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Anti-Barney humor is a form of humor that targets the children's television program Barney & Friends. The perception that the show is sugary, boring, uneducational or insincere has made the program a target for parody by older children and adolescents in the United States and elsewhere, as well as many adults, and a few famous entertainment personalities.
History
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Almost immediately after Barney and Friends first aired in 1992, it mesmerized and fascinated many younger children and infants but was despised by most older children. University of Chicago professor W. J. T. Mitchell noted that "Barney is on the receiving end of more hostility than just about any other popular cultural icon I can think of. Parents admit to a cordial dislike of the saccharine saurian, and no self-respecting second-grader will admit to liking Barney ..." These children were among the first to practice anti-Barney humor. Eventually, adults contributed to anti-Barney humor including a growing number of parents and a few famous entertainment personalities.Commonly cited reasons for the hostility include the sugary content and oversimplification of common childhood problems, such as sibling rivalry, arguments with friends and parents, and other typical childhood issues. Some episodes that have since been pulled show Barney instructing children to talk to strangers, as well as other sorts of harmful behavior. Other reasons for the hostility also include the purple dinosaur's voice, never-changing facial expression and self-centered attitude, as well as how the kids on the program talk and behave around the dinosaur and how there are very few adults aside from special guests and recurring guest characters.
Kids wrote songs about Barney being killed which are still even now, 13 years later, elementary school mainstream. Some of the more popular songs that have spread all over the country include "I Hate You" and "Barney Got Shot By G-I Joe". Many others where written as well that either did not make it passed their originated elementary school or have faded.With children writing these songs and many dissapointed parents having to see them at the principals office, people thought this was only a trend, but little did they know what would soon happen. Eventually adults what start contributing to the anti-Barney movement, as well as famous entertainment personalities. Barney still exsists to this day, as it did then, as does the anti-Barney humor.
Examples of Anti-Barney humor
Barkley vs Barney
Charles Barkley was the guest host of the television program Saturday Night Live on 25 September 1993. At one point during the show, Barkley parodied his Godzilla-themed commercial by facing off against Barney in a basketball match.
Music and related video
One of the first well known Anti-Barney songs was "Barney's on Fire" by Tony Mason (often miscredited to "Weird Al" Yankovic).
"Jurassic Park," released on "Weird Al" Yankovic's Alapalooza album, featured the lyrics, "I'm afraid these things might harm me / Cause' they sure don't act like Barney." The music video included a scene in which a Tyrannosaurus bites Barney's head off but later chokes on it and is given the Heimlich maneuver by an apatosaurus.. The music video for another one of Weird Al's songs, "I'll Sue Ya," also features a toy dinosaur in the color scheme of Barney gnawing on a decapitated arm.
An online video created by Ryan Steinhardt in 1998 combines clips from Barney and Friends with Tupac Shakur's song "Hit 'Em Up", making it appear that Barney and other characters from the show are rapping. The humor is based on the juxtaposition of the actual song's heavy use of profanity and violent content, which is inimical to the regular lessons and content on Barney and Friends.
Print media
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A small comic book imprint, Parody Press (an imprint of Eternity Comics), released an anthology comic book entitled Kill Barny in 1994, a collection of short stories and one-page strips depicting the death of the purple dinosaur. One multi-page story depicts "Beaver and Butt-Chin", characters drawn to resemble Beavis and Butt-Head, playing "Dinosaur Baseball" and setting the purple dinosaur on fire. Several months later, another issue was released under the name Kill Barney Again!, reprinting most of Kill Barny but with some new material pages and a new cover.
The Mad Magazine Fold-in for Issue #328 referred to Barney-bashing. It asked, "What Single Goal Has Brought Agreement And Unity Among Vastly Different Groups?" and the image, which featured pairs of opposite people proclaiming their support for the answer, folded into a dead Barney with the word "extinct" on it, and the caption then read "Death to Barney." MAD KIDS Issue #1, in "Puzzle Nook," asked readers to complete the phrase "NEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL" and one option was "BAR."
Internet Fiction
Several works of short fiction revolved around not only killing Barney, but portraying him as a demonic force to be defeated in an epic tale of good versus evil. One particularly visible example was the series of short stories by writer Brian Bull such as the Day of The Barney trilogy about two children named Jeremy and Fran who fight the purple dinosaur and free hordes of children from his demonic control, and the cult hit Batman versus Barney.A phenomenon that carried with it much energy for many years were a group of adults who wrote fiction revolving about not ony killing Barney, but portraying him as a demonic force to be defeated in an epic tale. The most highly regarded of these were a series of short stories by writer Brian Bull including the Day of The Barney novel, and the cult hit Batman versus Barney. The popularity of stories by Bull and others elicited the attention of the producers of Barney and Friends who moved to shut down the sites, although the stories may still be found on the internet.
