Barney toys near me9/26/2023 He had envisioned a “fun, wisecracking” Barney, inspired by Bruce Willis’s character in “Moonlighting.” Leach had other ideas. “They’re monsters, they’re vicious-a high-stakes life style.” Leach didn’t want Barney to have sharp teeth-or, the original head writer says, too much personality. “Kids of all ages are fascinated with dinosaurs,” Bill Nye, a fellow PBS veteran, tells us, waving his hands around. Leach considered focussing on a Teddy bear, but Patrick loved dinosaurs. One of the rare videos to hold his attention was “Wee Sing Together,” which combined group singing with an anthropomorphic mouse and bear, and Leach wanted to create something similar, with educational elements, “tailor-made for the preschool audience.” In an old interview, Leach says, “I didn’t have a background in video at all, but I thought, you know, How hard can it be?” Her father-in-law’s company had a production studio, and soon they were making a show. In 1986, the Leaches had a son, Patrick, who became a “very active” two-year-old. “I’m from a Christian background, and we kept the same moral code.” Leach taught school for several years before working at a family-run company, Developmental Learning Materials, where she met her husband. (Leach declined to participate in the documentary we get to know her and her family through archival footage and others’ descriptions.) “I went to high school with Sheryl,” a friend says. The character was created in 1988, in a Dallas suburb, by Sheryl Leach, who’d grown up in the area. “I Love You, You Hate Me” shows that Barney’s creators meant well. He did not, I now realize-his eyes and mouth moved-but immobility was the effect, because that grin wasn’t going anywhere. I was in college during Barney’s rise to power, and in my memory, Barney, unlike Big Bird and other expressive, sensitive Muppets of my youth, had a completely immobile face, like a sports mascot. The whole enterprise leads with safety and didacticism while insisting it’s having fun. (“ Daddy! Daddy! Let’s wash the car! Daddy! Daddy! And jog really far!”) Barney’s signature hit, “I Love You,” conveys the essence of the show’s approach, from the values-focussed lyrics (“I love you / you love me / we’re a happy fam-i-ly”) to the pacing (plodding, joyless) to the melody (“This Old Man,” robbed of its knick-knack-paddywhack zing). In one episode, they jump rope while chanting about chores, as most kids do. The dinosaur and the kids-a diverse group of youngsters, brimming with forced cheer-sing strenuously wholesome songs and dance in awkward syncopation. Lest we doubt this, the show’s snappily militaristic theme song, a dulled-down riff on “Yankee Doodle,” sung by children, spells it out: “Barney is a dinosaur / from our imagination,” and so on. In it, a bunch of peppy children hang out at what appears to be an abandoned nursery school, and in later seasons, a park, unsupervised except for a six-foot dinosaur the dinosaur is the authority figure, yet the children have made him up. “Barney & Friends” ran on PBS from 1992 to 2010. “And so let the bashing begin!” Don’t mind if I do. “People couldn’t accept that this was just a show, that it talked about nice things and nice emotions and love and caring,” Al Roker says, frowning on a sofa. (“It’s believed the Pentagon forced prisoners at Gitmo to listen to ‘Barney’ for twenty-four straight hours,” a newscaster adds.) The documentary purports to examine our collective impulse to hate, but it also wants to spill some beans-to reflect, gawk, shudder, and heal-and, in true “Barney” spirit, it pursues its mission while resisting nuance. “I got dismemberment-of-my-family e-mails because of my music,” the show’s music director, Bob Singleton, says. Directed by Tommy Avallone, the series takes a “Behind the Music”-style approach to the “Barney & Friends” phenomenon, juxtaposing the show’s wholesomeness and wild popularity with end-of-innocence stunners. What made Barney, the purple dinosaur and nineties kids’-TV sensation, so infuriatingly loathsome? Was it his doofy voice and inane giggle, coming at you like a low-watt Pillsbury Doughboy? His menacing rictus and unnerving hat-band strip of teeth? His shameless abuse of nursery rhymes? His indifference to the anxious smiles on his young friends’ faces as they all danced in lockstep to “Indoor-Outdoor Voices”? The short answer is yes, it is all those things, and, as a result, he and his show inspired an acute degree of animosity a new two-episode docuseries from Peacock, “I Love You, You Hate Me,” dares to investigate. Photograph by Vinnie Zuffante / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty The new documentary “I Love You, You Hate Me” uses Barney to examine a broader phenomenon.
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