Coupe
Well-Known Member
I have realized that lately I've become nostalgic about Beanie Babies...the ones I grew up with as a kid in the 90s and 2000s. As I've said probably more than once at this point, the newer "Beanie Boos" are kinda cute - I have a few of the more realistic and fuzzy ones, in fact. 
But I miss the way Beanie Babies used to be designed - when they were all floppy with mostly plastic beans rather than stuffing, when they were softer and their designs were more simplistic in a charming way.
My first Beanie Babies, as I recall, were actually Teenie Beanie Babies from McDonalds. They were a lizard named Lizzy and a lamb named Chops, but I can't remember which of the two I got first. I loved them right away, and I remember stimming with Lizzy a lot after I got her. I really got into Beanie Babies a couple of years later when I was about six. I was especially fond of the dog ones, like Nanook, Dobie, Red Rover, Tracker and Luke. When I wanted to watch TV, I would place throw pillows in front of the TV and line my favorite BBs up along them so they could watch too. Sometimes they even watched me have a bath.
The fact that other collectors (even kids my age) were absorbed in buying as many BBs as they could just to sell them for a higher profit sometime in the future largely escaped my notice as a kid, and I wouldn't have understood the concept even if I was aware of it. The first thing I did as soon as I got a Beanie Baby was remove the heart-shaped tag, for sensory reasons and because it seemed to me that it must have hurt the poor things to have tags attached. My Beanie Babies were as "real" to me as anything, and I simply couldn't imagine selling them to strangers.
Even as an adult, I still love Beanie Babies and stuffed animals in general - especially Disney Tsum Tsums, which kind of remind me of Beanie Babies, in a way. Lately I've been trawling Ebay for BBs I remember having as a kid. It's like welcoming old friends home. The funny thing, though, is that my very favorite, most loved bean bag plush that I've had longer than the others, has been one of my main comfort items/stim toys for years, and would be devastated to lose.....isn't even a real, honest-to-goodness Beanie Baby. It's a dolphin bean bag made by an obscure toy company called Imperial Toy Corp.
....So, now that I've waxed poetic about how attached I've always been to my little bean-filled friends, has anyone else ever been really interested in/attached to Beanie Babies? Was there a particular kind of animal you liked, or did you have favorites? Were there ones that you took everywhere with you?
But I miss the way Beanie Babies used to be designed - when they were all floppy with mostly plastic beans rather than stuffing, when they were softer and their designs were more simplistic in a charming way. My first Beanie Babies, as I recall, were actually Teenie Beanie Babies from McDonalds. They were a lizard named Lizzy and a lamb named Chops, but I can't remember which of the two I got first. I loved them right away, and I remember stimming with Lizzy a lot after I got her. I really got into Beanie Babies a couple of years later when I was about six. I was especially fond of the dog ones, like Nanook, Dobie, Red Rover, Tracker and Luke. When I wanted to watch TV, I would place throw pillows in front of the TV and line my favorite BBs up along them so they could watch too. Sometimes they even watched me have a bath.
The fact that other collectors (even kids my age) were absorbed in buying as many BBs as they could just to sell them for a higher profit sometime in the future largely escaped my notice as a kid, and I wouldn't have understood the concept even if I was aware of it. The first thing I did as soon as I got a Beanie Baby was remove the heart-shaped tag, for sensory reasons and because it seemed to me that it must have hurt the poor things to have tags attached. My Beanie Babies were as "real" to me as anything, and I simply couldn't imagine selling them to strangers.
Even as an adult, I still love Beanie Babies and stuffed animals in general - especially Disney Tsum Tsums, which kind of remind me of Beanie Babies, in a way. Lately I've been trawling Ebay for BBs I remember having as a kid. It's like welcoming old friends home.
The funny thing, though, is that my very favorite, most loved bean bag plush that I've had longer than the others, has been one of my main comfort items/stim toys for years, and would be devastated to lose.....isn't even a real, honest-to-goodness Beanie Baby. It's a dolphin bean bag made by an obscure toy company called Imperial Toy Corp. ....So, now that I've waxed poetic about how attached I've always been to my little bean-filled friends, has anyone else ever been really interested in/attached to Beanie Babies? Was there a particular kind of animal you liked, or did you have favorites? Were there ones that you took everywhere with you?