Jihad
The Jihad to Destroy Barney is a fictional jihad that sees itself in the ultimate battle against Barney (or B'harne) and his followers, the sponge minions. This is described as "a heterogeneous organization of people on the Internet dedicated to defamation, humiliation, eradication, killing, and removal of Barney the Purple Dinosaur of the television show "Barney & Friends" from the airwaves and from every human's life." The Jihad's website is a source of Barney-related fiction and essays, in addition to its Jihad Universe Role-playing game. B'harne himself is depicted as a purple lizardlike demon with pus-ridden scales, sharp talons, and glowing evil red eyes.
References to a Barney "Jihad" are found on Barney-related Usenet newsgroups as early as 1993. The website itself was active as of 1995.
The operators of jihad.net, in acknowledging the situation since the September 11, 2001 attacks, chose to continue their site, noting that "... while a group of geeky Western gamers keep hanging onto jihad.net, people with less pleasant intentions are unable to use it."
The Barney Bunch
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A group of Flash animators who post regularly on Newgrounds and YouTube known as the Barney Bunch typically portray Barney and other children's aimed characters (both fictional and real) as homosexuals. The animation content has strong usage of crude humor, sexual themes, and most of the characters voices are created by text-to-speech programs. Besides Barney, Drew Pickles, a character from Rugrats, is mostly parodied in their work along with Ronald McDonald, The Wiggles, Clifford the Big Red Dog, characters from Dragon Tales, Arthur Read, and many other kids' television programs. They have held multiple websites showcasing work, notably YouTube, Newgrounds, and a defunct Invisionfree message board.
Well Known Anti-Barney Humor Users
Anti-Barney humor has nearly become mainstream, although not nearly as common as it used to be, it still exsists, eventually, it became national.
One of the first well known uses of Anti-Barney Humor was the parody song "Barney's On Fire" by Tony Mason (although commonly misattributed to "Weird Al" Yankovic), whose title says it all. A more well known song that was released on Weird Al's "Alapolooza" record, "Jurassic Park" (a parody of the original version of "MacArthur Park", featured a lyric refrencing Barney ("I'm afraid these things might harm me/cause' they sure don't act like Barney...). While the lyric did not refrence "Anti-Barney Humor", the music video featured a scene were a dinsosaur bit Barney's head off, then spat it out at the end, obviously killing Barney. The video did appear on MTV and is one of Wierd Al's most popular songs/videos.
The website Newgrounds, established in 1995, is another well known offender. Since it has began several fan made cartoons using Barney in them have appeared. Most of depticting Barney as a drug addict or terrorist. Some of the most popular include "Barney Busdriver" and a twisted music video to Barney's own theme song, the first of which depicts Barney as a drug addict/alcholic/sadist who is driving an elementary school bus, the second show Barney's supposed friendships with terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and Saadam Hussien and him sexually assaulting a young girl.
Although it is unkown whether or not this is true, The Mario Brothers of the famed Mario Videogames are also Barney offenders. Many of it's video games feature bad guys who either look or act like Barney. Also, Barney appeared as a bad guy in their feature movie, and there is a rumored series of British Mario movies that depict Barney as a bad guy, as well as being metally retarded and sadistic, this, however, is unconfirmed.
Online-only rapper B.J. Barner also became famous making fun of the big purple dinosaur, his famous (or infamous) song "Kick Barney's A**" has become one of the most popular online songs on the internet and features a music video with Barner torturing Barney with various weapons including Machine Guns and Butcher Knives.
Many cartoons targeted at older children, Barney's orginal enemies, have made fun of Barney directly or not. There are too many example to name, and most of them did not mention Barney directly instead using a parody, but did depict the Barney parody as being mean and usually, subliminally, as an alchoholic.
There is even a rumor of a rejected episode of The Simpsons that featured quite strong Anti-Barney humor. The show has, both in parody and directly, been practicing Anti-Barney humor, but rumors are in this episode, involving Homer joining a shooting contest. Supposedly, Barney is in the shooting contest as well to win the free beer, Bart notices Barnet and urges Homer to direct the gun at him, then to shoot, and Barney is shot in the head and killed. Bart is thrilled, but Homer goes to jail. This episode, if it even exsisted, was rumored to have been rejected because they would probably be sewed by PBS and the creators of Barney & Friends.
