- [Director] Three, two.
- Thank you so much for watching "Barney and Friends"
on PBS.
And as Barney says,
anything is possible when you use your imagination.
So thank you very much for your support.
We believe in public broadcasting
and we believe in you.
Thank you.
Is that too corny?
(eerie music) - [Director] Five,
four,
three.
- The message to love, to love everyone.
- Barney!
- That "I love you, you love me" no matter what,
no matter who you are,
just resonates.
- [Bob] We were a great big family,
and Sheryl Leach was just everybody's mom.
Especially Barney's mom.
- Sheryl created Barney for her son, Patrick.
- Patrick, the reason we're all here.
- I don't think that they could have predicted
the success and how it was going to impact their family.
- We had absolutely no clue what was coming.
- Die, you commie (bleeps).
(gun fires)
- Kids love him, a lot of adults, eh.
- He is intensely irritating.
- You're all very special.
- I hate him, I hate him with a passion.
- I don't know of any other show
that has inspired Jihadists.
- To the people who own Barney the Dinosaur,
y'all can go to hell.
- Things started just going insane.
- I'm not gonna take this.
This is my show.
- I don't understand why people get so worked up.
It's a children's show!
- Three boys attacked a man dressed up as Barney.
- They said, "Is it true Barney molested y'all?"
- Something that doesn't have any cracks or flaws,
we can't trust that.
- Barney is purple, and soft,
and is vulnerable.
And there's like, homophobia that goes along with that.
- I got dismemberment of my family emails
because of my music.
- [News Anchor] It's believed the Pentagon
forced prisoners at Gitmo
to listen to Barney for 24 straight hours.
* I love you *
- [News Anchor] After playing Barney for 10 years,
he's working as a tantric sex guru.
(David breathes heavily)
- Hey, it's supposed to be fun, you guys.
It's children's television.
- Did we hit a nerve
at the dawn of the social media era?
Where the world learned to love the hate?
- There was laser focus on her.
Everybody was dissecting everything she did.
- Have you and your husband ever looked at each other
and said, "Honey, can we survive?"
- The phrase "every mother's nightmare" comes to mind.
- [News Anchor] In a Malibu neighborhood known for wealth,
a dispute between neighbors gets down and dirty.
- The bullet went through his chest and out his shoulder.
- The defendant's connection was ironic
given that Barney is this children's character.
- Yeah.
I don't know if you were talking about that or not,
but I do.
- It's feeding.
- [Trent] It's feeding.
- You're good, Trent.
It's set.
- [Trent] Go for it!
One, common mark.
- This is gonna give some people nightmares
when they hear this on piano.
(plays note)
- [Interviewer] I got one thing for you.
- Yes, sir.
- [Interviewer] Can I have you stand right here
and sing "I Love You, You Love Me"?
- No.
(interviewer laughs)
(plays "I Love You, You Love Me")
- There's no way I'm doing that.
Are you kidding me?
- I would absolutely not care to sing that song.
- No.
- Okay, I'll give it a try.
(Lauren clears throat)
* I love you *
* You love me *
* We're a happy *
* Family *
- That's all I know.
(crew laughs)
* With a great big hug *
* And a kiss from me to you *
(blows kiss)
* Won't you say *
* You love me too *
- [Interviewer] How does it feel to play that song?
- On this piano, it's like death.
(interviewer laughs)
* I love you *
* You love me *
- Barney really was
dramatically and remarkably kid focused.
With a preschool kid,
repetition represents safety.
They wanna hear the same song,
they wanna hear the same story.
- Our fun and learning never ends!
Never ends!
- That's safe to them
and it reaches kids.
Grownups,
not so much.
The stuff that's for a three year old
will drive a grownup crazy.
- [Andrew] Barney transports me back into a time
when I didn't have any worries or cares in the world.
And,
I love it, I love Barney.
My name is Andrew Olsen
and I run the "Barney History Fans" website.
There's a lot of misconception around Barney fandom.
You know, we're all weird, we're all freaks.
Anything that's just, you know, a stereotype.
We all grew up watching Barney
and there's no problem with letting him be
your friend through life.
I'm friends with a lot of Barney fans,
and even a lot of crew and cast members,
and I've even talked to the creator of Barney.
And that's really where the story begins.
Sheryl Leach.
(soft orchestral music)
- Can you imagine what the odds were
that not from New York, and not from LA,
but from a little town called Allen, Texas,
a group of people came up with an idea
that now is the number one most watched
children's television program.
- I went to high school with Sheryl Leach.
I'm from a Christian background
and we kept the same moral code.
Sheryl had just a wild, crazy sense of humor.
- [News Anchor 3] And here is Sheryl Leach.
Hi, Sheryl.
How are you?
- That's what drew me to her, I guess.
- [Andrew] Sheryl had taught school for seven years
before accepting a job for a company
called Developmental Learning Materials,
or DLM.
It was a family-run business
run by the Leach family.
It was during this time that she ran into Jim Leach.
Jim and Sheryl dated,
and they eventually got married.
