Barney & Friends


Barney & Friends is an American children's television series aimed at children aged 1 to 8, created by Sheryl Leach and produced by HIT Entertainment. It premiered on PBS on April 6, 1992. The series features the title character Barney, a purple anthropomorphic Tyrannosaurus rex who conveys educational messages through songs and small dance routines with a friendly, optimistic attitude. The last episode aired on September 18, 2009. Reruns aired on Sprout from 2005 until 2015, and from December 17, 2018 to present on Sprout's successor network, Universal Kids.
In 2015, a revival was announced to premiere in 2017, but to date, this has not occurred. On October 18, 2019, Mattel Films announced that a second Barney film was to be produced; British actor Daniel Kaluuya's production company was involved.

Origin and development

Barney was created by Sheryl Leach of Dallas, Texas. She came up with the idea of a children's program after noticing that her son outgrew Wee Sing Together, and then recognizing that there were no videos to appeal to her son. Leach then brought together a team who created a series of home videos, Barney and the Backyard Gang, initially released in 1988. The first three videos starred actress Sandy Duncan.
One day in 1991, the daughter of Connecticut Public Television executive Larry Rifkin rented one of the videos and was "mesmerized" by it. Rifkin thought the concept could be developed for PBS. Rifkin thought Barney had appeal because he was not as neurotic as Big Bird. He pitched it to CPTV president Jerry Franklin, whose preschool son also fell in love with it. Franklin and Rifkin pitched the idea to all of their colleagues with preschoolers, and they all agreed that kids would love a Barney show. Franklin and Rifkin convinced Leach to let CPTV revamp the concept for television. The show debuted as Barney & Friends in 1992. The series was produced by CPTV and Lyrick Studios.
Although the show was a runaway hit, PBS initially opted not to provide funding beyond the initial 30-episode run. When CPTV executives learned this, they wrote letters to their fellow PBS member stations urging them to get PBS to reconsider. The Lyons Group, meanwhile, sent out notices through the Barney Fan Club, telling parents to write letters and make phone calls to their local PBS stations to show their support for Barney & Friends. By the time of the yearly member stations' meeting, station executives across the country were up in arms over the prospect of one of their most popular shows being canceled. Faced with an atmosphere that Rifkin later described as "like an insurrection", PBS ultimately relented.
For several years, the show was taped at the Color Dynamics Studios facility at Greenville Avenue & Bethany Drive in Allen, Texas, after which it moved to The Studios at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, and then Carrollton, a suburb of Dallas. The TV series and videos are currently distributed by HIT Entertainment and Universal Studios, while the TV series was produced by WNET from 2006 to 2010.

Episode format

Opening sequence

The series opens with the theme song and the title card before it dissolves into the school. The children are seen doing an activity, occasionally relating to the episode's topic. The children imagine something and Barney comes to life from a plush doll, transforming into the "real" Barney, how he appears in the children's imaginations.

Main sequence

Here, the main plot of the episode takes place. Barney and the children learn about the main topic of the episode, with Baby Bop, B.J., or Riff appearing during the episode and numerous songs themed relating to the subject featured in the series. The roles of Baby Bop, B.J., and Riff have grown larger in later seasons and later episodes venture outside of the school to other places within the neighborhood, and in Season 13, to other countries around the world.

Closing sequence

Barney concludes with "I Love You" before he dissolves back into his original stuffed form and winks to the audience. After the children discuss what they have learned, the sequence cuts to Barney Says where Barney, who is off-screen, narrates what he and his friends had done that day, along with still snapshots from the episode. Then Barney signs off before the credits roll. In Seasons 3–8 and 12, he later appeared on-screen by saying, "And remember, I love you," and waved goodbye before the credits roll.

Characters and cast

Dinosaurs

The adults and children on the show often appear as teachers, storytellers, or other characters.

Multiple appearances

Puppets

A lot of puppets appeared in many seasons. The most notable puppets were:
Throughout the series' run, over 100 children have appeared in the series, with most of them from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Only a small portion of these actors have made notable appearances in media since their roles, including:
Other than the United States, the series has aired in Canada, Mexico and Latin America, France, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Philippines, Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand, among others. Two known co-productions of Barney & Friends have been produced outside of the US. The Israeli co-production produced from 1997 to 1999 in Tel Aviv, Israel, was the first of these. Rather than dubbing the original American episodes from Seasons 1–3, the episodes are adapted with a unique set and exclusive child actors. The other co-production was shot in South Korea from 2001 to 2003, airing on KBS. This one, however, adapted the first six seasons. It was done similarly as Israel production.

Music

A majority of the albums of Barney & Friends feature Bob West as the voice of Barney; however, the recent album The Land of Make-Believe has Dean Wendt's voice.
Barney's song "I Love You" was among those used by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay detention camp to coerce detainees. The similar use of "I Love You" to inflict psychological stress on Iraqi prisoners-of-war was examined by Jon Ronson in his 2004 book The Men Who Stare At Goats.

Awards and nominations

Reception

Several people have concluded that episodes contain a great deal of age-appropriate educational material, including Yale University researchers Dorothy and Jerome Singer, who called the program a "model of what preschool television should be". Others have criticized the show for a lack of educational value, as well as being repetitive.
The show is often cited as a contributing factor to the perceived sense of entitlement seen in Millennials, who grew up watching the show. One specific criticism is:
The creator and performer of the San Diego Chicken mascot, Ted Giannoulas, called Barney a "ubiquitous and insipid creature" in a 1999 court case.
Barney & Friends ranked #50 on TV Guide 2002 list of the 50 worst TV shows of all time. The show has also been parodied in many forms; see Anti-Barney humor.
In a 1993 newspaper article, Jerry Franklin, the head of Connecticut Public Television, which co-produced Barney at the time, was quoted thus: