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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1993-04-08
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TELEVISION, Page 70STUUUUPENDOUS!
Adults wince, but a giant huggable dinosaur is all the rage
on children's TV and at America's toy counters
By MICHAEL RILEY/ATLANTA
He's purple and green and 6 ft. tall, with perfect
TV-anchor teeth and bright yellow toenails. He has a doofy
chuckle and a bouncy waddle, and when he isn't singing syrupy
songs ("I love you/ You love me/ We're a happy family"), he has
a habit of exclaiming, "Stuuuupendous!" He gets 10,000 fan
letters a week, and his recent tour of America's malls had to
be cut short because the frenzied tens of thousands who turned
out to catch a glimpse of him created safety hazards.
He's Barney, a pudgy, fuzzy Tyrannosaurus rex who stars on
the smash children's public-television show Barney & Friends.
Virtually every day, some 2 million youngsters do not so much
watch the show as enter into it, talking back to Barney, singing
and dancing along with him.
With such a constituency, can the merchandisers be far
behind? There are Barney dolls (shhh! It may be a surprise for
somebody special, but President-elect Bill Clinton reportedly
just bought a 4-ft.-high model from F.A.O Schwarz) as well as
Barney bed sheets, books, earrings and underwear. JC Penney has
opened Barney boutiques, which sell everything from jogging
outfits to necklaces. "It's going to be the hottest toy this
Christmas, because every two- to five-year-old child in America
knows who Barney is," says Standard & Poor's toy analyst Paul
Valentine. Next year Hasbro intends to market an 18-in.-tall
talking Barney. Plans for a network-TV special, a Barney movie,
a line of books and a record deal are all in the works. Watch
your flank, Big Bird.
Unlike Big Bird's Sesame Street, Barney & Friends is a
simple, slow-paced show, more like an after-school play group
than a slick TV production. In each episode, a multicultural
cast of children uses imagination to bring Barney, a small
stuffed animal, to full-size life (embodied by actor David
Joyner inside the purple-and-green suit, with Bob West providing
the voice). Together the children and Barney spend 30 nonviolent
minutes exploring a theme -- ranging from recycling to counting
-- through song, dance, crafts and creative play. Says creator
Sheryl Leach: "It has a magical simplicity to it that parents
don't understand."
Many parents, in fact, want to throttle Barney as much as
their children want to hug him. "The kids love it," says Leah
Horton of Atlanta, a mother of three, "but you don't want to be
in the same room when it's on." Cloying and sappy as Barney's
manner seems to adults, it, like the rest of the amateurish
production, is carefully calculated to keep a two-year-old
transfixed. "We kind of have to say, `Bear with us as we talk
to your children,' " explains executive producer Dennis
DeShazer, "because it is a mystery to a lot of adults."
But there is no mystery about the spell Barney casts on
children. One Washington toddler wakes up each morning and
greets his parents with an eager, "Hi, watch Barney." A
four-year-old girl in Pensacola, Florida, who learned that
Barney appears on TV while she is attending preschool,
threatened to boycott school until her parents agreed to
videotape the show for her. At a Connecticut elementary school,
first-graders pay homage to a Barney poster on the door before
they walk into the classroom.
Barney was born five years ago when former schoolteacher
Leach could not find a video to hold her two-year-old son's
attention for more than five minutes. One day, as she drove
along a freeway, she got the idea for her own videos. "The
thought was, How hard could it be? I could do that," Leach
recalls. With her knowledge of kids, and with help from a
father-in-law who owned a video-production facility, she joined
with a friend, Kathy Parker, to develop Barney. He started out
as a cuddly teddy bear but evolved ultimately into a snuggly
dinosaur. Leach and Parker hawked the initial videos to
preschools and slowly built a national following.
Then one Super Bowl Sunday, Leora Rifkin, 4, daughter of
Larry Rifkin, a programming executive with Connecticut Public
Television, pulled a Barney tape off the video-store shelf and
went home to watch it. And watch it. And watch it. Seeing the
magic, her father called Leach's company, the Lyons Group, and
they teamed up to produce 30 PBS episodes, which started airing
last April. When PBS considered canceling the show last summer,
parental howls saved it. Now 20 new episodes, which will
introduce another dinosaur character, are scheduled for next
year.
Like many a superstar before him, Barney is learning that
fame can be a heavy burden. A legal team is scrambling to quash
a rash of Barney impostors. And grandiose plans to market and
export the creature may, through overexposure, make him a
victim of his own success. Still, not a bad fate, given what
happened to the rest of the world's dinosaurs.