You may recall a time when Barney the Dinosaur was just about everywhere and that it was all so sickly sweet and almost impossible to bear.
Time's moved on and toddlers and children today are all about Peppa Pig, but for a time, it was all Barney. In a recent interview with Business Insider, the man behind the Barney suit - David Joyner - shared some of his experiences playing the big purple dinosaur from our imagination.
It got... weird, to say the least.
As Joyner tells it, he was inspired to play Barney in a dream where he gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the suit and that he thinks about a lot of career decisions by dreaming about them. No, really.
According to Joyner, "there's a lot of psychic energy in my family, and there's a lot of clairvoyance. And a lot of times, with me, if I'm trying to figure out a situation, I'll dream about it."
"So on the way to the audition, I'm sitting at a stoplight, and something says 'Look up.' So I look up, and there's this billboard. It says 'Breathe life into your vacation - Southwest Airlines.' And then it hits me. I had to breathe life into Barney in my dream. If I go into this audition and breathe life into this character, I'm going on vacation. And that's exactly what I did."
It doesn't end there, either. Joyner goes on to talk about how he played Barney by feeling energy, and that he'd meditate between filming shoots. As Joyner tells it, "when Barney's mouth is closed, I can't see anything. So what I would literally do is I would walk around my apartment as if I was blind. I would close my eyes, and I would try to feel energy. And try to feel the energy of anything that was around me."
This is basically like in The Simpsons when they meet Adam West and the camera slowly tilts as he talks about Batman not dancing anymore.
Via Business Insider
