On April 24, 1994, NBC aired Barney's first foray into commercial television, with a prime-time special entitled "Bedtime with Barney: Imagination Island." Such popularity with the television-watching preschool demographic made Barney and Friends vulnerable to critical attacks that suggested the show was nothing but "an infomercial for a stuffed animal." The four million Barney home videos and $300 million in other Barney merchandise that sold within one year after its PBS premiere confirmed that "Barney" was a media force to be reckoned with. Barney and Friends ' signature song, "I Love You," took the tune of "This Old Man" and substituted lyrics remarkable for nothing if not their catchiness: children nationwide were soon singing "I love you /you love me /we're a happy family" and spreading Barney's feel-good message throughout the land. The group would dance, sing songs, and learn valuable lessons about getting along with each other in work and play.
The young members of this politically correct sampling of American culture could make a small stuffed (and eminently marketable) dinosaur come to life as Barney.
#Purple dinosaur from barney series#
The PBS series was entitled Barney and Friends and featured Barney (played by David Joyner, voiced by Bob West), his younger dinosaur sidekick Baby Bop (Jeff Ayers, voiced by Carol Farabee), and a gaggle of children representing the country's major ethnic groups (Caucasian, African American, Asian-American, Native American, Indian, etc.). Leach produced three "Barney and the Backyard Gang" videos and marketed them through day-care centers and video stores.Ī PBS executive saw the videos and in 1991 secured a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to produce thirty episodes of the series.
She wrote scripts for a children's video featuring a stuffed bear that came to life but changed the central character to a dinosaur, capitalizing on the renewed interest among children. In 1988, the character's creator, Sheryl Leach, had grown dissatisfied with the selection of home videos on the market to amuse her young son. Barney, a huggable six-foot-four-inch talking purple dinosaur, starred in a daily half-hour children's television program that premiered April 6, 1992, on PBS.
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