"Barney = 666" joke
Many individuals have been associated with the Number of the Beast (666) using a variety of schemes to transform their names or mottoes into the infamous number. One of the most widely-distributed works of Anti-Barney humour provides a 666 calculation for the character of Barney as follows:
1. Barney is well-described with the following phrase:
- CUTE PURPLE DINOSAUR
2. The old Latin alphabet used the letter 'V' in place of 'U', therefore the above phrase is modified to:
- CVTE PVRPLE DINOSAVR
3. Letters that do not represent Roman numerals are removed:
- CV-- -V--L- DI----V-
4. Add up the Roman numerals of the remaining letters:
- C + V + V + L + D + I + V
- 100 + 5 + 5 + 50 + 500 + 1 + 5 = 666
A summary of the Antichrist calculation was included in the Barney FAQ v1.2 (posted on Usenet's alt.tv.barney newsgroup 1 December 1993). Since then, it has become one of the most widely-distributed instances of Barney humour.
Computer games
Anti-Barney humor found another channel for expression due to the flexibility of early 90's computer games, such as the popular first person shooter, DOOM. Numerous "mods" circulated the Internet, some of which could replace specific monsters in the game. Some mods replaced one or more monsters with Barney, often with new sounds as well. One such mod is "Barneystein 3D", a spoof of Wolfenstein 3D, where, instead of killing Nazis, the player has to kill Barneys. Closely related was the "mashup" WAV file of Barney starting his theme song, interrupted by some German speech and various weapon sounds from the game Wolfenstein 3D (with the implication that the German soldiers killed Barney with a large volume of gunfire).
There was also a computer game for Macintosh platform called Barney Carnage.
A homebrew ColecoVision game known as Purple Dinosaur Massacre was released in the late 1990s.
Starcraft also has custom map called "Kill Barney", in which the players kill characters from the show and ultimately mutilate Barney himself as the final boss. Barney is also one of the many characters one can download for MUGEN, and the player can make it look like another character is beating up/killing the purple dinosaur (such as Homer Simpson squashing him with a giant steamroller and telling him to "go to hell"). Another anti-Barney MUGEN video shows two anime schoolgirls fighting Barney versus fighting game-style at a community high school.
Legal responses
Lyons Partnership, which owns the intellectual property rights to Barney & Friends, took the view that Barney spoofs were instances of trademark and copyright infringement against the Barney character. Lyons' lawyers subsequently demanded that the owners of Anti-Barney humour websites remove their material from the Internet. Some site owners withdrew their Barney-related materials after such threats while others resisted. However, American law has established parody as a fair use defense against such infringement claims.
Barney vs San Diego Chicken
In 1994, comedy sketches of The San Diego Chicken during professional sporting events began to include scenes of the Chicken beating up a dinosaur character. Lyons Partnership began sending letters to Ted Giannoulas, who portrays the Chicken, demanding that he stop the alleged violation of Lyons' rights on the Barney character.
These threats did not stop the mock battles between Chicken and Barney. On 8 October 1997, Lyons filed lawsuit in Fort Worth, Texas federal district court against Giannoulas, claiming copyright and trademark infringement and further claiming that such performances would confuse children. This court ruled against Lyons on 29 July 1998, declaring the sketches to be a parody that did not infringe on the rights of the Barney character.
Lyons appealed this ruling to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but again lost their case to Giannoulas on 7 July 1999.
Barney vs EFF
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) hosted online archives from the Computer Underground Digest that contained Barney parody material. In 2001, Gibney, Anthony & Flaherty, LLP who were the lawyers for Lyons Partnership, issued a threat letter to EFF claiming infringement of the Barney character. EFF strongly defended itself against these claims citing the established defence of parody, backed by United States First Amendment protections.
As of November 29 2006, the EFF successfully defended a website ridiculing Barney from a lawsuit. An article in The Register applauded the victory.
Barney vs CyberCheeze
Around 2001, the comedy website CyberCheeze posted a work entitled "150 Ways to Kill the Purple Dinosaur". In response, a lawyer's letter on behalf of Barney's rights owners threatened legal action. CyberCheeze replied to this with a substantial dose of satire.
"I Hate You"
This is the best known elment of the elementary school written Anti-Barney songs that got the Anti-Barney movement started. It is a parody of the songs closing song "I Love You", which is played to the tune of "This Old Man".This may be the most important elment (and possibly the most famous).May versions have been sung.
Miscellaneous
Many cartoons targeted at older children have made fun of Barney directly or indirectly. Some examples of shows that have done this include Dinosaurs, Garfield and Friends, Rugrats, and Animaniacs. One of the bosses in Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia is a monstrous Barney parody named Mr. Huggles who attacks by singing and attempting to hug unwilling pedestrians. After fighting him, his suit comes off, revealing a more vicious Jabba the Hutt-like being. Also in the Arcade game Carnevil evil Barney-like creatures are some of the enemies in the Rickety Town level.
