Why did the right react so strongly to such a benign figure? Well, there is a certain queerness inherent to Barney’s message. Throughout all this abuse, he never stopped smiling, never stopped singing, and never stopped dancing – in doing so he can be read as a symbol of queer resistance. Likewise, according to academic Elizabeth Tucker, Barney has long been subjected to homophobic attacks: in the 1990s, during the height of the AIDS crisis, there was a popular phenomenon of school children singing parody songs about him dying from HIV-related illnesses, while during the same era, his stuffed toys were regularly shot with guns and pulverised with hammers. In the eyes of today’s Christo-fascists, we are all sexually ambiguous purple dinosaurs. Over 30 years later, the right are still using this same line of attack against the queer community, which means that – regardless of how he identifies – Barney deserves our solidarity. One right-wing pastor, Joseph Chambers, wrote an excoriating diatribe against him, which described our purple pal as “an abomination onto the Lord”, and a “politically correct teacher of everything on the liberal left’s agenda”, who promoted paedophilia and homosexuality. This is certainly how many of his right-wing adversaries interpreted him, upon his ascent to stardom in the early 1990s. What we can argue, however, is that Barney is queer. There is no textual evidence to suggest that he is interested in fucking, or even that he possesses sexual organs – it’s just not that kind of show, nor is speculating on his off-air proclivities an interesting discussion. We can spend hours debating whether or not Barnie is gay, as young children have been doing since the early 1990s. Barney is a complex guy, neither outright hero nor villain, but he was without a doubt ahead of his time, someone who prefigured many of the trends which define our society today.īelow, we explore the most significant aspects of Barney’s legacy, character and political ideology.

With the “millennial disenchantment” angle sanded away, what’s left? What does Barney still have to say to the modern audience? As it turns out, quite a lot. Maybe think about leaving the kids at home… But it seems that the company has had a change of heart: CEO Ynon Kreiz recently assured future audiences that it will not be an “odd movie” after all.ĭaniel Kaluuya – who is attached to produce – has made enough excellent films that I’m willing to give this one a try, but it’s difficult to imagine that it will be any good. No mere exercise in cheap nostalgia, this was going to be an experimental, surrealist, “A24-type” study of millennial angst, inspired by the work of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman.

When Mattel’s forthcoming Barney film was announced, the company went hard on the idea that it was going pretty out-there.

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