YMMV / Barney & Friends

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • One song in the show is about brushing your teeth. Unfortunately, the hand gestures that are being made... do not look exactly like tooth brushing. Can be seen in this video. The show's producers likely noticed and changed the choreography for "Brushing My Teeth" in future episodes. In the same season, in fact.
  • The Israeli adaptation’s opening song translates to this in English, likely thanks to different word definitions in Hebrew:
    Barney is a sort of dinosaur
    In our imagination;
    When he's big, then he can
    Touch all of us.
• Accidental Aesop: In "Falling for Autumn", Shawn "wins" the peanut race at the Fall Festival by using peanut butter to keep his peanut on its spoon. This implies that it's okay to cheat, which is not something most parents want their children to learn.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • All that needs to be said is that Barney is a T-Rex and the cast of kids changes every season.
  • Or that he's a fully-grown adult dinosaur who spends a lot of time around kids and cuddling them. Or worse, both at the same time.
  • Parody videos produced by the show's fanbase use two different portrayals for Barney: the "Barney with Bad Words" series depicts Barney as a Jerkass who downright insults or endangers the kids, while the "Boredom Videos" series portrays Barney as a extreme Cloudcuckoolander with a Jerkass streak.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Prior to the TV series and videos becoming hits, Barney's producers were faced with this exact trope on a number of occasions.
  • Connecticut Public Television executives felt this way when they couldn't see the series' appeal after watching a Barney video. After they showed the video to kids and saw their reactions, however, the tides turned and CPTV immediately got a TV contract for the Barney series.
  • Song writers Lory Lazarus and Stephen Baltes, who wrote songs for the initial three Barney & The Backyard Gang videos, were told by friends to leave the company for this reason. They came back to write for Barney & Friends' third season, once the character's popularity took off.
  • When asked whether Barney would ever take off during the Backyard Gang era, Bob West shrugged.
• Archive Panic: Barney & Friends alone has 268 episodes, which would take about six days to finish non-stop. That's not counting the home video releases ^note 128 of them, counting episode videos and the Backyard Gang titles nor the movie.
• Awesome Music:
  • "I love you, you love me, we're a happy family..." It may have been mocked and ridiculed to death, but you'll never forget it.
  • "Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination. And when he's tall, he's what we call a dinosaur sensation."
  • "Oh, you are special, special. Everyone is special. Everyone in his or her own way."
  • "Never talk to strangers. That's very good advice, cause you just can't tell if they're good or bad even though they may seem nice."
  • "Hey, Mr. Knickerbocker, boppity bop. I like the way that you boppity bop. I like the way that you boppity bop with your hands!"
  • "Sometimes everybody gets real mad, it's even true for your mom or dad. So if that feeling gets a hold of you, tell me some things that you might do!"
  • "Clean up. clean up. Everybody everywhere. Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share."
  • The song that the ending credits used from season 1-3 which was titled Barney's Dilemma^note It got this name due to Bob Singleton, the composer and musical director from season 1-6, submitted the composition 3 times,, the remix used from season 4-6 is even catchier.
• Base-Breaking Character: Barney himself. Does he deserve the hate many people felt for him during the period of anti-Barney humor, or is he an optimistic role model for children with no negative qualities whatsoever? His hatedom has often argued that the "no negative qualities whatsoever" part is what made the hatred for him at least somewhat justified.
• Broken Base: Some fans consider the first three seasons to be the best of the show, with Season 4-6 (along with earlier HIT produced seasons ^note Seasons 7 and 8. Occasionally Season 9 is included) the Bronze Age and the later HIT seasons (especially Seasons 10-13) the Dark Age. Others consider Season 4-6 to be as good as, if not better than, the first three.
• Critic-Proof: Despite being despised by most over the age of 3 during its heyday (most critics were divided on it, quite a few treated it on a scale from "good for the whole family" to So Okay, It's Average), the series became one of the biggest merchandising successes of the '90s and 2000s. Hell, one of the reasons why it survived for 17 years was because of its popularity with parents and educators (that and its hatedom slowly shrank into a Vocal Minority as time went by).
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Professor Tinkerputt, even among the show's few remaining haters, for his silly, over the top behavior. Stella the Storyteller also gets this because of her calm personality and whimsical approaches she takes to situations.
• Everyone Is Satan in Hell:
  • Reverend Joseph Chambers went on a crusade against Barney for using magic on the series as well as the show's message of love and tolerance.
  • Although most of the criticism was aimed at SpongeBob SquarePants, Moral Guardians still went after Barney and the other stars of the We Are Family music video, claiming the video would teach "the homosexual agenda".