By 1986,
Sheryl's son, Patrick was born
and she decided that she wanted to be a stay at home mom.
- She's been called Barney's mom
and I think she'd be proud to be identified as such.
Come in here, Mrs. Leach. (audience applauds)
- [Shelley] I don't feel like she was a career woman.
I don't think that was her goal in life.
- Well, here you are,
suburban mother of how many?
- Mother of one. - [Phil] Mother of one.
- And Barney, of course.
- Yes. (Sheryl chuckles)
- She was a mom
and she loved being a mom.
- Well, the first logical question,
how exactly did you come up with Barney?
- Well, that's an easy one to answer.
I was a mom at home with a very active two year old,
always looking for things that would keep him busy,
but would also give me time to do things.
- I babysat for Patrick Leach.
He was always just super high energy,
wanting to go from one activity to the next.
A precocious, curious,
active little boy.
- And the more I searched,
the more I realized that there were not many things
on the market that held the attention of a two year old.
- In the world today,
there's so much content for preschoolers.
In the late '80s,
it was a very different media landscape.
- [Announcer] Bright and early weekday mornings
on Nick Jr.
- Back then, there was Nick Jr.,
PBS,
and the major networks' kids blocks.
That was it.
There were very, very few hits
and very, very little content
that was developmentally appropriate for that age.
- Cobra just went bust.
- Sheryl went to the video store,
tried to find something that
would capture Patrick's attention.
- [Sheryl] I found a video out on the market
called "Wee Sing Together."
* The more we sing together *
* Together *
- [Sheryl] And Patrick just loved it.
* The happier we'll be *
- [Andrew] You know, the premise was this stuffed mouse
and this stuffed bear.
At night, they come to life.
It's terrifying.
* The more we sing together *
- [Andrew] Patrick was, you know,
a typical two year old and, you know,
Patrick would play it over and over and over again,
watching this.
- Round and round we swing.
- I started thinking wouldn't it be great
if there was a video that was strong enough
or tailor-made for the preschool audience
that would hold his attention.
- Sheryl is not a passive thinker.
Sheryl goes, why don't I create my own television show?
I'll put the aspects that worked
in "Wee Sing Together"
and add in some educational elements
from my own training.
- I didn't have a background in video at all,
but I thought, you know, how hard can it be?
I'll try to learn what I need to do
to be able to do the video.
- [Pat] Sheryl's father-in-law, Dick Leach,
he had the video production studio,
and he hired me as the head writer for that.
My lifelong dream had been to write for David Letterman.
But both of my parents developed cancer
and I had to come back to Texas,
so I had to find other ways to write comedy from here.
Dick Leach called me into his office
and he had the treatments that Sheryl had given him.
He said,
"Take these and make something filmable."
So...
- When Sheryl came to me with the idea,
I said, "Bingo!"
I just said, Sheryl, I have a crew ready to help you.
- [Pat] The original treatments that I saw,
they were very rough.
It wasn't even Barney the Dinosaur yet.
If I recall, it had different toys coming to life.
One was a bear, I think,
one was a clown doll.
(eerie music)
I didn't want to do the clown doll.
(Pat laughs)
- Well, in the beginning,
in the first scripts,
Barney was a teddy bear.
And then the Traveling Dinosaur Exhibit was touring Dallas.
My little boy, Patrick, loved dinosaurs.
I remember him saying,
"How about a dinosaur instead of a teddy bear?"
- [Bill] Kids of all ages are fascinated with dinosaurs.
Of course.
They're monsters.
They're vicious.
High stakes lifestyle.
(dinosaur roars)
- Sheryl knew if this is gonna work,
no sharp teeth,
no claws,
no spikes, no talons.
You know, this has to be a friendly, inviting,
soft, cuddly dinosaur.
- [Pat] They were going to make three videos
and when I was working on my versions of the scripts,
I was envisioning Barney
really inspired by the character,
you're gonna hang to your hat for this,
Bruce Willis in "Moonlighting."
(Bruce singing)
Kind of a fun, wise-cracking kind of guy.
- Whoops.
- [Pat] Who lit up the room.
- I like to look at naked women.
You know what they say,
the bigger the cushion... - Stop it!
- That didn't really survive the rewrites.
I got a letter firing me.
It said, "We have decided that you have a creative spirit
that cannot be contained."
(Pat laughs)
You know, you don't want your head writer
to be too creative.
- Instead, Sheryl worked with her friend
and fellow educator, Kathy Parker,
along with a producer at DLM, Dennis DeShazer,
in order to bring her vision to life.
- Barney was written to really connect
right to children.
We want adults to approve of what we do,
but it's really not for adults,
it's just for kids. - Right.
- They took out the humor
and made it much more oriented towards small children,
not something adults can watch without going crazy.
They had a thing they wanted to do,
and they did it.
- Barney gives an unconditional type of love
that children seem to realize
when they see him
and think that not only children need this,
but adults need it as well.
- I think that having positive feelings about ourselves
is the whole jam
and I think that's what the best of kids' TV
tries to help us do.
