Hey guys! Welcome back to another review. As mentioned in my recent blog update post, I decided to start a segment on strictly family friendly/child friendly shows, books and movies from my childhood as a complement to my new Disney reviews segment. Which is a bit more encompassing than this segment is. Today I'm starting with a series that was part of my childhood through most of the '90s, Barney & The Backyard Gang, which would become the children's Television series, Barney & Friends, which my siblings and I also watched. Today I'm looking at the first video to be produced in this series, The Backyard Show, released in 1988.
Released on August 29th, 1988, The Backyard Show was the first tape in the Barney & The Backyard Gang series to be released. Though oddly enough the third tape in the series, A Day at the Beach serves as a prequel to this tape as that's where the majority of the characters met the big purple Dinosaur, but it was released after this one was. Before I get into the tape itself, I'd like to give you some background information on the series as a whole.
Barney & The Backyard Gang was created by Sheryl Leach, a former school teacher who couldn't find any videotapes that would not only entertain them but educate them as well.
Sesame Street had episodes on VHS and some direct-to-video specials, but the direct-to-video market was a relatively untapped source in the late '80s, with home video still being somewhat new at the time. So with some money from her father-in-law and the use of a studio, built by her father-in-law's company, Sheryl, and her friend, Kathy Parker, along with producer Dennis DeShazer, created Barney the Dinosaur. Barney was originally going to be a blanket (I kid you not), but then morphed into a teddy bear, because a blanket would be too hard to keep children's interest. That idea didn't last long because Sheryl's then two year old son loved Dinosaurs, like pretty much every kid in the '80s and '90s, so Barney became a purple Tyrannosaurus Rex.
If you were a kid anywhere between 1992 and 2010, this is what you remember Barney looking like. Well, back in 1988, Barney didn't look anything like this. In fact, he looked like...
Here he looks more like a Tyrannosaurus Rex and how they were portrayed in other movies and TV shows in the '80s and '90s. He's also a much darker shade of purple than he would be in his more well known design. The costume was also operated the same way Big Bird's costume was operated by Carol Spinney on Sesame Street. Which is pretty cool.
You can tell that The Backyard Show was independently made as it looks pretty cheap on the production side of things. Which is actually the charm of it for me because it shows that you don't need elaborate sets or costumes to be entertaining. Only three locations are featured in this episode, with the majority of it taking place in the garage that acts as the kids's club house. Still though it's pretty impressive for a late '80s independent video production.
The visual effects are pretty cool too as they use some animation for certain songs. The best visual effect in this, and the next two tapes, is the effect used when bringing Barney to life. While in later tapes it would be more instantaneous, here it's a slow process that apparently includes wind as the kids' hair is blowing around as they watch Barney come to life. Like I said, it's less elaborate after A Day at the Beach, with the audience never seeing him return to his plush form after the first three tapes, but it's still a cool twinkling effect.
What's interesting about these early tapes is that Sandy Duncan, who played Peter Pan in a stage play of the original J.M. Barrie story, as well as one of the leads in the TV sitcom The Hogan Family, appears as Michael and Amy's mother. This tape and A Day at the Beach are the videos where Sandy Duncan has the most screen time as she sings "If You're Happy and You Know It" with the kids in the middle of the show, which I will get to shortly. Bob Reed, who plays Michael and Amy's dad, gets the most screen time in this episode as it centres around the gang getting ready to put on a show for his birthday, but only appears briefly in the next two tapes.
The kids themselves are pretty great. These are the Barney kids that I grew up watching. Though half the gang featured in this tape wouldn't make it into Barney & Friends, which I will talk about more when I get to the final tape in the series, Rock with Barney. Michael, Tina and Luci are the ones that continue on with the TV series once that began in 1992, though by the show's third season all three of them would be gone as well. Also this tape and the next, Three Wishes, the only tape in the series I didn't see as a kid, are the only ones where Luci is wearing a baseball cap the whole time.
Barney himself is portrayed very differently here than he is in later episodes. While he's voiced by Bob West, who would voice Barney through this series as well as the first six seasons of the TV show, the character is more parent like in these early tapes. You can tell when Amy says that she can dress up as a bumblebee and "sting" the kids and he warns the kids that bees are not something to play with as they can hurt you. And then later, when Adam wants to pretend to be Humpty Dumpty by climbing on a small ladder, Barney encourages him not to do so, making way for the actual Humpty Dumpty to appear through Barney's magic so they could sing the song, "Humpty Dumpty".
Speaking of Barney's magic, he plays it more coy with his abilities in this tape. After they sing "This Little Piggy" Jason asked how Barney made the animated pigs appear and Barney tells him that he didn't do it, the kids did, using their imaginations. Yet, in later tapes and in the TV show we see Barney teleport the kids pretty much anywhere and conjure up pretty much anything. So I thought that was interesting.
By the way there's something I've always been confused about with this tape in particular, though not so much the later tapes or the TV show. At one point Amy and Jason see that Michael and Amy's mom is coming to see them, and suddenly the kids frantically try to hide Barney. Why? I mean Barney ends up in the house later in the episode, and in the next episode they tell her about Barney and explain to her that he's their make believe friend. So if Barney is the make believe friend of the children, why did they frantically try to hide him? It's the only tape in Barney's history where this happens.
