The tone of anti-Barney humor was hostile, even violent, in a way that had never been seen before-or since. Barney-alikes were screamed at by Robin Williams in Death to Smoochy and lampooned (and harpooned) in Mafia! In 1993, Charles Barkley took Barney on in a brutal game of one on one for Saturday Night Live the crowd went wild at every elbow to Barney’s face. But mostly, “anti-Barney humor” involved watching some copyright-skirting Barney stand-in get the stuffing kicked out of him.Īnimaniacs dropped anvils on “ Baloney the Dinosaur.” On ABC’s Dinosaurs, “real” dino dad Earl whaled on a hippo host named Georgie. There were the usual punch lines from the drive-time DJs and late-night hosts, and there was the immortalizing spoof on The Simpsons. “ Anti-Barney humor” was so widespread, it was practically its own form of comedy. Adults-and just about everyone over the age of five-had turned not liking Barney into a cultural movement. When adults say they dislike Barney, Franklin told the Hartford Courant, “in a way, we take that as a compliment.”īy the end of the nineties, Franklin must have been feeling really flattered indeed. Jerry Franklin, who had helped develop Barney’s show for PBS, was even more blunt. “We really don’t care whether the adults are going to be entertained,” Leach told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. They decried the saccharine world Barney lorded over, where every problem could be waved away with a song-songs that proved so cloying, by the way, that interrogators at Guantanamo used them to torture Iraqi prisoners. They blasted Barney for being insipid, irritating, and even dangerous. Barney’s sudden ubiquity seemed inexplicable, especially to parents, who despised his dopey demeanor, his reflexive giggling, and his inane exclamations of “Super-dee-duper!” The critics didn’t get it either. In January, he waved from Bill Clinton’s inaugural parade. By that Christmas, stores couldn’t keep Barney dolls in stock. Barney embarked on a tour of shopping malls that drew thousands of toddler acolytes. When Barney & Friends debuted on PBS on April 6, 1992, it was an immediate hit, in a way that the modest regional success of the earliest, straight-to-video Barney specials-backed by Leach’s father-in-law and filmed in the Dallas suburb of Allen from 1988 to 1991-certainly never predicted. ( We love you? Really?) Whatever the reason, what Barney got in return was our hate. Maybe it was his desperate need for validation. “Won’t you say you love me too?”īut we didn’t love Barney. Barney preached-gently, secularly-on the value of friendship. His dinosaur maw had been capped in a blindingly white smile that would have made Tony Robbins jealous. His bulbous, spongy body was made for hugs. From the moment former Dallas schoolteacher Sheryl Leach breathed him into life, the purple Tyrannosaurus rex was a reptile of exceptional warmth.
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