“Barney & Friends,” the perennially beloved children’s TV program, made its first appearance on PBS in 1992, and from virtually the moment it arrived it was the kiddie show that launched a thousand misanthropic sick jokes. At the center of every joke was the same idea: that Barney, the big fuzzy purple dinosaur with the doofy voice and the message of love, was a character worthy of your contempt. He was too cuddly, too wholesome, too saccharine, too hideously adorable. He was such an insufferable mascot of synthetic affection that, in line with the jokes, he deserved a fate worse than death.
There was always something a bit kinky about Barney. I thought the funniest thing about him is that he had bedroom eyes; they seemed to peer out at the world with a little too much love. (That’s part of his weird accidental creep factor.) But the real point is that Barney has been a punchline for hipsters nearly as long as he’s been around. (“Death to Smoochy,” the Robin Williams comedy that took off on this sentiment, came out 24 years ago, in 2002.) So “Buddy,” a fairy-tale satire of “Barney & Friends” in which the central joke is that the Barney character is actually a vicious killer, feels like it’s arriving a bit late to the “We hate Barney!” party.
