Hold Up, Barney the Dinosaur is from North Texas?
Barney the Dinosaur educated kids for a couple of decades and I had no idea the show was right here in Texas.
'Barney & Friends' premiered in 1992, I was three at the time, so I definitely was a Barney fanatic. One of my favorite tapes in preschool was a Barney beach episode that I watched several times back in the day. Barney was canceled back in 2009, but he had a lasting impact on a lot of kid's childhoods. I still have that cleanup song stuck in my head all these years later.
Turns out a new podcast started this week called Purple Tales. Carey Stinson is the host and he was actually the guy in the Barney suit. Every week he has on a different guest who was a part of the show and they talk about the history of Barney. I had no idea about this, but Barney was filmed in Dallas.
It was originally just a series of educational tapes, but eventually became a series for PBS. The show was actually filmed in three different studios, all in the North Texas area. The original tapes were filmed in Dallas. The first couple of seasons were shot at Color Dynamics Studios in Allen, Texas. They would later move to the Studios at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, and then to Carrolton.
I can't believe that such a big part of my childhood was filmed just a couple of hours away from us. Does this mean if I lived in the area, I could have been one of those kids on the show? Man, that would have been pretty cool when I was three-years-old. If you want more info on the creation of Barney in Texas, check out the Purple Tales Podcast.