to last forever...

...But of course, it did not -- the bubble burst around the turn of the millennium, leaving lord knows how many people with hundreds, if not thousands, of worthless plushies that were once meant to pay for a child's college education with no choice but to leave them wilting away in a shed. And where were the kids in all of this, the people who these understuffed toys were ostensibly designed for, as opposed to the soccer moms and dads who pounced upon them so relentlessly?...good question. One that the video hopes to answer -- enjoy it, and Kim Justice programming will return in 2018. 

• kim justice
• documentary
• beanie babies
• ty warner