Word: barneys
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With such a constituency, can the merchandisers be far behind? There are Barney dolls (shhh! It may be a surprise for somebody special, but President- elect Bill Clinton reportedly just bought a 4-ft.-high model from F.A.O Schwarz) as well as Barney bed sheets, books, earrings and underwear. JC Penney has opened Barney boutiques, which sell everything from jogging outfits to necklaces. "It's going to be the hottest toy this Christmas, because every two- to five-year-old child in America knows who Barney is," says Standard & Poor's toy analyst Paul Valentine. Next year Hasbro intends...
Unlike Big Bird's Sesame Street, Barney & Friends is a simple, slow-paced show, more like an after-school play group than a slick TV production. In each episode, a multicultural cast of children uses imagination to bring Barney, a small stuffed animal, to full-size life (embodied by actor David Joyner inside the purple-and-green suit, with Bob West providing the voice). Together the children and Barney spend 30 nonviolent minutes exploring a theme -- ranging from recycling to counting -- through song, dance, crafts and creative play. Says creator Sheryl Leach: "It has a magical simplicity to it that...
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...