My journey to watch most of Barney that I can in my lifetime continues. It is something I’m not only not proud of but it can be quite tough to watch them. Even as a kid I can’t ever say I found Barney particularly engaging. There’s just something about that purple T-Rex that I love and that’s the reason I make these sacrifices. To ease the pain at least I try to find themed episodes to be able to find something worth to go through and comment over. This time it’s time for the Easter Bunny.
So let’s begin with Barney’s Egg-cellent Adventure. Here we have detective BJ and someone stole an apple. Color me interested, this might be something I’m actually going to enjoy. One of the songs is about taking care of pets, I think it had plenty of potential but somehow the song did not inspire me with any confidence at all that the kids in the video and at home are understanding any of it. I guess it’s a good try and better than nothing but whatever. Definitely a missed opportunity of an entire episode’s theme.
Now there’s a bunny and an egg hunt in the video but besides that I really don’t see much or anything of easter in it. My guess would be they didn’t want to do anything that might be deemed as religious? I don’t know it’s only a guess but easter is not really ever mentioned which the name of the episode is basically implying it’s an Easter special. I decided to make sure I wasn’t missing anything an the Barney wiki confirmed it, these were just random episodes with a very vague connection to Easter. At least earlier Barney Home videos were original and not just compilations.
Mother Goose appears and that somehow makes sense to me that she’s related to Easter, don’t ask my why. The video in general definitely feels like random episode segments that they thought were somehow related to easter to be sold. But if this is the case, why not have an actual official Easter episode? It makes no sense and the vidoe would’ve been easier to market. With how many years Barney was around they could’ve easily done more than one special on Easter.
Now there are Easter books for Barney, quite a few of them actually:
Barney’s Easter Egg Hunt
Barney’s Easter Party!
barney’s easter parade
there’s more even semi games and compilation books.
The books clearly gave no f-cks about including easter iconography in their stories and making a short story themed on them. I mean it’s the most basic vanilla stuff you can think of but at least it’s there. It wasn’t that hard to have it and these were released in different eras of the franchise with years passing between them so it’s not like the didn’t have this idea to cash-in on the Easter Bunny.
I actually “read” through them kinda they were read to me from those videos that seem blatant copyright infringing channels that read kids books online. I do have to say not all readers are the same, some do creepy voices, some don’t, some don’t give a crap, others have the most boring adult voice you can imagine. Athough somtimes you’ll get one that is actually pretty decent. In Barney’s Easter case it wasn’t high quality.
Sad day for Barney as an Easter theme party. At least the Barney’s big surprise live on stage plush is all about easter.