There are other strange details in director Tommy Avallone’s film, like how the original actor inside the Barney suit, David Joyner, found a too-good-to-be-true (for media purposes, anyway) second career as a tantric massage therapist and healer, a practice that included, by his admission, sleeping with at least some of his clients. “All that success came at a price,” says Andrew Olsen, a devotee of “Barney” history and its memorabilia. But the popularity of Barney exacted an almost Shakespearean toll on her family, including her son, Patrick, who, it’s suggested, suffered for growing up in the shadow of a felt-covered “sibling” whose fame eclipsed him. The show also “hit a nerve at the dawn of the social-media era,” as Bob West, the original voice of Barney, observes, with music director Bob Singleton noting that material tailored to a three year old “will drive a grownup crazy.”īy tapping into an under-served, fresh-out-of-diapers demographic, Leach became fabulously wealthy, eventually selling the company for $275 million. Yet the two-part documentary is also the soapy story of the creator and her family, which ends up eclipsing the overreaching impulse to connect the purple dinosaur to something more culturally profound.Ĭonceived by Sheryl Leach, a resident of Allen, Texas, in 1988, “Barney” became an instant favorite among toddlers, in part because of its simple repetition and cheerfully cut-rate production values. Aside from planting that song in everyone’s head (again), “I Love You, You Hate Me” is an amusing look back at the “Barney & Friends” phenomenon, and the over-the-top torrents of hostility the PBS children’s show elicited.
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