That is the point of something like Barney.
- Well, hopefully the world will be a better place someday
because of Barney.
- Sheryl created Barney with all of her heart.
And it took off really, really fast.
- Is this really happening?
(crowd cheers)
- [Lori] But I think that definitely impacted their family.
In a negative way.
- I'm just tensing up here.
I'm Bob West and I was the original voice of Barney
from 1988 to about 2000.
(whimsical music)
Growing up,
I was a weird kid.
I was a really weird kid.
Sorry.
Just a total, outright nerd.
I did a lot of noises and voices and stuff.
I did lots of accents and dialogues.
And so, I thought, well, you know,
maybe I can get paid for this.
(cheerful rock music)
I started in voiceover really doing commercials mostly.
It was, you know,
"Now at McDonald's, come on in for a deal on such and such!"
You know, that sort of thing.
Then I did "Chuck-E-Cheese."
I ended up getting cast as Jasper and Pasqually.
Jasper T. Jowls,
he's the dog that plays the banjo.
Pasqually, the Italian tenor,
he's sings, ah!
You know, that sort of thing.
Getting the role of the voice of Barney,
it started out as just another audition.
- [Woman] And sign in over here as well.
- [Bob] It was 1988
and I came up with a voice,
just, like, right off the top of my head.
This is Barney and this is what he sounded like.
(Bob laughs)
Oh, what a workout!
That was kind of the placement of the voice at the time.
Hi, everybody!
- [Kids] Hi, Barney!
- They said,
"We really like your voice a lot,
but we've already started building this costume."
So they decided to try to find somebody shorter
to do the costume work,
and then I would do the voice.
- My name's David Voss,
I was the original first body of Barney the Dinosaur.
When I got the audition for Barney,
I was part of a mime troupe.
So when I did my audition,
I auditioned as a mime.
And that's how they could see that I could move
as well as act at the same time.
- Here we go, gang.
In five,
four,
three,
two.
* If you're happy and you know it *
* Stamp your feet *
Action.
- [Bob] Like a lot of projects,
it started out very small,
had a low budget.
That was the phase where Barney was very blue.
- Oh, look at that, Barney!
- Barney actually wasn't blue,
it just looked blue on camera.
But yeah, it was heavy.
Lot of bruises at first.
But bruises I love to get, so...
(David laughs)
So it's cool.
- [Bob] And 'cause it was the kind of thing
that they had never produced before,
we all worked together, you know,
we really did.
- Barney!
- Talk about a ma and pa operation.
Man, oh, man.
"The Science Guy" show was a little bit the same way.
This kind of television
where it's just a few people in a warehouse
making a show.
I was just trying to write jokes
and trying to perform on camera
and trying to stay solvent.
- [Bob] There were so many really talented people involved.
- I think I was nine when I started.
I remember being around nine.
- They just asked me, "Do you wanna play with Barney?"
And I said, "Yeah!
Yeah, that'd be awesome!"
- I started in '88.
You know how many girls that I got?
Oh, my god.
- I asked Sheryl, "Out of all those writers,
why did you only pick me?"
And she said, "Because you're the only one
who didn't ask what it was paying."
- We just laughed and had fun the entire time.
Hello, Mr. Saget,
and welcome to "America's Funniest Home Videos."
(cameraman laughs)
- I was gone from my house from seven until seven
every day.
So there wasn't really time for too many other friends.
So they were the friends and family.
- We were a great big family.
We really were.
And that was because of Sheryl Leach.
Everybody loved her.
I mean, this just all sounds so trite,
but it's really true!
She was just everybody's mom,
especially Barney's mom.
- Sheryl Leach was awesome.
She opened her home to us.
So once a week,
we were over there.
Patrick was a young kid.
I thought he was precious,
I loved spending time with him.
- [Lori] Sheryl was very protective,
she wanted him around people
that were gonna be the best for him,
and I think just felt like she was
making a difference in Patrick's life.
That was her top priority.
(cheerful music)
- [Shelley] In the beginning,
Sheryl's son, Patrick, had a love relationship with Barney
because he was the reason
that Barney even existed.
- [Andrew] The first Barney tape came out
at the end of 1988.
And the problem was
there's really no marketing budget.
- In the early days,
we didn't have enough money to make the videos
and spend money on marketing.
So we decided to hire
a group of our neighborhood mom friends,
and we called those moms The Mom Blitzers.
- [Andrew] These Mom Blitzers
started making phone calls to other moms
and they went around to local daycares and preschools
to sell tapes.
- Parents,
The Backyard Gang is always looking for new members.
- [Sloan] I had a very active two year old son.
And a girlfriend of mine said,
"You need to rent this videotape
called Barney the Dinosaur."
And I was like, "Oh, okay."
(cheerful music)
And my son fell in love with it.
So then I'm renting the second one.
And I rented the third one.
And I went, "Oh!
That's it.
I'm gonna do Barney birthday parties.
And I am gonna market this dinosaur
because this is the best thing I've ever seen."
