Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 11, 1993 TAG: 9303110104
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARTIN F. KOHN KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
FORGET IT, PARENTS, BARNEY IS FOR KIDS CUTLINE TO COME RIGHT HERE
Dorky, sappy, dippy and lame?Friendly, happy, cuddly and cute?
They aren't attorneys, and they aren't characters in a remake of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." The dueling epithets sum up how adults and youngsters, respectively, feel about the children's entertainment phenomenon of the year: "Barney & Friends." You know, the TV show about the purple dinosaur. (It airs during the week at 9 a.m. on WBRA-Channel 15.)
You don't know? No preschooler in your life, huh?
A quick summation, then: Barney, created by Sheryl Leach and Kathy O'Rourke Parker, is a 6-foot-4 Tyrannosaurus rex (one actor wears the costume, another provides the voice). He hit the PBS airwaves last April after four years of starring in a popular series of home videos. Since then, Barney has been on People magazine's list of 1992's most intriguing people and the cover of last week's TV Guide and has attracted almost 1.7 million young viewers each weekday. And we haven't even mentioned all the Barney products that are out there.
For every young viewer he charms, Barney seems to repel an equal number of older viewers. "The grown-ups don't like Barney," says Diana Huss Green, editor-in-chief of Parents Choice, the influential Massachusetts-based review of children's media.
Bashing Barney has become a participatory sport. For adults. Writing about the purple one in the Washington Post, John F. Kelly used such phrases as "Chinese water torture" and "until you want to put your head under a bus." TV Guide used the terms "condescending," "gooey" and "childish."
Well, that's the fallout of success - the Barney rubble, if you will.
"Oh, wonderful!" says Dr. Patricia Weissman, a child development specialist at the Merrill-Palmer Institute of Wayne State University in Detroit, upon hearing that other adults share her opinion of Barney. Wonderful, says Weissman, "`given that I am a mother of two Barney groupies - Tony, age 3, and Rosie, age 5 - and I am a parent who cannot stand Barney. My husband and I roll our eyes at him. He makes us sick."
As an expert, though, she understands Barney's appeal. It relates to the work of Jean Piaget, who studied how children think. "He said their thinking is qualitatively different from the way adults think." Piaget held that "somewhere around the age of 2," children discover "the power of imagination. This is something that adults usually hold very little respect for," says Weissman. "When I work with parents, they want to know if their kid is learning the alphabet or learning to count. They never ask, `How's my kid's imagination?' "
Imagining, said Piaget (and Weissman agrees), "is essential to how children think and learn. Barney is absolutely the only children's show that I'm aware of that is based on that notion. Barney would not exist without the child's symbolic play." Each episode begins with Barney as a small toy; then he is imagined into life. Children at that age also "believe they have magical power," Weissman says.
"Another reason why children love it is there's such a strong sense of unconditional love. He's always turning to the camera and saying, `I love you.' You can never underestimate the child's need and right to feel supported and valued and loved," though to adults Barney may be "sweet and sugary to the point of being grotesque."
Green compares him to Peter Rabbit, who "lives in a tidy little world where good is clearly good and naughty is clearly naughty. And that, like Barney, makes kids feel safe. He sings, `I love you. You love me. We're a happy family.' Nothing, nothing, nothing in this insane world makes kids feel safer."
At Barney Central - the Lyons Group, near Dallas - those wonderful folks who bring us "Barney & Friends" are aware of grown-ups' disdain. "We hear it all the time," says Beth Ryan, manager of communication and public relations. They also hear the words "but my kids love it."
That's what they want to hear. "The show is targeted absolutely to the preschooler and not the preschooler's parents. We do not have a goal of entertaining adults; we have a goal of entertaining children."