It’s a pretty good indication the love was strong. When you show up at a shopping mall in Hartford, Connecticut, and the sidewalks are lined with parents and strollers, and you get inside, where you expect 600 people but there’s 6,000, that’ll bring you to the present. We’d get to see the love that was being poured out toward Barney, and that was just amazing. But then we would go out and do personal appearances, and we’d have meet-and-greets with kids and parents. We were in the studio so often, and we really didn’t see a lot of the reaction to the show. What did it feel like to be at the center of such a big hit? The show was ubiquitous when I was growing up in the ‘90s. “Barney & Friends” was a genuine pop culture phenomenon. We just synced up together.īob West holding a Barney plush doll. David Voss, who was shorter than me, fit the costume while I got the voice. Because of a fluke, they had started to build the costume before casting the voice. My agent recommended me to Dennis DeShazer, who was one of the producers of “Barney & Friends.” I auditioned with a lot of other folks. I worked as a robot character called The Blaster for a hospital in the Dallas area. I put together the world’s looniest demo tape. How exactly did you wind up voicing Barney?īob West: I started doing commercial work and narration in 1979 or so. NBC News: I've read that you started working as a voice performer in the late 1970s. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Thirty years after Barney first showed up on TV, however, West still believes that Barney's friends outnumber his haters. In his mind, the backlash was driven in part by kids trying hard to flex their “machismo.” In a phone interview last week, West (who appears in the docuseries) reflected on the success of “Barney & Friends” and offered a few theories on why Barney proved to be such a lightning rod. Image: Barney the purple dinosaur (Hit Entertainment / Everett Collection)īob West, a veteran performer who provided the voice for Barney from 1992 to 2000, recalls the production of “Barney & Friends” as a blissful experience that was sometimes shadowed by darker intrusions from the wider world, like a string of death threats he says he received via email. ![]() “Parents admit to a cordial dislike of the saccharine saurian, and no self-respecting second-grader will admit to liking Barney.” ![]() “Barney is on the receiving end of more hostility than just about any other popular cultural icon I can think of,” the University of Chicago academic W.J.T. The internet gave rise to new genres of anti-Barney humor that freely mixed winking irony with seemingly real rage. Urban legends about the character's dark secrets sprung up. NBA great Charles Barkley beat up Barney in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. School-age kids added violent lyrics to the “Barney & Friends” theme song. The docuseries explores how, throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s, Barney turned into a cultural punching bag, the subject of disdain from adults and derision from kids desperate to disavow their childish pastimes. ![]() He was inescapable.īut not everyone considered Barney a friend, a phenomenon at the heart of a new Peacock documentary series called “I Love You, You Hate Me.” (NBC News and Peacock are both owned and operated by NBCUniversal.) The character was an avatar of goodness, endearing himself to countless young children around the world even as he sometimes grated on their beleaguered parents. rex who extolled the virtues of love, kindness and cleaning up your toys. ![]() “Barney & Friends” was a mainstay of daytime television in the early 1990s, making a star out of the title character: a purple anthropomorphic T.
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