So I called Sheryl Leach's office,
and then I get a phone call from Sheryl
about an hour later.
She goes, "I understand you want to market our dinosaur."
I said, "Yeah, I do!"
And I became the senior vice president
of live events and stage show productions.
So I was employee number six.
That's when the journey began.
- [Andrew] In 1990,
these tapes were now selling like crazy.
- And the first Barney in concert
was scheduled on November 19th, 1990
at the Majestic Theater here in Dallas, Texas.
- And it sold out.
(exciting music) (audience cheers)
- [Sloan] I was sitting there, just mouth dropped.
I mean, I was like, "Oh, my gosh,
we've got something here."
(audience applauds)
- [Andrew] But there's a huge issue because
they had to recast Barney.
- Yeah.
So what happened was
I'd got a calling to join the military.
My grandpa had been in the military,
a lot of family members had been in the military,
so I decided to go in.
It just kind of clicked, I guess,
that this was something that I was meant to do.
So.
- [Bob] And so they needed to find someone
to be the new body of Barney.
- [Interviewer] When we talked to other people
in this documentary,
they always go, "Is David Joyner a part of it?"
(David breathes heavily)
Why do you think sometimes people are nervous
that we would be talking to you?
Why do you think sometimes people are nervous
that we would be talking to you?
- A lot of people are nervous now about me and Barney,
it's basically because of that article
that came out in 2018.
- [Sloan] When I heard something about this,
what's it, I can't remember what it's called again.
- [Interviewer] Tantric.
- Tantra? - [Interviewer] Yeah.
- Okay.
I don't even know what it's all about,
to be honest with you.
Don't care to know about it,
from what I've kind of heard about it.
- When people hear tantra,
they think it's about sex.
Now, tantra is much more than that.
Feel the love.
I am a tantric energy healer.
Around April of 1990,
I was studying tantra and...
(dance music)
I was dancing, I was modeling,
I was standing in store windows as a live mannequin.
They were looking for someone to play Barney,
to be inside of the costume.
So I get a call
and they told me, "Learn the choreography.
We want to send you to do a live performance."
And they said, "On the first song,
Barney just comes out, he's greeting everyone,
so pretty much do whatever you want."
And so, the music starts,
and I just leaped!
(audience cheers) (upbeat rock music)
Started doing these bell kicks,
I'm running from one side of the stage,
doing these spins.
And so, I'm dancing and I'm moving,
I'm like, I'm gonna do a 360,
I'm gonna do a 360.
So I jump.
And I do this 360.
They're like, "Yeah!"
(audience cheers)
- [Sloan] Once David Joyner hit that stage,
oh, my goodness.
- David Joyner is just tremendously physically capable.
I mean, you've got this 60 pound costume on him
and he could just move it like, you know.
(exciting music)
- [Sloan] He made Barney
the athletic Barney that is he today.
(David breathes deeply)
- [David] As a tantric energy healer...
I own my goddess power.
I help goddesses reconnect
with their sexual energy
on a spiritual level.
I am filled with loving energy.
- I am filled with loving energy.
- When you study white lotus tantra,
you learn sexual energy is not for physical gratification,
it's for spiritual elevation.
The fee for my services
are basically for the energy work,
and the massage,
and the meditation.
Anything beyond that,
there's no extra fee.
- [Interviewer] So,
you do have sex with the women?
- Not necessarily.
Not all the clients have a full session,
which what you consider sex.
But in tantra, we consider it spiritual intimacy.
Before I got in costume,
I'd pull up my Kundalini energy.
Just imagine love, love, love, love,
love, love, love.
So.
Oh, wow.
(David laughs)
- I think it'd be fair to say
that David's a different kind of guy
and maybe we're not all supposed to be understood
by everybody.
- Whether I believe in what he's doing or not,
I can see where he's coming from,
knowing him.
He's a very driven,
very intense person.
- So I didn't know what it was,
I have no idea what it is.
But I know that David has the biggest heart.
(David breathes deeply)
And the love of his heart went through that costume
and straight to these kids.
- I was asked to sign an agreement
that said I couldn't talk about tantra,
or teach tantra,
or practice tantra while I was being Barney.
They're like, well, it's Barney and sex.
Barney and sex, that doesn't go together.
As the attorney said,
that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
- [Interviewer] He couldn't talk about tantra at the time.
- Yeah.
They couldn't risk making any mistakes.
Barney was finally finding an audience
and not just in Texas.
(exciting music)
- [Larry] It was Superbowl Sunday, 1991.
But that wasn't first and foremost on my mind.
Our daughter, Leora,
really wanted to go and get a home video for that day.
- Okay.
I remember the tape was on the lowest shelf.
The colors and kind of the image of Barney
kind of drew me right in.
* Oh Barney is a dinosaur *
* A dinosaur *
- [Larry] She wanted to watch it
over and over and over.
So I sat down and I said,
"What is this that is so captivating my young daughter?"
- [Leora] Watching the show,
it imprints something on you
that was fun,
it was like, oh, I wanna do whatever Barney's doing.
