The absolute insatiable urge some people had in the mid-90s to create their own website or freeware game about killing Barney the Dinosaur. The collective man-hours that were spent on crafting something solely about hating a PBS character. How many of those people making this stuff were parents who were legitimately tired of hearing Barney songs, and how many were edgy Gen X college kids? I have a hunch. Wild times.
I can't even think of a modern day equivalent. Who would take the time to make a Cocomelon hate site?
I think most of them were way younger than college students, actually. I think probably nobody older than high school age was actually making kill-barney stuff. At least until the point that it had cycled around to being internet nostalgia joke.
I think some of it was probably, like, kids being of an age where they want to reject "baby stuff" because they're sick of being treated like children and want to indicate their maturity. Some of it was boys having really strong social pressure to distance themselves from any kind of nurturing emotions, whereas the iconic "barney song" explicitly says you love me. And some of it was probably a response to someone we didn't love and didn't want in our houses telling us "I love you, you love me, we're a happy family."
But I also think that Barney was genuinely obnoxious to people outside the target audience in a way that its predecessors (and most successors) haven't been. Like, maybe as 12-40 year old, you're not really interested in sitting down and watching Sesame Street, but it's perfectly tolerable to be in the same room as a kid who's watching it. Whereas Barney's obnoxious "funny voice" was extremely grating if you didn't find it funny.
Also, I feel like Barney was pushed on the public excessively. I can distinctly remember sitting through at multiple separate evening news reports that had a story about Barney.
I think one was "PBS has new children's show featuring a dinosaur character" and another was "PBS' new dinosaur-based children's show is popular with children." Both of which had a stock clip of Barney singing the extremely obnoxious song that gaslights you about your emotions.
So, yeah, I think a lot of the Barney stuff was genuine antipathy, not from adults who were tired of hearing it, but from male-socialized children who were wanting to signal their maturity and deny their compassionate urges rebelling against an inescapable figure trying to dictate their emotions. Add in access to a whole new mode of communication where there weren't any rules on what you couldn't say, and you get a whole lot of kill Barney media.
And also the song was annoying. Just, like, worse than "it's a small world" even.
After a few years some of it might have cycled through to "edgy college kids making an internet nostalgia joke about when we all wanted to murder a dinosaur" though.
