UNTIL last week, the urge to punch purple dinosaurs in the face was entirely passé — sort of like wanting to punt Cabbage Patch Dolls or step on Tickle Me Elmo’s windpipe.
Such urges, after all, are excusable only when marketing is at its most shrill. (Let it go, man.)
But the owners of the Barney character have only themselves to blame if Barney-bashing experiences a renaissance — particularly among denizens of the Internet, for whom the character has been an object of gleefully malevolent parody, off and on, since the early days of the Web.
On Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco, filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in New York against Lyons Partnership of Allen, Tex., which owns the Barney brand.
The group’s aim is to bring an end to what it characterizes as the partnership’s relentless harassment of Web site owners who parody the Barney character, chiefly through threatening cease-and-desist letters from Lyons’s law firm in New York, Gibney, Anthony & Flaherty.
In this case, the foundation, along with the Aiken Gump law firm, is representing Stuart Frankel, a musicologist and freelance computer repair technician in New York who maintains a crude, obscure and inarguably minimalist site claiming that Barney is “the enemy” (dustyfeet.com/evil/enemy.html).
There are, in sum, about 200 cryptic words on the entire page, and two small pictures: one of Barney as he normally appears, and another of Barney defaced, amateurishly, with scribbled-on horns and sharp teeth.
•The site has been up, more or less unchanged, Mr. Frankel said, since 1998. And yet, Mr. Frankel has received at least four cease-and-desist notices — with intimations that his Internet service provider might be contacted, or that further “legal remedies” awaited if he did not remove the images — from one of the Gibney lawyers, Matthew W. Carlin, since 2002. The most recent letter came in June.
The foundation has answered those letters on Mr. Frankel’s behalf, pointing out in one response to Mr. Carlin in 2002 that parody is “protected expression under the First Amendment and a recognized exception to both copyright and trademark law.” The group also suggested that “making baseless legal threats” was a no-no.
A spokesman from Hit Entertainment, the parent company of Lyons Partnership, would say only that the company would not comment on pending litigation. But it’s clear that somewhere in the company’s chain of command, there is a failure to grasp the cultural tides that brought Barney and the Web together in the first place.
After all, for all of its success — either as instructive idol or potent child opiate, depending on your point of view — the purple dinosaur exploded onto the American landscape around the same time that the Internet was beginning to permit unprecedented sorts of expression.
So as Barney’s signature song “I love you, you love me” (itself, many critics have pointed out, blatantly ripping off the tune to the children’s standard “This Old Man”) reached an unnerving cultural crescendo, there was on hand a brand new medium in which to indulge the reaction — one that permitted crafty sorts to include not just words but defaced images, mocked-up songs, crude interactive games and other fare.
Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia, maintains a useful history of anti-Barney Internet humor — from the “Jihad to Destroy Barney,” which has evolved into a role-playing game, to fictionalized stories and images documenting Barney’s womanizing and crack habit.
Of course, the Web was also channeling animosity toward Barney in the offline culture, too. There was heated debate over whether the dinosaur was doling out sound values or peddling a glassy-eyed catechism that merely sedated children. And those without offspring often found the character at best treacly and at worst enraging.
In a Massachusetts district court in Worcester in 1994, Deborah McRoy testified that she was wearing a Barney costume outside a local pharmacy when Derrick McMahan suddenly tackled her, knocked her giant dinosaur head off and punched her. The Boston Herald reported that when Ms. McRoy asked him why, she said he replied simply, “Because I hate Barney.”
When the San Diego Chicken — another costumed creature — introduced a Barney-like character that he would pummel as part of his routine at sporting events, the Lyons company apparently decided that it had had enough, and sued for trademark violation.
In 1998, however, a federal court called the routine a clear parody — and therefore, not only a protected form of speech, but one unlikely to confuse anyone into thinking this was the “real” trademarked Barney.
Not long after this decision, Lyons appeared to turn its attention to Web sites that were making unflattering use of Barney’s likeness — once going so far as to send threatening letters to the Electronic Frontier Foundation itself for playing host to some Barney parodies.
For his part, Mr. Frankel is unsure if it was the San Diego Chicken or news of some other random assault on Barney that spurred him to create his own Web page, but he insists that he has no malice toward the character — which only adds to the absurdity of the situation.
“I was just practicing HTML coding,” Mr. Frankel said, referring to the computer scripting used to create Web pages.
He was just learning at the time, he said, back in the late 1990’s, and he thought the reaction to Barney was funny. So he made his little page.
By the time Mr. Carlin’s legal letters began arriving several years later, the hostility toward Barney had mostly vanished to the very fringes of the culture — and the Web — and Mr. Frankel said he hadn’t even visited his own site for a very long time.
•Odds are, no one else had either. There wouldn’t have been much reason to go there.
Now, should a court uphold Mr. Frankel’s rights to parody, the site will be forever enshrined as a victory for free speech, and Lyons will have cast a white hot spotlight onto this demon Barney — and what would otherwise have been a forgotten corner of Internet history — all by itself.
Mr. Frankel said that if the company had simply asked nicely in the beginning, he would have just taken the site down. Instead, he suggested, they came at him like a bully. And Mr. Frankel, who said he was among many citizens beaten by overzealous police officers in New York City’s infamous Tompkins Square Park riot of 1988, said he was not about to be pushed around now by Barney’s bullies.
“Barney teaches you to ask nicely,” he said. “So they don’t follow Barney’s rules.”