Keep Barney Pure: “B*rney may be a dinosaur who chants about hugs and love, but his lawyers aren’t afraid to
get nasty when protecting their plump, purple trademark.
In the last few weeks, a law firm representing Lyons Partnership — which owns the rights to B*rney — has
stepped up its efforts to yank hundreds of humor sites poking fun at the children’s cartoon character that
so many Internet users love to hate.” Wired It’s extremely curious to me why B*rney almost universally inspires such a visceral revulsion among so many, myself among them. Before I had children, I’d never seen B*rney and was only aware of its existence from the disdain showered on it on the ‘net, e.g. in usenet groups with names like alt.tv.barney.kill.kill.kill or the like. As cynical as I fancy myself to be about conformity, I could dismiss the phenomenon as being like schoolyard teasing, jumping on the bandwagon to hate someone that everybody else with nothing better to do loved to hate. You know, the kind of thing to which the proper rejoinder is, “Get a life.”
But more recently, as a parent who begrudges my children very little that I notice delighting them, I still can’t sit in the same room when Barney comes on. My son’s B*rney stage, partly because of his parents’ discouragement, was quite brief, but my daughter is smackdab in the middle of being enthralled by him and it shows no sign of slowing. The closest I can come to understanding my contempt is that it’s about the enraging, smarmy falsity of the good feelings both B*rney and his cast of fixed-plastic-smile kids have. I imagine it’s similarly painful for them. How I long for a repeat of that fabled children’s television scandal in which a microphone gets accidentally left on and the character’s candid expression of disdain forever dethrones him!
It fascinates me that grownups — but unfortunately not the legions of entranced children — can universally detect such falsity and react with such visceral pain to it. Seems built in; wonder what the evolutionary psychologists would have to say about the adaptive value to social interaction of having such a “bullshit meter.”
And can you imagine how twisted into knots might be the innards of the recent law-school graduate waking up each morning to remember that his firm’s assignment has given him a full-time career made out of defending the B*rney trademark?
