‘Barney’ Music Director Got Death Threats Over Insufferable Songs

(This story has been edited and truncated to remove quotes that People has removed from its original story.)

Generations of parents and their grandparents run screaming from the room when the sickly sweet strains of Barney’s “I Love You, You Love Me” ooze out of televisions and iPads. But kids hate it just as much — ask any child what they think about that song and listen to them bust out a renegade version. 

It’s one thing to disparage the purple dinosaur but some viewers took it to another level. “There were certain things, certain messages that people would send that were pretty threatening,” says Bob West, the original voice of Barney, on the Generation Barney podcast, as reported by People. 

Some of those menacing messages came from unexpected places. “If you get a death threat from a middle school child who sends you an email, then it doesn’t make me feel bad for me,” he explains. “It makes me feel bad for them because they’re obviously going through something that’s leading them to act out this way.” 

David Joyner, the actor inside the Barney costume, also got anger directed his way. “Some people just feel the need to hate,” he says. “I was at a parade in New York. We’re coming around the corner and I see this man yelling, ‘I hate you, Barney! F*** you, Barney!’ I’m on this float, and he’s in front of a sea of people shouting this.”

The Barney scorn was such a phenomenon that Peacock did a two-park docuseries called “I Love You, You Hate Me” about viewers’ ire toward the show.

“They were gonna come and find me and they were going to kill me,” says West in the documentary, which also discussed a parody novel called The Jihad to Destroy Barney and a first-person-shooter video game with the purple dinosaur as a target. 

The Peacock series wants to paint the Barney hate as representative of something darker happening in society and that’s no doubt behind some of the outrageous behavior. But why wasn’t there a similar backlash against more popular children’s shows? Sesame Street never got this kind of blowback. Barney’s ‘90s contemporaries — Arthur, Rugrats, Blue’s Clues — remained beloved. What was it about Barney?

Let’s be clear — no one deserves threats of physical violence. But Barney & Friends did manage a new level of insufferable.