Also, I noticed something while I watched this tape on YouTube last night that I never noticed before. Tina sits in a red wagon during the song "Bumpin' Up and Down" and on the side of the wagon it says Big Red Wagon. What's funny about this is that the song's chorus goes "Bumpin' Up and Down in my little red wagon". Yeah, I never noticed that before.
I first saw
The Backyard Show sometime in 1992, following that year's re-release of the entire
Backyard Gang series on VHS, just before
Barney & Friends debuted on PBS. I don't remember if we got this for Christmas or if I got it as a birthday present, I just remember getting it. I also don't remember if my siblings and I started watching
Barney & Friends before we got this tape, or after. I just know that we had seen both by January 1993 when we went to Los Angeles, California for a special vacation for a week because we watched the TV show on the local PBS station in our hotel room before going to Disneyland our first full day in LA.
As you probably noticed from the images I'm using in this blog, the cover art for the VHS box changes slightly between editions. For example, the original 1988 cover, which I'm using for this review's cover image, has a picture of Sandy Duncan in the upper left corner and has her with Barney and the kids. However, the first re-release (shown directly above), which happened in 1989 to coincide with the release of the second tape, Three Wishes, maintains the Sandy Duncan image in the upper left corner, but the central image is just one of Barney and the kids with some balloons. The 1990 re-release, shown further up in the review, removes Sandy Duncan entirely from the box, as her character didn't appear in the three tapes released that year. Her picture in the upper left corner is replaced with an image of Barney as he appears in all three tapes released in 1990 (Waiting for Santa, Barney's Campfire Sing-Along, and Barney Goes to School).
The final re-release, which is the one I owned as a kid, with the cover image I use above the paragraph I talk about having the release, changes the image of Barney to one of him where he looks like he does in the last two tapes of the series (Barney in Concert and Rock with Barney) and the first season of Barney & Friends, which is his traditional appearance. Also, the Barney & The Backyard Gang logo is removed from the box entirely, removing any reference on the packaging of it being part of Barney & The Backyard Gang. That happened with all of the 1992 re-releases of the Backyard Gang tapes, making it in line with the two non Backyard Gang tapes released that year.
The success of this tape led to seven more tapes to be released between 1989 and 1991. Then in 1992, the series attracted the attention of Larry Rifkin, who was the former head of Connecticut Public Television, when he bought one of the tapes for her daughter. He liked the idea and contacted Sheryl Leach to bring Barney to TV. This led to Barney & Friends, which ran from April 6th, 1992 until November 2nd, 2010 on PBS. It was a huge success, and spawned even more direct-to-video and direct-to-DVD specials that ran until 2017, seven years after the Television show ended and 29 years after The Backyard Show first came out.
In 1998, Barney appeared on the big screen in the movie, Barney's Great Adventure. It flopped at the box office and was a failure with critics, because, naturally only little kids would be enchanted by this movie as they're the target audience for Barney and critics would have a difficult time with it being it's not aimed at people their ages. I don't remember if I saw commercials for this movie on TV in 1998 or not, but given that I was no longer the demographic for Barney, chances are pretty good that I didn't see anything about this movie and it just went by me.
Movies, Television, and merchandise aren't the only things The Backyard Show led to. Carey Stinson, who was the actor inside the Barney costume for live shows and personal appearances from 1991 until 2001, and then on the TV show from 2001 until 2010, began a podcast in 2019 called Purple Tales, about the behind the scenes of Barney & Friends with former Barney kids appearing on the show as guests, with Ricky Carter, who played Derek from Waiting for Santa until a guest appearance in season 3 of the TV show, and Brian Eppes, who played Michael from The Backyard Show until the end of the show's second season, being the only Backyard Gang performers to appear on the show. Then later that year, Purple Tales became Purple Roads, which shifted the focus from Barney to children's entertainment in general. It's a fascinating listening experience as you hear stories about the production of these shows, which, unless it's a big franchise like Sesame Street or a renowned series like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, you don't get to hear too much of that information about children's shows.
So how does this tape hold up now that I'm an adult? Surprisingly it holds up pretty well for what it is. Do I recommend watching it? Not unless you have a kid and want to relive the nostalgia of being a child and watching Barney. I also wouldn't recommend watching this if you didn't watch Barney as a kid. If you did watch Barney when you were little but started with Barney & Friends at any point between 1992 and 2010, I would recommend watching it on YouTube if you're interested in seeing how Barney began and what the series was like before Barney & Friends started.
Alright guys that's gonna be it for me for today. Sorry for the length of this review but since this is not only the first Barney tape ever, but the first Barney tape I'm reviewing on this blog, I wanted to include as much information as I could like I did the other day with The Bare Necessities. The next reviews, Barney or otherwise, will be much shorter. My original plan was to come back on Saturday with my review of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, but I'll actually be back tomorrow because the trailer for the new Hulu series (which will air on YTV here in Canada), The Hardy Boys dropped yesterday and I want to talk about it. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Bye.
Links
*All images taken from the Barney Wiki
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