do kids these days make up songs about killing the wiggles and doc mcstuffins or did barney the dinosaur just unlock some latent primal rage in my generation
Listen I had a childhood pre-Barney and we didn’t sing about killing our childhood characters then as far as I am aware so I am inclined to suspect that goddamn purple dinosaur just struck some kind of collective nerve.
I grew up in a transitional period. When I was really young, we had Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, and we had nothing but unconditional love for them.
Then Barney came along, and so great was our rage that we would need to slaughter not only him but also Baby Bop to slake our bloodthirst.
Then as far as I can tell came the Wiggles, Lazytown, and Blue’s Clues, and all of them are still quite beloved.
Maybe there’s still some primitive part of our brain that knows to fear dinosaurs?
Yeah I was born on the tail end of Barney and that was the only one we ever wanted dead
Kids, I won’t lie: that was a long weekend. More ups and downs that I can count. It was a twisting turning road that led to the end of the aisle, and not everything along the way was perfect. To be honest, not everything to follow would be perfect either, but what is?
Here’s the secret, kids: none of us can vow to be perfect. In the end, all we can promise is to love each other with everything we’ve got, because love is the best thing we do.
And on that lovely spring evening, that’s exactly what Barney and Robin promised each other. And it was legendary.
So I was thinking about the songs about killing Barney and the one I remember (late 90s-early 2000s Indiana) starts “I hate you, you hate me, let’s hang Barney from a tree” and that’s all I remember.
I was just talking about this song and how many different variations there are! Same time, NYC, we sang “I hate you, you hate me/let’s team up and kill Barney/stick a knife in his back and kick him out the door/no more stupid dinosaur.”
I always wanted to catalogue those meme-y kids songs and all their variations. Thanks for giving me this one!
We need to do a full-on anthropological study of this phenomenon.
I don’t think anyone ever has…to my knowledge. It would be a good topic
Okay: reblog with your general location, time you sang it, and what your version of this threat on Barney’s life was.
You guys are all from different places. And I think we discussed this at one point. You start.
I grew up in the Farmington Valley of CT mid-90s to early-00’s and the most common anti-Barney song I remember singing was
“Joy to the world
Barney’s dead.
We barbecued his head!
What happened to his body?
We flushed it down the potty
Around and around it goes
Around and around it goes
Around and around and around it goes!”
I got tagged, so here goes:
I’m from central MA. We had the ‘Joy to the World’ parody listed above, and also:
“I hate you, you hate me, Let’s gang up and kill Barney With a great big punch and Barney’s on the floor Kill that stupid dinosaur/no more stupid dinosaur”
What really bugs me is I don’t recall the ending of our version.
“i hate you, you hate me, we’re a crappy family with a (??? involved violent murder of barney and the other children)”
i cant believe i forgot it???
im arizona and had the same version as sayla-aris (the one abt flushing his head down the toilet) BUT ALSO we had
i hate you, you hate me, lets get together and kill barney with a great big shot gun shoot him in the head now that purple freak is dead
You know what I am in freaking Colombia, Latin America, and we had our own song in Spanish, can remember only the beginning tho, wtf is up with this? What was the hate that surpassed countries and languages about that poor dinosaur.
That’s what I find so fascinating, there are variations of it EVERYWHERE.
What do you remember of it in Spanish?
Chicagoland area, but over the Indiana line.
We had:
“I hate you
You hate me
Let’s all go and kill Barney.
Shoot him in the head and nail him to a door
No more stupid dinosaur.”
We also had “Joy to the world” with a different ending…..but I cannot remeber it.
The violent song remeber best was a song that skiier kids in Michigan sang. To the tune of jingle bells’s verse:
“Crashing through the snow,
On a pair of broken skiis
Down the hill I go,
Smashing into trees.
The snow is turning red.
I think I might be dead.
All I want for Christmas is
A hospital and bed.”
Long Island, NY, we didn’t kill Barney, but we did:
I hate you, you hate me, We’re a dysfunctional family. With a pinch and a punch and a kick from me to you, Won’t you say you hate me, too?
