Rescuing the Living Beanie Babies

We'd seen it on the news, I suppose. In order to counteract the Furby craze, the latest Beanie Babies would also be interactive. The company was bragging that their interactive fuzzy critters wouldn't be electronic; they'd be alive. The newest Beanie Babies were going to look just the same, but they'd have tiny animals sewn inside of them.

I was horrified, as were my (unidentifiable) friends. We all went to the Toys R Us in order to save the tiny animals. Nobody else planned for it, but I dressed in full urban commando gear -- khaki outfit, a million pockets with seam rippers and X-acto knives, and in the back of the car I had several big Rubbermaid tubs with towels at the bottom to keep the animals in.

When we got to Toys R Us, the shipment was in. It was horrible! A half aisle of Beanie Babies (smaller than normal, I think) mewling and struggling. The clerks were nowhere in sight. My friends suddenly realized they had no knives, but I passed out mine to them. We started cutting the Beanie Babies open, but it took us a long time, trying not to hurt the animals inside them.

Mine was a duckling, and when I finally cut it open, a tiny duck was inside it. It wasn't a baby duck, it was a full-grown duck, but tiny. My friends were finding the same kind of thing -- tiny, full-grown animals. There weren't that many different kinds -- inside a parrot Beanie, we'd still find a duck. Luckily, the Rubbermaid tubs had dividers. We put all the ducks in one part, all the cats in another, all the elephants in a third. They seemed to be feeling all right, after we cut them out.

The fur suits the animals were sewn into were odd. They were a cross between fake fur and spandex, and they were lined with a strange, sticky pink ooze that clung to the suit and to the animal. There were no orifices, so I don't know how the animals ate or eliminated. I had brought a camera, and took many pictures of the animals being removed.

About this time I had the revelation that this was the only batch of Beanies with animals included inside them, and that if we took care of these, there wouldn't be any more made. I'm not sure how I knew this, but it was true.

We still had a LOT of animals to rescue, so I left my friends there, cutting open the Beanies and throwing the fur outsides in a pile. There was plenty of room in the tubs, though.

I went to the action figure aisle and started cutting the large G.I. Joes out of their boxes. They gathered around me, and I explained the situation to them. I needed help rescuing the animals, and my hands were too big. I issued X-acto knife blades to the Joes and they promised to help.

They promptly ran off with the blades. I think they started freeing the other action figures on that aisle, although for what purpose I cannot guess. I felt disgusted and went back to the Beanie aisle and my friends.

When I returned to the Beanie aisle, it had changed greatly. There were many terraria, each with an appropriate substance lining the bottom (bark, dirt, moss or a towel) and with food dishes. The miniature elephants would trumpet occasionally, to be answered by the elephants still trapped. The aisle was almost empty of Beanies, and had turned into a storage room. The terraria were arranged carefully on a long table, under a warm light, but the rest of the room was dim. There was a large sink, as one would find in a laundry room. My friends were looking through a large box of tea bags. They had a graduated cylinder full of water, and were dropping some of the teabags in.

As it turned out, they ship Beanie Babies dehydrated and compressed, as a little sponge-like square in a package that dissolves. My friends had found the rest of the shipment, but couldn't tell which ones were normal and which ones were dehydrated living animals. Some of them wanted to just dump the whole shipment into the sink, then sort through the resulting Beanies to find the live ones. I convinced them that that would be a bad idea. The sudden expansion would knock everything over, and make it hard to find the live ones in a huge pile of Beanie Babies.

Instead, we dipped the packets in the cylinder one by one. Eventually, I noticed a pattern in which ones were normal and which ones were alive. I went through the box, discarding the normal ones and passing the live ones to my friends to reconstitute. Interestingly, the normal ones that were reconstituted were also filled with the odd pink plasm, as well as beans. The effect was much like frog eggs.

Some of the dehydrated Beanies were unique. The animals we'd been rescuing previously had been one of five or six different kinds, but some of these new animals were the only ones of their kind. Some of them we could put in with other miniature animals -- like the tiny rhinoceros in with the elephants, or the miniature cheetah with the miniature housecats (both were the same size). For the others, I took a Rubbermaid tub and made dividers for it out of cardboard, so it was divided into eight sections. One of the Beanies housed a squid, so we put that in a Mason jar for the time being.

It was late at night when we finally finished rescuing all the animals. We put all the terraria full of miniature animals in the van, then we turned on the water in the sink and threw all the normal dehydrated Beanies in. The building visibly strained to contain all the stuffed toys. It was neat.

We took the animals to someone's home. It might have been mine. I had made certain to save some of the Beanie husks, for evidence. We had a large basement, with many outlets, so we worked on setting up all the terraria so the animals were comfortable. We also had some small terraria for the unique animals.

I have vague recollections of the company apologizing, the media descending on us, and finding homes for the animals, but that was all very rushed. The night we saved the miniature animals is the part that sticks in my mind.