YMMV / Back at the Barnyard

• Adorkable: Freddy's shy and neurotic nature just makes it hard not to love him.
• Awesome Music:
  • "You Broke My Heart So I Blew Up Your Farm". Black Comedy has never sounded so fun in musical form.
  • "Bionic Janitor" and its later two variants sound great for what little they were used in "RoboPeck".
  • "No Fear Bigfoot". Bigfoot may not be the most fluent communicator, but man, can he sing.
  • The Ominous Latin Chanting in "Hypno-A-Go-Go" is bound to send chills down your spine.
• Fountain of Memes: The entire series has become this once the internet age took off.
• Fridge Brilliance: In "Paging Dr. Filly", Dr. Filly makes a lot of sayings that don’t make any sense. It’s subtle foreshadowing that he’s not an actual psychologist and is just pretending to be one.
• Genius Bonus: Yes. Even a ridiculous show like this can have one. In "Four Leaf Otis", Pig says that to make a rainbow, you need to close your eyes, wish really hard, and fill your heart with love...and seed a raincloud with Silver Iodide. A chemical than causes clouds to start raining early.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When "Weird Al" Yankovic guest starred in the episode "Get Bessy", the big twist was that he's actually a horse in disguise. He later guest starred on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
  • In "Otis For Mayor", the mayoral campaign between Otis and Mrs. Beady looks somewhat similar to the 2016 U.S. election; with Otis being Donald Trump and Mrs. Beady being Hillary Clinton.
  • In "Back At The Booyard", Otis goes to the Halloween party dressed as Frankenstein's Monster. Kevin James, who voiced Otis in the original Barnyard, would later go on to voice another version of the Monster.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Otis and the other actions in "Dummy and Dummier", where they accused Freddy of Mr. Jinx' misdeeds and nearly banning him from the barnyard because of this were seen as a lot worser than Mr. Jinx himself, whose deeds were actually the result of termites living in the wood he was made out of and wanted revenge because of it.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The "Viewer Mail" and "Ask Dr. Pig" segments have become memes with the clips replacing various suspenseful moments from popular culture.
  • Dr. Pig has become very popular on 4chan, with entire threads dedicated to discussing it as if it were an anime (referring to a series of very bizarre videos, from this channel).
  • While not immediate following the show's end, the scene where Otis gets milked by the milking machine quickly gained attention online due to some newly-realized sexual context behind it.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Baxter was an unlikeable little jerk to begin with, but he crosses this in "Puppy Love" where he plots to marry Duke's sister, then kick his family's various buckets to take his family's fortune of golden dog bones.
  • In "Pig Amok", Brunnhilda, Pig's arranged wife, is always seen berating and insulting Pig (who is too love struck to care) with no redeeming qualities to boot, but it's when she laughs at Otis' supposed death by "broccoli poisoning" that she truly establishes herself as over the line.
  • Winky the ghost rabbit pretty much trying to fling the protagonists into Hell for exorcising his fellow ghost pets and declaring that if he can't have their bodies then they can't either. Fortunately, Otis comes in to save the day.
• Narm:
  • The cover of "Cowman: The Uddered Avenger"◊. Yes, we know it's a kid's show and it's obviously a spoof of a dramatic superhero comic book cover, but there's something so over-the-top corny about it that it hurts to look at it.
  • Invoked in "Hypno-A-Go-Go". (It's not a serious cartoon whatsoever.) Otis panics when he supposedly killed what was thought to be the farmer while under hypnosis. But his panicking sounds far too hilarious to be taken seriously.
• Narm Charm: Modern fans of the series with nostalgia for the franchise fondly remember it for the witty jokes and the fact that it wears it's permanent clown face with straight-laced honesty.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In "Hypno-A-Go-Go", Otis accidentally hypnotizes himself with a recording from a movie, instructing him to kill the farmer when he hears a bell. And Hypnotized!Otis is pretty chilling with his gruffer monotone voice, his swirly-eyed stare, his half open jaw along with the scary music played when his trance is triggered. His attempts to assassinate the farmer, the worst of which, range from electrocuting him with his fence to running him down with a tractor at full speed.
• Shipping: Otis and Abby, since Abby is basically a replacement for Daisy, the love interest from the film. Though other fans prefer shipping Otis with Daisy.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The title card theme for Hypno-A-Go-Go (which also plays throughout the episode) sounds rather similar to The Graveyard(o)_(o).
  • In "Dummy and Dummier", after hearing the word "dummy", a scene showing Otis's Thinking Wheels is accompanied with a song similar to that of Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse"
  • The background music in "Wild Mike's Dance Party" sounds fairly similar to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Otis' Mom" features Bessy depressed because she lost her son when he was very young. It is also dedicated to Lee Paulsen, Rob Paulsen's mother, who died during production.
  • The moment is "Dead Cow Walking" where Otis thinks he's dying and Pip gets real depressed over it.
  • The scene in "Pig Amok", where Otis seems to have died. To add salt in the wound, Brunhilda even laughs at it.
  • In "Tale of Two Snottys", where Nathan starts crying his eyes out and revealing his true feelings is just heartbreaking.
  • In "Dummy and Dummier", The others blame Freddy for all of Mr. Jinks' wrongdoings and plan on banning him from the barnyard after Mr. Jinks puts cement in Pig's mud jacuzzi. While they did find out Freddy was innocent after Mr. Jinks reveals the truth, it was still upsetting.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Bingo said he was going to come back, but he ultimately only showed up in the last episode as a cameo.
  • After his one episode, Geraldo never tried to expose the animals again.
  • Farmer Clem only returned in an episode towards the end of the series.
• Trans Audience Interpretation: Some audience members have noted Otis having udders, despite being male, indicates that logically he must be a trans man (or rather, bull). This◊ scene is also often cited.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The animation of the TV series is rather... odd, especially when compared to the much more fluid animation of the film it was based on. The animals are bit too human in how they move and act, while the human characters look more like moving wax models.
• Vindicated by History: The show wasn't very popular on the internet when it was on, much like other Nickelodeon shows at the time. However, the show now has a half-ironic, half-genuine fanbase that enjoys it for its absurd nature and nearly every episode having memes in them somewhere.

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