The CGI Barney has giant eyes and sucked in cheeks and of course people are complaining about it. It’s presumably to appeal to millennial parents who grew up with the purple dinosaur and want to introduce him to their kids. Mattel recently announced that Barney is getting an animated reboot, complete with a makeover. The cast and creator, Sheryl Leach, got so much hate for their show that a documentary was released about it last year, called I Love You, You Hate Me, a play on Barney’s I Love You, You Love Me theme song. ( Calliou was similarly not welcome in our house.) Barney is a polarizing figure due to how annoying he can be, although the intention was of course pure. My son is now 18 so this show was around when he was little, but we didn’t watch it even once. Honestly I found Barney cloying even in small doses. Barney is of course a big purple anthropomorphic dinosaur that talks in a goofy voice and sings and dances while teaching lessons to children. PBS Kids show Barney & Friends aired from 1992 to around 2010, although it’s heyday was in the mid to late 90s. Here's a new look at the purple dinosaur below /qV3VIUShRn “I Love You, You Hate Me” premieres October 12 on Peacock.Mattel just announced its relaunch of the Barney franchise. But while the project captures a very specific moment in time, it runs out of insight before its time is up. “I Love You, You Hate Me” has already generated media attention for Peacock, so score it as a win by that measure. There are also rather arbitrary voices brought into the mix, such as NBC’s Al Roker, which merely underscores that the list of people with something profound to share about Barney, which was canceled in 2010, is relatively short. Sure, the Barney bashing (such as an incident with the famous San Diego Chicken) sailed into the ridiculous, but what that says America during those years doesn’t necessarily represent any kind of a straight line. It’s a reasonable point at first, but one the documentary overplays, especially when there’s so much odd, specific stuff about the show to mine here. Still, “I Love You” really wants to emphasize the vitriol flung at Barney – the “You Hate Me” part – as evidence of a nasty turn in the culture during those years, from the snarky attitude embodied by David Letterman to the daily fistfights on Jerry Springer’s talk show. There are other strange details in director Tommy Avallone’s film, like how the original actor inside the Barney suit, David Joyner, found a too-good-to-be-true (for media purposes, anyway) second career as a tantric massage therapist and healer, a practice that included, by his admission, sleeping with at least some of his clients. “All that success came at a price,” says Andrew Olsen, a devotee of “Barney” history and its memorabilia. But the popularity of Barney exacted an almost Shakespearean toll on her family, including her son, Patrick, who, it’s suggested, suffered for growing up in the shadow of a felt-covered “sibling” whose fame eclipsed him. The show also “hit a nerve at the dawn of the social-media era,” as Bob West, the original voice of Barney, observes, with music director Bob Singleton noting that material tailored to a three year old “will drive a grownup crazy.”īy tapping into an under-served, fresh-out-of-diapers demographic, Leach became fabulously wealthy, eventually selling the company for $275 million. Yet the two-part documentary is also the soapy story of the creator and her family, which ends up eclipsing the overreaching impulse to connect the purple dinosaur to something more culturally profound.Ĭonceived by Sheryl Leach, a resident of Allen, Texas, in 1988, “Barney” became an instant favorite among toddlers, in part because of its simple repetition and cheerfully cut-rate production values. Aside from planting that song in everyone’s head (again), “I Love You, You Hate Me” is an amusing look back at the “Barney & Friends” phenomenon, and the over-the-top torrents of hostility the PBS children’s show elicited.
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