How Santa Barbara Billionaire Ty Warner Waged One-Sided Class Warfare Against 450 Workers

OPPENBARBIE VS. BEANIE BABY MOGUL: I haven’t got around to seeing Barbie yet. I worry about gamma radiation exposure from all that pulsating pink. Instead, I went to see The Beanie Bubble — a less-than-epic cinematic experience about Beanie Baby mogul Ty Warner and three women he exploited, betrayed, and otherwise screwed over as he climbed to the top on their well-trod backs. 

For Santa Barbara — where Warner lives and does much business — it’s your basic local-billionaire-makes-bad genre. Spoiler alert: Each of the three women finds success and happiness after telling Warner — played as a megalomaniacal, micromanaging, back-stabbing, control-freak genius endowed with a too-eager-to-please manipulative man-child charm by a criminally miscast Zach Galifianakis — to pound sand as they walk out the door and into the sunset of destiny.

You can watch it at home on Apple TV+, but I preferred to see it up close and personal at the Hitchcock Cinema. It turns out everyone who watches it in theaters gets a free Beanie Baby, courtesy of Ty Warner himself. Back in the ’90s — during the speculative peak of the Beanie Baby day-trading craze — such a creature might have fetched as much as $10,000.