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“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.
As a piece of satirical world-building, “Buddy” is exquisitely designed and executed. The movie was directed and co-written by Casper Kelly, the co-creator of Adult Swim who is best known for his cult short “Too Many Cooks,” a brilliantly unhinged take-off on ’70s and ’80s TV that’s ZAZ-level in its uproarious appreciation of how television makes even the worst things nice. “Too Many Cooks” crammed the entire cosmos of network TV into 11 minutes. In “Buddy,” Kelly tries for something comparable, expanding the joke of a take-off on “Barney” into a dreamy-kitsch act of satirical world-building. The movie works, and has a handful of inspired touches, yet a little of it goes a long way.
The opening half hour is a straight-up “Barney” spoof, and in its way it’s perfectly done. Buddy, the children’s mascot, is a big fuzzy orange unicorn with a kerchief and a yellow mane and a purple heart on his chest and a voice (supplied by Keegan-Michael Key) that nails that nasal Barney geekiness, right down to the way he emits a reflexive chuckle at his own jokes. (It’s worth noting how that chuckle, and much else about “Barney,” was lifted from “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” only shorn of all irony and bite.) Kelly ingeniously recreates the outdoor-set-as-PBS-studio-bubble effect, giving Buddy a theme song to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (“You love Buddy, yes you do…”), as well as innocuous background music that punctuates everything, anthropomorphic characters like Mr. Mailbox and the Worry Well and Strappy the backpack, educational songs like “You Gotta Be Scared to Be Brave,” along with a dash of ridiculously wholesome ’90s hip-hop. The kids, of course, are all saints…except for Josh, who refuses Buddy’s invitation to dance. That’s where the trouble begins.
The camp hatred of Barney is really a leftover 1960s counterculture jape. Too sweet to be true, he is seen as a corporate fake marketed to children by The Man. Therefore, the notion that Barney has a secret aggressive side is a kind of Freudian potshot, an insistence that there’s an ugly violence he must be repressing. I always kind of felt that way about Barney — at least, until I had kids of my own and started watching “Barney” with them (especially the wild direct-to-video “Barney In Outer Space”), and I saw that the rap on “Barney” was actually a bit much. I don’t think it’s a show that’s too squeaky-good; today’s kids have more than enough time ahead to channel-surf depravity. But “Buddy” serves up the idea of Barney as homicidal maniac with a demented gusto, in part by keeping it within the pasteboard-and-fuzzy-fur texture of the show. By the end of that first half hour, he has been unmasked as the bloody avenger of the backyard.
But Casper Kelly is just getting started. “Buddy” then leaps into the suburbs, telling the story of a sitcom-worthy family, led by Topher Grace and Cristin Milioti as the parents. Now it’s Milioti’s character who starts to become unhinged, as she conjures the idea that she had a ghost child and then, seeing a “Buddy” episode, gets pulled into the TV set, and another dimension, like something out of “Poltergeist.” This is where Kelly’s pop-culture omnivorousness begins to make itself felt. He turns “Buddy” into a genre mash-up that takes off on everything from slasher movies (“That’s all the time we have!” says Buddy after half his face gets singed off like Freddy Krueger) to Little Red Riding Hood’s journey into the woods to “The Wizard of Oz” to the arrival of a singing cowboy (Clint Cowboy) and his Howdy Doody puppet pal to the id of Buddy laid bare…as a black-demon-skeleton version of Godzilla!
For all that, I got more mild chuckles than big laughs out of “Buddy,” and I glanced at my watch a couple of times, because this kind of conceptual satire doesn’t always have the narrative propulsion a movie needs. Yet Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In “Buddy,” he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture. “Buddy” is a surreal contradiction, a hate letter made with love.
English (US) ·