- What you'll see is a desire
to get a child off a couch
so that that experience,
which otherwise could be passive,
really became active.
- [Barney] Ooh, that's funny.
- [Leora] What Barney hits on is that
every person has the ability to love
and to be loved.
Unless you're a sociopath.
- In my mind,
Barney was Fred Rogers going electric.
- Yay!
- [Interviewer] If you could,
just introduce yourself?
- Okay.
I'm Larry Rifkin
and I was the head of programming
at Connecticut Public Television.
- [Sloan] Larry Rifkin with PBS called Sheryl
and said, "We're airing it."
(Larry laughs)
Get ready.
(exciting music)
* Barney is a dinosaur *
* From our imagination *
* And when he's tall *
* He's what we call *
* A dinosaur sensation *
- And from that point on,
it just exploded.
- [News Anchor] Barney and friends attract
nearly two million toddlers every day.
- Every time I see him,
I could give him a big hug.
- [News Anchor] The highest watched children's show
on public television.
- Barney became an icon in the entire culture.
- Hi, Barney!
- Barney's like part of our family.
- Kids love it,
they learn from it,
and they have the music that they love,
they dance and sing to it.
- Each day now we still find ourselves saying,
is this really happening?
(soft music)
- [Ria] Barney really means so much to me.
Seeing all the diversity,
every different race represented,
and when they cast me,
they cast me as a Filipina.
- My family came from a country called the Philippines.
That's a long, long way from here.
- [Ria] And they gave me a storyline
with my Filipino heritage,
which was awesome.
You know, I got to sing happy birthday in Tagalog.
(singing in Tagalog)
I'm sorry.
I think that sometimes being Asian-American,
there's not always a place for us.
And so, it was a really special thing
and I think it's still special now.
- I have a new friend I want you to meet.
This is Tasha.
Today was her first day at school.
- [Hope] For me,
Barney was a huge source of light in my life.
I feel like without Barney,
my childhood wouldn't have been as joyous
and free as it was.
I was abused as a child, before Barney.
It was very painful.
It was very hard.
But Barney came along
and I got to get introduced to warmth and love.
- The whole experience is very personal to me.
I tried to portray him as the father
I wanted to be for my own daughter.
And we had a good long run
in which everything was going well.
- [Photographer] All right, everyone, on two, please!
Here we go.
(all laugh)
- [Lori] Over time,
I think Patrick's relationship with Barney was changing.
- Sometimes I'm introduced as the creator of Barney,
but I really feel most that I'm Barney's mom.
- [Lori] Barney was bigger than life,
it was something that was not actually a sibling,
yet shared a lot of characteristics of a sibling.
- [Man] Ms. Leach, how old is your son now?
The one you originally created Barney for?
- [Sheryl] He is now seven.
- [Man] Does he know what's inside Barney?
- [Sheryl] Yes, he does.
But Barney has been around since he was two
and to him Barney is a sibling
and he has kind of a love-hate relationship
just like all siblings do.
- Their family was changing,
he was growing up,
but I know at the end of the day,
Sheryl put him first and would have done anything for him.
(soft music)
- [Sloan] Sheryl wanted Barney to be in 200 countries
and I think he ended up being in, like, 225,
or something like that, countries.
But it was her vision
and she did it.
- I saw Barney as already a success
and that my role wasn't so much to create it,
my role was to clear the way for it,
and I was just the person running out front,
saying, "Get out of the way, he's coming through!"
- [Sloan] You know, there were not easy times,
because Sheryl and I were traveling all over the world
for months at a time.
When you are focusing so much of your time
on something else and not on your family,
your family will get a little jealous.
Same thing happened at my house, you know,
my husband had a full-time job
while I'm off all over the world.
It's a very delicate balance.
- I think the amount of time
that Sheryl had to be away from home
had to have been rough on her marriage with Jim.
And they're trying to keep things
as normal as possible at home,
but there's nothing normal about
what's about to happen from here on out.
- I want to make it clear that
I think Barney was a brilliant show.
You know?
I really do.
(Steve laughs)
(soft piano music)
But when something is so implausibly happy all of the time,
unfortunately,
in kind of the darker corners of all of our spirits,
there is a desire to find joy
in sort of tearing that down.
- It was hard for many grownups to watch
because it was continually upbeat,
it was, in a sense, unrealistic.
- [Brittany] In the early '90s when Barney was exploding,
it was completely at odds with
a lot of the general sentiment for Gen Xers.
(rock music)
- The actual, like, popular culture is Nirvana,
it's Pulp Fiction,
it's irony, and it's sometimes blood-soaked.
And Barney could not be more different than that.
Doesn't bode well for Barney.
(Butt-Head laughs)
- That was cool.
who are you waiting for?
- [Kids] Barney!
- Can I hear his name a little bit louder?
- [Kids] Barney! - Barney!
Barney, Barney,
Barney, Barney!
- [Announcer] Can I ask you to welcome
the man, the host, Mr. Jerry Springer, right over there!
(audience cheers)
- Oh, can I stand up?