• Fandom Rivalry: Many fans of other children's shows airing in the 90's usually tended to look down on Barney. Though this disdain was admittedly a largely one-sided affair.
• Fandom VIP:
  • Perhaps the most notable example is Andrew Olsen, admin of the Facebook group "Barney History Fans." He ended up actually working on the documentary, I Love You, You Hate Me.
  • Another famous fan is Drew aka SonicHOG, a massive Barney expert who has made a video essay about the series' history.
  • Emilia Leonetti is an active fan who was later chosen by Bob West to become one of his digital assistants.
  • Kerron Stark has been an avid Barney fan since childhood and did amateur performances of the character in his teens. He is very active in the fanbase as he is a moderator-turned-admin in Barney History Fans and stars in his own show, Mister K's Clubhouse.
  • Although they have diversified their content as of early 2023, artist and YouTuber HedgeOnStage is considered THE Barney content creator, making video essays and artworks pertaining to the franchise.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show was popular enough in Singapore to gain appearances in shopping malls (even after the show's cancellation in 2009) and gained a handful of crowds.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Fans of Barney found out as adults that his original voice actor, Bob West, is a huge nerd with a keen interest in space. This makes re-watching Barney in Outer Space pretty heartwarming, especially considering the special has a real-life astronaut, NASA's Ken Reightler, as the guest star.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • As noted on the Character page, Barney is an All-Loving Hero. An All-loving Hero who is associated with purple dinosaurs.
  • The whole "Captain Pickles" Accidental Innuendo becomes more hilarious when one considers how Barney is portrayed as a member of the Memetic Molester Barney Bunch group, whose leader is Drew Pickles and it also has a captain who goes by the name Captain Crunch.
  • In the season one episode "Eat, Drink And Be Healthy!" Luci tells the story of a boy who refused to eat any food besides noodles (not even fruits or vegetables), and paid the price for his extreme picky eating by turning into a noodle. Two days short of one month after the episode aired came the season finale of another PBS children's show, Sesame Street. In a sketch that debuted in that episode, Cookie Monster has a nightmare in which he meets a sentient cookie, once a furry monster just like Cookie Monster, who regrets his insistence on eating only cookies and not healthy foods like carrots, fish or whole wheat bread, which led to his transformation into a cookie.
  • In a 1988 costume training video for Chuck E. Cheese, the duck umbrellas from "The Backyard Show" and "Rock with Barney" can be seen hanging from the ceiling. In 1995, Chuck E. Cheese would provide funding for Barney & Friends up until the late 2000s.
  • In "Barney's First Adventures", Becky's goldfishes are named Splash and Bubbles. 18 years later, these names would be used for the protagonists of another PBS Kids show.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The official Barney YouTube channel embraced this trope by uploading a compilation of the episodes with Selena Gomez's character Gianna.
• Mandela Effect: In the episode "Playing it Safe", many adults remember Derek controversially saying "A stranger is just a friend you haven't met yet". In reality, Baby Bop asked why you shouldn't talk to strangers and Derek replies saying "They might be bad people".
• Memetic Badass: Barney occasionally gets this due to being a magical Friend to All Children who never raises a fight because he loves everybody regardless of who they are.
• Memetic Loser: Barney was once a common victim of this trope thanks to the show's once-incredibly vocal hatedom. Hell, you might just find people who still spout anti-Barney hatred to this very day.
• Memetic Molester:
  • Unsavorable Urban Legends and playground myths about Barney and his actor(s) were commonplace in the past. He's also the namesake of the Barney Bunch, Speakonia videos on Newgrounds and YouTube based on its characters visiting various places and doing disgusting things.^note Despite the name, the main character is Drew Pickles from Rugrats.
  • Stephen Lynch did a series of CD tracks called "Evil Barney Bus Driver" and its sequel, "Evil Barney Babysitter", which were often featured on Opie & Anthony when they were radio hosts in Boston. In the first track, Barney is driving a school bus and does very mean things to the kids. This continues in the second one where he babysits two kids, invites over a prostitute, and makes the children watch a porno. It's basically Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking through and through, and also acts as Hilarious in Hindsight considering the "Barney with Bad Words" fan videos.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • If you were alive after 1988, chances are you or someone you know can never, ever clean up without someone else singing "Clean-up! Clean-up! Everybody, everywhere!"
  • The show's hatred with older demographics became memetic during The '90s, to the point that an entire Wikipedia article exists on the subject, which makes the similar memetic hatred for newer works such as The Emoji Movie seem tame in comparison.
  • "Cha-Cha real smooth!" ^note A weird-looking Barney statue located at The Den and the Glen, a children's park in Scotland, is often paired with this lyric from the "Cha-Cha Slide". The meme is often used to portray darkly comedic yet bizarre situations and Take a Third Option moments.
