“Barney & Friends” was a mainstay of daytime television, making a star out of the purple T. rex. But not everyone considered Barney a friend.
School-age kids added violent lyrics to the “Barney & Friends” theme song. NBA great Charles Barkley beat up Barney in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. Urban legends about the character's dark secrets sprung up. The internet gave rise to new genres of“Barney is on the receiving end of more hostility than just about any other popular cultural icon I can think of,” the University of Chicago academic W.J.T.
Thirty years after Barney first showed up on TV, however, West still believes that Barney's friends outnumber his haters.NBC News: I've read that you started working as a voice performer in the late 1970s. How exactly did you wind up voicing Barney?I started doing commercial work and narration in 1979 or so. I put together the world’s looniest demo tape. I had done some costumed character work. I worked as a robot character called The Blaster for a hospital in the Dallas area.
When you show up at a shopping mall in Hartford, Connecticut, and the sidewalks are lined with parents and strollers, and you get inside, where you expect 600 people but there’s 6,000, that’ll bring you to the present. [Laughs.] It’s a pretty good indication the love was strong.I have been online since way before most people accessed the internet. I had heard about some internet groups that were out there doing this role-play thing where they were fighting Barney because he was evil and such.
The specific motivation was growing up. The people who sent me those threats were all kids in middle school. They were doing the thing where they’re trying to throw off childhood and trying to be cool. I’m sure a lot of them were having emotional issues or maybe they were having trouble at home. There’s just no way to know.
It’s really part of growing up, although I have to say that we seem to have amplified that phase of life in the United States. I don’t recall that kind of backlash happening in other countries. We would go to Ireland or wherever, and there were kids in the audience who were 12 years old, singing along. I think there might be a cultural difference.I think we have this focus on, and sometimes an obsession with, rugged individualism. I won’t go into an analysis of John Locke or anything.
It’s easy to amplify the negative voices, and I think that we examine the negative feedback and call it what it is: somebody is reacting to innocence in a negative way, and we need to find out why. We need to talk about it. If we don’t, that kind of thing can snowball on you.It’s funny — after the fact, we’re hearing more about the hate than we did then. I have to say it didn’t really take much of a toll on me at the time.
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