There’s a new documentary streaming on Peacock about Barney the purple dinosaur. I show up in the 47th minute, sounding a little insane.
I’m babbling something about how Barney speaks to children on a frequency adults can’t hear. The clip is taken from an interview I did in 1993 with CBS News and, in my defense, I was speaking metaphorically.
In February of 1993, I’d written what might have been one of the first anti-Barney screeds, an essay in The Post’s (late, lamented) Outlook section about how my 18-month-old daughter, Gwyn, was smitten by the saccharine, twinkle-toed, aubergine dinosaur and how left out I felt. The headline was “Barney Beware.”
The essay went as viral as things could in those barely digital days. Bill Geist and a CBS camera crew came to my house and trained a video camera on Gwyn as she watched “Barney & Friends” and sucked on her fingers. I was interviewed by the BBC. For the next few weeks, The Post’s Free for All page featured letters from readers in support or opposition to my viewpoint.
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It was kind of fun being briefly famous.
Eventually, Gwyn outgrew her Barney phase, and I forgot about him. This documentary — “I Love You, You Hate Me” — brought it all back.
All of it and more. Somehow I’d missed how curdled and violent the Barney backlash became in the years that followed. There were anti-Barney newsletters and video games and Nuremberg-style rallies. (Well, stupid college gatherings.)
The two-part documentary is full of literal Barney bashing, not just people swinging bats at Barney piñatas but — because this is America — people firing handguns into plush purple dinosaur toys. There is no Barney-on-Barney violence, but there is San Diego Chicken-on-Barney violence. (An interesting First Amendment case, actually.)
I won’t spoil the documentary’s various VH1 “Behind the Music”-style revelations, but suffice it to say that a lot of sadness seemed to cling to a show that was meant to make kids happy.
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“I Love You, You Hate Me” made me feel bad about my small role in the anti-Barney industrial complex. The documentary posits a unified field theory of fin de siècle snark, where the nascent internet and the cynical sarcasm of David Letterman combined to form a bitter brew.
I think that’s true, to a point. What the filmmakers don’t do is examine whether “Barney & Friends” was any good to begin with. They mention Barney in the same breath as Mr. Rogers, Big Bird and Kermit, without trying to understand why those characters didn’t receive the same level of abuse.
When I was searching the web for my 1993 Outlook essay, I came across something I wrote six years later that I’d totally forgotten about. In 1998, I reviewed “Barney’s Great Adventure,” His Purpleness’s leap to the big screen.
I wrote: “My problem with Barney has always been that for a show supposedly all about imagination, it isn’t that imaginative. Kids are capable of much more interesting flights of fancy than those illustrated on the morning TV program. ‘Let’s imagine,’ Barney says, and then he proceeds to plank out the most pedestrian of fantasies.”
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But maybe that’s elitist. I wouldn’t blame the creator of Barney — a woman from Texas named Sheryl Leach — for thinking coastal elites had it in for her hoary, homespun T. rex. Not everything has to be a double-entendre. Barney was barely capable of half an entendre.
There I go again.
The documentary did make me question my knee-jerk reaction to the show and to things like it. I don’t think watching “Barney & Friends” — or any TV show — was going to make my daughter a better person. I don’t think me watching Barney with my daughter was ever going to make me a better person.
But perhaps examining my reaction to the show — and to other things like it — just might.
See you soon
I’m taking some time off. I should be back in this space on Oct. 31.
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