• Memetic Psychopath: Pink and cuddly or not, many people have pointed out that Barney is a dinosaur, and a T-Rex at that. This of course leads to depictions of Barney are being a literal predator who hunts down and devours the kids he sings and dances with, or even a satanic demon disguised as a pink friendly talking dinosaur. Sometimes he is depicted as a more realistic-looking T. rex but recolored pink, though this can overlap with the aforementioned Memetic Badass.
• Moe: Tina (in the early Barney & the Backyard Gang videos), Kathy (in Season 1), and some other kids. One girl, Linda, seems to make a connection with Kathy in a reunion special.
• Narm:
  • Sandy Duncan singing "I Love You" at the top of her lungs, when she's by herself in "A Day at the Beach."
  • One could argue the acting of the early child cast members is pure narm as well.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Barney, BJ, Baby Bop and Riff's mouths are completely black, they have no tongues, Baby Bop's mouth never moved in the first two seasons, and Barney has human-like eyes and teeth.
  • The end of the Backyard Gang video "Waiting For Santa", with Santa looking at the camera and whispering almost menacingly "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!"
  • Many children were scared by the bear in "Barney's Campfire Singalong" due to the sheer Unintentional Uncanny Valley factor of his appearance and because he appears out of the darkness of the woods.
  • The donkey statue from Rock with Barney has only a small amount of screen time, but it has managed to traumatize a generation of children watching the video. As everyone exits the studio, the donkey can be heard braying offscreen, but when Adam's mother turns around to look for the source of the noise, she sees nothing but the inanimate donkey statue, so she merely shrugs it off and leaves. However, the scene cuts back to the donkey as the camera zooms up close to its face, after which it gives the audience a creepy-looking, almost lifelike wink.
    • And just when you think it couldn't get any worse, the donkey appears once more at the end of the credits and winks at us a second time!
• Never Live It Down: For better or for worse (mostly the latter), the Tyrannosaurus rex will forever be associated with Barney in popular culture, which doesn't help his extreme unpopularity at all among adult dinosaur enthusiasts. Nearly every fictional T. rex or other therapod under the sun, be it Godzilla, Rexy, Megatron, Deviljho, Anjanath, Tyranitar, Tyrantrum, Greymon, Tyrannomon, or countless others (but surprisingly not the dinosaur-based Zords from Power Rangers), has been mockingly associated and parodied with Barney in some way.
• Older Than the Demographic: The series is squarely aimed at the 5-and-under crowd but Barney is an adult. Most of the child actors are also older than the demographic.
• Older Than They Think: The "I Love You" song first appeared in the Backyard Gang videos, but the song was written in a 1983 children's book prior to its usage on Barney. Songwriter Lee Bernstein and her daughters had heard the song on a show ^note  Barney and the Backyard Gang aired as part of Disney Channel's Lunch Box block 2 years before the PBS series premiered back in 1991. They solved the mystery a year later after one of her employee's kids sang the song, noting it was from Barney. Lee contacted the show's producers and both parties reached an agreement where she'd get credit for the song in future episodes (and would initially receive royalties). This didn't stop said book's publisher from suing both Bernstein and the producers of Barney & Friends in 1994 over the song's lyrics. The lawsuit was settled out of court later that year and "I Love You" has remained part of the series.
• Padding: Songs are often inserted in episodes to stretch out the runtime, even if the songs halt the storyline or don't make sense in the context of the plot. For example, "The Reluctant Dragon: A Fairy Tale Adventure" has the gang sing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" after being scared by a spider. If you took the song out, the episode would still be the same.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Barney's Hide & Seek Game is so ridiculously easy that the game will literally beat itself if you don't press any buttons.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Barney’s 5th suit actor was Josh Martin, best known as Majin Buu. Coincidentally, his singing voice around that time was Duncan Brannan, who voiced Babbidi.
  • Two actors best known for playing Captain Ginyu., Brice Armstrong and R. Bruce Elliott both got their starts on Barney via guest roles and voices.
  • Michaela Dietz, who played Riff, went on to voice Amethyst on Steven Universe. Many SU fans were surprised when they found out. Surprised, and then highly amused.
  • Before becoming Disney Channel stars and music icons in their own right, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato both got their start in season 7 as Gianna and Angela, respectively. Barney later returned the favor and gave them a shout-out for the show's Milestone Celebration 25 Million Hugs Campaign.
  • Similarly, Kyla Pratt's role as Marcella in the movie was before her more well-known ones such as Maya Dolittle, Breanna Barnes, and Penny Proud.