In the Simpsons episode "Rosebud", Homer watches a TV show where a Barney-like character is seen dancing and chanting "2+2=4."
The science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research published in its January/February 1995 issue an article called The Taxonomy of Barney, including X-rays of his skeleton. It is freely available on the magazine's website.
References
- Mitchell, W.J.T. (1998). "Chapter 37: Why Children Hate Dinosaurs". The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-53204-6.
{{cite book}}: External link in|chapterurl=|chapterurl=ignored (|chapter-url=suggested) (help) - Barney parodies from children were given an entire chapter of the 1995 book Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood by Josepha Sherman and T.K.F. Weisskopf, ISBN 0-87483-444-9 (see The Green Man Review entry)
- Bellinghausen; Alex, Barney: The Babysitter, Jihad.net non-fiction archives.
- Pete McEntegart, "The 10 Spot", Sports Illustrated 10 July 2005
- See Tony Mason official website, indicating the song is a 1993 composition
- Weird Al Yankovic at MySpace Yankovic denies writing this song as indicated on his "FAQ Lite" section: "Unfortunately, there are many 'funny' songs floating around the Internet being attributed to me which are, in fact, NOT by me. 'Barney's On Fire,'..."
- "Jurassic Park" on MTV.com (USA access only). Canadian access: see MTV Canada videos
- I'll Sue Ya Animated music video, 0:50 into the video
- Steinhardt, Ryan (1998). "Barney Shakur". MySpace. Retrieved 2008-08-10.
- "Site Map: A little entertainment". Daddy Designs. Retrieved 2008-08-10.
- ^ "The Non-Jihad Story Collection". The Jihad to Destroy Barney.
{{cite web}}: Unknown parameter|accessdater=ignored (help) Includes works by Brian Bull. - Bull, Brian; "Batman vs. Barney" part 1
- Urban Dictionary: B'harne
- Hann, Michael (21 May 2003). "No, not the Barney song!". The Guardian. Retrieved 2008-08-03.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - Jihad to Destroy Barney: FAQ v3.6x
- "Joining the Jihad", alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die, 13 October 1993
- Metzler Lavan, Rosemary (29 June 1995). "Business is Blooming on Internet". New York Daily News. Retrieved 2008-08-06.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - Casimir, Jon (1997). Postcards from the Net: An Australian's Guide to the Wired World. Allen & Unwin. p. 301. ISBN 1864482338.
- "The Jihad Universe for Dummies", from jihad.net
- Barney Bunch website
- Shulman, Dave (26 December 2000). "Cipherin' for Jesus". LA Weekly. Retrieved 2007-09-07.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - Cairney, Richard (9 April 1998). "On the Web". SEE Magazine. Retrieved 2007-09-07.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - Science Askew. CRC Press. 2001. p. 115. ISBN 0750307145. Retrieved 2008-08-03.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help); Unknown parameter|isbn13=ignored (help) - See this Google search; as of 7 September 2007, this yielded 1380 results, most of which include the Barney/Antichrist Joke.
- YouTube - Everybody hates Barney
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKWc3NDZduE YouTube - BS: all stars 75# school girls HATES Barney!
- Removal of "Barney Dies" sound files, Carolyn Gargaro
- "A children's toy could get me sued", drwho.virtadpt.net
- Stirland, Sarah Lai (27 April 2002). "The Parody Police: Bash Barney online; soon you've got mail". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 2008-08-03.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - See "Copyright issues" under Misplaced Pages:Parody
- Current.org: "The case of Barney v. Chicken", articles from 1997 and 1998
- E! Online: Celeb Courthouse "Barney the Dinosaur v. the Famous San Diego Chicken".
- FindLaw: 5th Circuit decision, Lyons Partnership vs Ted Giannoulas
- EFF Response to "Barney" Legal Threat, Electronic Frontier Foundation letter, 6 July 2001
- EFF defeats Barney the Dinosaur, The Register, 29 November 2006
- Original articles on cybercheeze.com Unavailable as of 21 April 2006 as the site was under maintenance. Still unavailable as of May 30, 2008. May be defunct.
- The Register: "Barney barney makes dino outfit purple with rage"
- Wired News: "Lawyers: Keep Barney Pure", includes reference to the EFF situation.
- Theriot, Edward C. (January/February 1995). "The Taxonomy of Barney". Annals of Improbable Research. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help)
See also
- Baloney & Kids
- Barney & Friends
- Barney's Hide and Seek (Sega Genesis/Megadrive console game)