Barney Balloon Collapsed During 1997 Thanksgiving Parade: ‘We Watched Barney Die’
Oh, the humanity!
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is a long-standing holiday tradition, with children’s favorite cartoon, movie and TV characters inflated to the size of office buildings and strutted down the streets of Manhattan. For many, watching the festivities is a cherished childhood memory, but for some kids watching in 1997, it was the stuff of nightmares.
High winds threatened the 71st Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from the get-go. While the wintry weather was uncomfortable for the marching bands and beauty queens, blustery breezes were devastating for the infantile inflatables. The Cat in the Hat was pummeled, colliding with a lamppost and knocking off one of his Seussian arms. A punctured Pink Panther had to be forcibly deflated by the NYPD — and this was in the days before bodycams.
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Most traumatic, however, was the apparent demise of Barney. Like the Cat in the Hat, the purple dinosaur was the victim of a violent lamppost that ripped a hole in his side. As Barney slowly imploded, volunteers and police officers teamed together to wrestle his flailing fuchsia frame to the ground. Forty-three-mile-per-hour winds whipped the balloon to and fro.
Not everyone was wrecked, though. According to People, Barney haters were well represented in a crowd divided between cheers and boos. NYPD officers stabbed the balloon repeatedly in their attempts to deflate it, per the Associated Press, causing at least one child to shout with glee, “Barney’s dead! He’s dead! YEAH!” Another kid agreed: “That was cool!”
AP reported that 1997 wasn’t the first year in which beloved characters met their doom either. Sonic the Hedgehog got into it with, you guessed it, a lamppost in 1993, resulting in falling debris that injured a police officer. Raggedy Ann snapped a light post in 1986, the same year that Superman lost his left hand to aggressive Central Park trees.
But Barney’s destruction is the one that seems to have left a mark. TikTok versions of Barney’s fall have resurfaced, labeled with captions such as “Anybody else think about the time we watched barney d*e on national tv?” and “Emotional damage.”
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TikTokers who watched the Barney video lamented the day like Germans mourning the destruction of the Hindenburg. “The beginning of millennial trauma that continues to this day,” posted one user. “Barney was fighting for his life,” said another. “I remember yelling at the TV: NOT BARNEY!” someone else posted. “Mother tried turning the TV off but it was too late. I was already HYSTERICAL,” remembered a different TikToker.
Some people’s tragedy, however, is other people’s idea of entertainment: “The screams when it was live made it better.”