    • The child who played Cody in the same film, Trevor Morgan, would later star in The Sixth Sense and Jurassic Park 3 (the latter would feature a clip from a Barney production playing on TV).
  • Mr. Knickerbocker is played in one appearance by voice actor Todd Haberkorn, best known for voicing Death the Kid, Ling Yao, Hikaru Hitachin, Haruka Nanase, and especially Natsu Dragneel.
  • In the video Let's Go to the Fire House, the teenager was played by a then-unknown Debby Ryan.
• Ron the Death Eater: Many, many forms of media depict Barney as evil or a child murderer in some way.
• So Okay, It's Average: Once you get past the anti-Barney humor, the show pretty much boils down to being just another preschool show that was ever so slightly innovative and groundbreaking.
• Sequel Displacement: The Barney & The Backyard Gang videos are more obscure than the TV show that succeeded it. While the videos continued to sell well in the 90's because of the success of Barney & Friends, not many knew that these were what the TV show was based on rather than the other way around.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • In the original three Barney & The Backyard Gang videos, Barney would close each video winking. Unfortunately, the eyelid was very blatantly drawn on. The Pooh doll at the ending of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh also used an animated eyelid to wink, only it was better animated in comparison to the Barney doll's winking. In later videos, the wink was now downgraded to a sparkle in his eye, which continued in the television series.
  • There was also an attempt to animate a breakdancing Barney for the first usage of "Mr. Knickerbocker" in the Backyard Gang tape, "Three Wishes". Emphasis on attempt. They just took photos of Barney laying down from different angles, and the end result is less than convincing since the frames would crossfade to each other instead of moving rapidly, to say nothing of the weird sound effect accompanying the "breakdancing".
  • The CGI intro, including the purple guy himself, of "Come on Over to Barney's House" looked dated even during the 2000's.
• Sweetness Aversion: One of the main criticisms of the show is how downright saccharine it is, even by children's show standards, and that Barney's always unfailing chipper and upbeat mood is a main contributing factor in making him coming across as genuinely disturbing and creepy to older viewers. People especially dislike his "Super-dee-dooper" cachphrase, as well as his song, seeing them as overly sweet and nauseatingly saccharine.
• Tainted by the Preview: Once the animated reboot was announced in 2023, many people - particularly those who grew up on the original show - took to social media in order to express intense backlash over Barney's redesign. This quickly got to the stage where the hashtag #NotMyBarney blew up in popularity on Twitter, and the fact that Nelvana - who had previously collaborated with Mattel for the similarly-reviled Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go - most certainly didn't help matters.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Hit Entertainment seasons provide quite a few points of contention for folks who grew up on the older Barney seasons from Dean Wendt's portrayal of Barney and the park set to the introduction of Riff and more conflict-driven plots.
  • The internet had a very negative reaction to Barney's makeover for the CGI reboot, saying that he looked creepy and/or like a serial killer.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The season 1 episode "My Family's Just Right For Me" could have had Michael's sister Amy mentioned in passing during it (even though she was not able to appear due to her actress Becky Swonke falling ill, as mentioned on the main page).
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Along with the aforementioned Sweetness Aversion, another criticism from the show's hatedom is Barney's design (mainly his toothy grin and small but realistic looking eyes) combined with his always-happy mood came across as unnerving.
• Values Dissonance: The early years of the show. These days, no kid would be allowed to hang around their school outside of school hours unless they were in an after school club (which the theme song implies, to be fair) or at another after school activity (under adult supervision) due to safety concerns. As such, starting in the early 2000s, the kids meet at a local park instead.
• Vindicated by History: Since the 2010s, Barney has gotten way less hate than it has in the past, with many now looking back on the show fondly and calling it one of PBS' best shows (helped in part by Caillou becoming the network’s new punching bag). When the show aired on Universal Kids, it drew in surprisingly good ratings.
• The Woobie: Baby Bop in the episode "Pot Full of Sunshine" after her flower dies.
• Woolseyism:
  • "I Love You" in the Israeli co-production. The song was rewritten to be about togetherness and friendship:
    For me, for you
    There's a friend, so there is joy
    Holding hand in hand, no one here will be alone.
    We will love each other forever.
  • The show's other songs in the same production became Woolseyisms, though ones mostly true to the originals. One of the more dramatic examples "I've Been Working on the Railroad", which now talks about working at a sea port and watching ships (even if Israel has a railroad network). Another example noted on the main page is "London Bridge", which became "Yarkon Bridge" to connect with Israeli audiences.
  • The Hebrew translation of "If All The Raindrops" talks about if raindrops were drops of cola and snowflakes were made of Krembo ^note A chocolate covered marshmallow treat popular in Israel.

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