“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” I said solemnly. “I have something difficult to tell you, and I need you to listen.” My children looked up from the game that they were playing in anticipation of the bad news I was going to deliver. “Barney is dead,” I said gently. “He died tragically. And suddenly. But he’s no longer.”
Barney was a purple dinosaur of someone’s imagination. He was irritating and well behaved, loved everyone, and always cleaned up. He was humourless, but laughed all the time.
I’m convinced that he’s the reason Americans shoot each other with automatic weapons whenever they have a bad day. The Barney generation was taught that being pathologically well behaved is an aspiration. Which is why they have no idea how to behave when things aren’t pleasantly purple.
The act of telling my kids that he was dead seemed extreme. But in my defence, I didn’t want them to grow up to be serial killers. Needless to say, my wife was unimpressed with my strategy, but she knew that she, too, would benefit from a house free of, “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family” playing incessantly in the background.
And then. If 2023 wasn’t challenge enough, it’s been announced that Barney is back.
According to CNN, Toy giant Mattel announced that Barney, the friendly – and, let’s be honest, cringe-worthy to a large group of millennials who watched him as pre-schoolers and their parents – purple dinosaur is making a triumphant return to TVs and toy shelves next year.
“With our modern take on Barney, we hope to inspire the next generation to listen, care, and dream big,” says Mattel.
One can only imagine what that means. Following my logic, if Americans treat conflict with semi-automatic weapons because of Barney V1, it’s not difficult to imagine what the next generation would be capable of.
The creators of Barney have also announced that he – not sure if “he” is Barney’s preferred pronoun – will have a new look. He appears as though he’s fresh out of gastric bypass surgery, having been slimmed down, sporting a new nose, and much bigger eyes.
Unfortunately, that voice is likely to remain the same, and I anticipate that the message will be even more “goody two shoes” than ever before.
The danger with Barney is that the show values the boring. It sends a message that in a perfect world, everyone behaves, loves each other, is always polite, and cleans up after themselves.
The truth is the opposite. The world is messy, fun, and full of humour. And although we might strive to love each other, we don’t do so all the time. In fact some of the time we don’t even like the people we love.
As Jews, we believe that in messianic times, there will be resurrection of the dead. Let’s have Barney stay where he is until that time.