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- 'Cause I'm going to.
(interviewer laughs)
'Cause you're trying to do me
what I used to do on Springer, by the way.
- [Interviewer] Oh, I know you did.
- Yeah.
And I love that. - [Interviewer] Yeah.
(interviewer laughs)
- "Would it be okay if you said so-and-so?"
How about shut the (bleep) up,
no, I'm not gonna do that.
(interviewer laughs)
My name is Burt Dubrow
and at the time Barney was getting huge,
I was living the talk show world.
I was producing "The Sally Jessy Raphael Show"
and "Jerry Springer."
- Where in the Bible does it say
we're supposed to start shooting each other?
- Read Revelations.
- Jerry Springer originally tried to be
more of a serious political social based talk show.
- [Burt] And one day, out of nowhere,
we were doing a show on race
and the first fight broke out.
Boom.
- One more time. - I didn't...
- You will...
(audience gasps)
- [Burt] Chairs went down.
Everything you sort of thing of the Springer show as
happened.
Everybody sit down, down!
We stopped the tape.
We were freaked out,
we didn't really know what to do.
- [Jerry] Let me first apologize for the disruption.
I don't want to be a part of anything
which brings violence into anybody's home.
- The next day,
I looked at the overnight ratings
and saw that we went from here to here.
We clearly saw a spike.
(exciting music)
- After the ratings success of this,
we realized that this is what audiences want.
- Okay.
- [Audience] Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!
- We saw that a little bit of anger,
a little bit of pain,
isn't necessarily a bad thing.
For television.
- My sister is one of the most scandalous bitches
in North.
- I puked on you!
- At the same time,
we're starting to see culture shift as a whole.
- [News Anchor] A generation on the cutting edge
or over the edge?
(rock music)
- I think kids these days,
they like vulgarness.
- The government says the drugs are getting stronger
and the users are getting younger.
- And seeing what buttons we can push,
what boundaries we can go against.
- [Gavin] Films like "Slacker" and "Reality Bites,"
people are trying to make sense of, like,
what does it mean to be a young person in the 1990s?
- It's irony, uh.
It's, well, I can't really
define it,
but I'll know when I see it!
- For Gen X,
being apathetic was cool
and being cool was everything.
- It was a time where people were suspicious
of anything that wasn't snarky.
- Suddenly edginess became the thing to do.
- He's ugly, he stinks, he has no talent,
his clothes suck.
- [David] David Letterman was one of the leaders
in ushering in this age of irony.
- "The David Letterman Show" is like garbage.
Dot, dot, dot.
It stinks!
- And if there's one show in the history of TV
that's not ironic,
it's Barney.
- [Steve] Barney,
it lacked irony, cynicism, and grit.
All things that I, as an adult,
came to understand the world was about.
It's not just about Barney
being on a children's television show
that makes him bashable.
I suspect maybe that it's because
in children's television, like "Sesame Street,"
there's something broken about Grover,
and there's something broken about Bert,
and there's something broken about
absolutely every single one of us,
but there's nothing broken about Barney.
- I love you, Barney.
- We love you too.
- Watch out, the lovable lug is now under attack.
- [Brittany] There's this urge to just hate it
because you don't understand it
and that's the basis for hating anything,
that's the basis of, you know,
greater concepts like homophobia and racism.
- Barney is purple,
and he's soft,
and he's vulnerable,
and there's, like, homophobia that goes along with that.
- [Jon Stewart] Barney, the singing dinosaur
who also happens to be purple,
and allegedly likes to hang out
with his pals, Tyrannosaurus Rex,
Tyrannosaurus Lance,
and Tyrannosaurus Bruce.
- Barney is coming out at the time that
the AIDS epidemic is at its peak
and of course there's a lot of very misdirected anger
towards the gay community.
Of course this made Barney a huge target.
- We're just not used to, in our culture,
seeing men that are kind,
and vulnerable, and sweet,
and if we do see that,
they're penalized.
- [News Anchor] Sheryl Leach now reports for work
in a gleaming Dallas skyscraper.
Her office quarters are so new,
that workers haven't finished perfecting
the purple carpeting.
But one of Leach's most valuable staff members
stays home.
- Well, so what are you gonna do today, sweetie?
- Well, my plans are to support the Barney enterprise.
(Sheryl laughs) In any way I can.
- [News Anchor] Jim Leach quit a top executive position
to help take up the slack at home
when Sheryl's persistence paid off.
- [Andrew] I think Baby Boomers were much more traditional.
You know, a father is the bread winner,
the mother stays at home with the kids.
And when Barney began taking off,
Jim went from being this provider
to stay at home dad with Patrick
and they kind of reverse roles,
you know, Sheryl became the bread winner of the family.
- [Lori] They could never have predicted
what was going to happen with Barney.
But I do think that Barney changed their lifestyle.
- [Stephen] And I think Sheryl and her family
found that they had a lot to cope with
besides what people would consider upsides of fame.
They had to pay a price for the other side too.
