Word: barney
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Many parents, in fact, want to throttle Barney as much as their children want to hug him. "The kids love it," says Leah Horton of Atlanta, a mother of three, "but you don't want to be in the same room when it's on." Cloying and sappy as Barney's manner seems to adults, it, like the rest of the amateurish production, is carefully calculated to keep a two-year-old transfixed. "We kind of have to say, 'Bear with us as we talk to your children,' " explains executive producer Dennis DeShazer, "because it is a mystery...
...there is no mystery about the spell Barney casts on children. One Washington toddler wakes up each morning and greets his parents with an eager, "Hi, watch Barney." A four-year-old girl in Pensacola, Florida, who learned that Barney appears on TV while she is attending preschool, threatened to boycott school until her parents agreed to videotape the show for her. At a Connecticut elementary school, first-graders pay homage to a Barney poster on the door before they walk into the classroom...
...Barney was born five years ago when former schoolteacher Leach could not find a video to hold her two-year-old son's attention for more than five minutes. One day, as she drove along a freeway, she got the idea for her own videos. "The thought was, How hard could it be? I could do that," Leach recalls. With her knowledge of kids, and with help from a father-in-law who owned a video-production facility, she joined with a friend, Kathy Parker, to develop Barney. He started out as a cuddly teddy bear but evolved ultimately into...
Then one Super Bowl Sunday, Leora Rifkin, 4, daughter of Larry Rifkin, a programming executive with Connecticut Public Television, pulled a Barney tape off the video-store shelf and went home to watch it. And watch it. And watch it. Seeing the magic, her father called Leach's company, the Lyons Group, and they teamed up to produce 30 PBS episodes, which started airing last April. When PBS considered canceling the show last summer, parental howls saved it. Now 20 new episodes, which will introduce another dinosaur character, are scheduled for next year...
Like many a superstar before him, Barney is learning that fame can be a heavy burden. A legal team is scrambling to quash a rash of Barney impostors. And grandiose plans to market and export the creature may, through overexposure, make him a victim of his own success. Still, not a bad fate, given what happened to the rest of the world's dinosaurs...