Beyblade still baffles me
I was just slightly too old for Beyblade when it first entered my awareness in the early 2000s in the US. I remember being like 14 or 15 years old and thinking, "collectible battle tops?? what????" and dismissing them out of hand.
If you'd held a gun to my head and told me to guess which of the classic 90s-2000s collectible toy and card IPs would make it to the 2020s with a live fandom, I would never have guessed Beyblade. But it did.
I've been aware for a while that Beyblade has an active fandom that takes it seriously and discusses strategy and meta. This video on youtube is probably the first time I've seen a concise video that breaks down what Beyblade people are thinking about when they interact with these toys, and what they do when they made decisions about how to play:
Wild shit. It's so funny to think about how finely separated weird microgenerations of collectible toys and IPs were back in the 2000s and still today. I was still buying toys in 2001 at age 12, nearly 13... but by Christmas 2003 I was nearly 15, and I didn't think of myself as a person who would buy a toy. I would buy electronics, but not a toy.
I recommend looking at the years that you liked certain shit as a kid. It's wild to me how densely I formed memories from age 10-12, and how I experienced a few years of hyper-commercialized childhood as a long, long span of time that strongly characterized my interests and future decisions about life. It's funny to see how the span of 8 or 10 months made the difference when it came to the cultural phenomena I experienced. I've been in a lot of discussions over the last few years about how quickly it feels like youth culture is moving... but I don't actually think it's moving THAT much more quickly. Visual jokes and popular videos penetrate culture faster, but there were toy and product fads less than a year long back then, too. I'm sure that if I took a dive into my childhood bedroom's closet back in my parents' house, I could identify a few that I've forgotten.