- [Lori] But I think that Sheryl
was so passionate about what she did
and I think just felt like
she was making a difference in Patrick's life
and making a difference in the lives of so many other kids,
despite all the haters.
- I went as Barney the purple dinosaur.
(audience laughs)
I got my ass kicked.
(audience laughs)
- He's been put into power
by the most heinous and evil force of the 20th century.
- Barney?
- [Stephen] At first, Sheryl didn't really care that much
about Barney bashing.
The idea was if we just ignore it,
it will go away.
- We can laugh, and cuddle, and sing happy songs!
(Animaniacs scream)
- Which it pretty much didn't.
(intense music)
- My name is Rob Curran
and my daughter, she loved Barney.
(cheerful acoustic music)
Michelle Christine loved singing the Barney songs,
she loved singing the "I Love You" song.
- I love you,
you love me.
- I went away on a business trip
and when I came back,
I was expecting my daughter to run to me
and say, "Oh, daddy, daddy, I'm so glad you're home!
You're home."
And that didn't happen.
She was basically glued to the TV set,
enraptured by Barney,
transfixed by Barney.
- Oh, goodie! (Barney laughs)
- And I felt a bit hurt.
(soft music)
So it was at that point
where I started to think about,
you know, all these things about Barney
that were really, really bothering me.
Barney only appeals to, like,
a three year old mentality.
Parents couldn't share Barney with their kids.
Barney just drove all the parents crazy.
- You love me.
- But I realized I had to do something.
- [News Anchor] You're watching the Channel Four
News Nightcast,
number one at 11.
- [Female News Anchor] He's big,
he's purple, and he's lovable,
but some non-fans would rather see him extinct.
The report of a club founded by a South Florida man
who thinks Barney is a prehistoric pain the neck.
- [News Anchor] Robert Kern, an advertising man,
spends his free time cranking out
the "I Hate Barney" newsletter.
- [Robert] We're not really a hate group.
What we are is we're a support group
for parents who have Barney addicts in the family.
- With "The I Hate Barney Secret Society,"
I just gave waste to all the fears
of all the parents.
- [Man] My daughter's two and a half
and she's a Barney fanatic.
- [Robert] Who were having problems with Barney.
- [News Anchor] Barney haters rejoiced.
They'd found an outlet for their frustration.
If your kids will let you join the Barney bashers,
all you have to do is send 50 cents
to "The I Hate Barney Secret Society."
- [Robert] Over a period of probably about six weeks,
we got 7,000 requests for the newsletter.
"I am sick of Barney.
We've had to suffer through a Barney birthday party
and I thought I was gonna puke."
It seemed like the whole world was rising up to,
you know, bash Barney.
- Unlike anything that ever happened
to Captain Kangaroo or Big Bird,
Barney is coming under vicious attacks
in what amounts to a Barney backlash.
- It's completely bland and toothless.
- My husband doesn't love Barney,
I'll tell you that much.
- [Man] There must be some ultra-high frequency message
being sent out
or something that just grabbed the brain
in a way that adults couldn't recognize.
- [Man] "Purple dinosaurs must die."
- [News Anchor] Now, what did lovable Barney do
to deserve this?
It's called Barney Bashing
and it's become a favorite pastime
amongst the college crowd.
(crowd cheers)
- My name is Travis Fox
and I was the originator of the Barney Bashing event
at University of Nebraska, Lincoln in 1993.
- Are you guys ready?
- We're ready!
(rock music)
- I was born in 1970.
So my character was Big Bird.
I think the reason that we specifically went after Barney
was he was the replacement to our "Sesame Street."
- I hate Barney.
Barney is the bane of my existence.
- [Travis] He was encroaching on our childhood.
So we decided that we had to push back.
We did a Barney pinata.
We did the stuffed animal beatings.
This one doesn't have any eyes left,
I actually watched somebody eat the eyes
right off of this doll.
And then the finale was Big Bird versus Barney
wrestling match.
- [News Anchor] With a right wing hook,
Barney hits the floor.
No more purple dinosaur.
(crowd cheers)
- You know, the sad thing is
those students are the future of our country.
- Yes.
- [Travis] We submitted the story of what we were doing
to the news.
That's when the phones started to ring,
the calls started to come in.
- [Rob] I had interviews with just about
everybody you can imagine.
It's just kind of crazy.
You know, even Jerry Springer called out of the blue.
- Barney was a phenomenon.
And talk shows dealt with phenomena.
So if there's an "I Hate Barney" fan club,
and an "I Love Barney" fan club,
bring them together,
and have two adults arguing about Barney.
There's a perfect show.
- And with the guy from Nebraska,
there's punching bags,
there's other bashing things.
You can go and run the track
or do something more constructive.
You know?
(Travis laughs)
- What is it that Barney says that upsets you?
What is the message that's so bad?
- There's massive, you know, resentment
in all of these families being held hostage
by an imaginary purple dinosaur.
- Call it what you want,
Barney Bashing was a protest.
- I was on to something here as,
like, an opinion leader.
- [Lori] Sheryl had a hard time understanding
why someone could be so angry and hateful
towards something that was made with such good intentions,
with such a good, pure heart.
- Somehow there's a kind of a faction
that finds all of that
almost as if that's not okay.
- Why do I hate Barney?
I don't, he's here to beat.
Let's beat somebody.
- [Stefania] Oh, we see Barney as a friendly,
dopey-ish, soft dinosaur, right?
So this goes against what we think
males should be like.
So there's a fear that if boys, especially,
are watching that type of programs,
it'll make them soft.
- "Barney Salutes the Alphabet"?
- There is probably resentment
that is very unexpressed, like,
we're so lousy as a culture
talking about our emotions,
even, like, naming our emotions.
There's so much divorce
from the experience of childhood that Barney depicts.
- You're all different in your very own ways.
- [Shannon] So many of us are just like,
"My childhood wasn't like that,
and I'm pissed, and I'm so angry."
I think that this is particularly true for males
in our society.
So many people don't even have the words to express that.
- We are not part of a family.
- [Shannon] That is why, like,
this violence feels so satisfying.
(gun fires)
- [Man] I hate you, Barney.
- It's America.
It's a culture of individualism,
and going it alone,
and machoism.
You know, Barney was symbolic of much more.
- I have a prepared statement,
and one of the big questions I wanna ask is
did I hit a nerve
with this "I Hate Barney Secret Society"?
Is this the first time
at the dawn of the social media era
where the world learned
to love the hate?
Really, nothing feels more stimulating
than nursing a giant grudge.
Nothing feels more stimulating
than nursing our angry temper.
And in 1993,
we put a name and a color
to our collective pet grudge.
And that name was Barney the purple (bleeps) dinosaur.
(gun fires) (man laughs)
(soft orchestral music)
- [Sloan] In '94,
everybody was up at Radio City Music Hall
for "Barney's Live Show."
Sheryl had really been working hard on that show.
(kids singing)
- At the time,
I was a features writer for the Dallas Morning News.
I was assigned a story on Sheryl Leach.
I decided to center the piece
around this Radio City musical event.
I was really trying to get a look at
how Sheryl's life had been affected,
and then by extension,
her, you know, her husband too, and her family.
Let's see.
It's hard knowing what I know,
I don't wanna sound like I somehow saw darkness coming,
'cause I didn't.
Sheryl and I had part of our interview
at a restaurant, Tavern on the Green.
And I think I got my first glimpse
of the pressure she was under
when she noticed that she had forgotten her wedding band
in Dallas.
You know, here she is,
the mother of Barney,
and she's going to, you know,
there was laser focus on her.
You know, everybody was dissecting everything she did.
I think there was just a whole lot going on.
- What has this done to your life?
Boy, this is kaboom.
Have you and your husband ever looked at each other
and said, "Honey, can we survive this?"
(Sheryl laughs)
- Yes, we have said that,
and we have survived it.
And we just feel very honored
to be working with something
that's making such an impact on the world.
- [Sloan] I remember Jim and Sheryl's son, Patrick,
wasn't at the premiere at Radio City Musical
and I remember they were saying
that he didn't want to come to the show.
- [Stephen] Barney was like another entity in the family
competing for attention.
I can imagine that Patrick wouldn't be crazy about that
comparison.
- It's really hard to be the child of an adult
who seems to have, like, a more popular fictional child.
Candice Bergen was the daughter of Edgar Bergen
who was, you know, like, a very successful ventriloquist.
- [Candice] You knew he wasn't real
and yet he was treated so much better than most humans.
I still don't, you know, think of him as a doll.
- [Charlie McCarthy] She had to compete with a puppet
for her father's love
and she resented it.
- One of Fred Rogers' children said
it's really hard growing up
having, you know, sort of a second messiah as your dad.
Christopher Robin Milne,
the child of A.A. Milne,
who did, like, all the "Winnie the Pooh" stories,
he had the name Christopher Robin.
It was this big weight on his life,
and made him profoundly unhappy.
When you have an adult who has given so much care to,
like, the children of the nation
and it not necessarily focused on you,
I think that's, like, a hard and complicated situation.
- He mentioned having a sibling rivalry
with a large purple dinosaur.
(soft music)
- [Lori] When Barney started to get big,
I just think that their family was changing,
you know, because Barney was changing.
And so, that's all that I observed.
- [Interviewer] What happened to Patrick?
- How he ended up the way he did?
I don't know, I think it could happen to anybody.
- So, I can't answer that.
- I really can't answer that question.
- I don't know.
I can't speak to that.
- I don't think it's my place to talk about it.
- [Lori] He never stood out,
in the years that I was around him,
as just a troubled little boy.
- [Interviewer] You say he never stood out like that?
- He did not, no.
- [Director] Two cameras, A, B, mark.
- [Interviewer] So tell us why we're here today.
- Well, I had said that I would give some background
on Sheryl and Patrick and when I babysat.
My conscience bothered me for
how I felt like I was dishonest to you
and I felt like I needed to fix that.
- [Interviewer] So there's more to say about Patrick?
(tense music)