With great popularity comes backlash – something Barney, the big purple dinosaur who graced our television screens throughout the 1990s, knew all too well. Recall the parody of the “I Love You” song that ended every episode of “Barney & Friends:”
“I hate you, you hate me, let’s get together and kill Barney.”
With his new film, Casper Kelly is diving into the collective psyche that made all of us hate a figure like Barney so much. “Buddy” stars Keegan-Michael Key as Buddy the Unicorn, a Barney-like figure who just wants the kids on his 90s-era TV show to love and respect him. And when they don’t, he acts out in violently erratic ways.
The Atlanta-based Kelly comes from a background of working on kids’ shows and adult cartoons, from “CatDog” in the 1990s to Adult Swim’s “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell.” “Buddy” feels of a piece with much of his other creative work (“Too Many Cooks,” “Adult Swim Yule Log”) – taking a piece of seemingly innocuous pop culture and diving into its darker depths.
Ahead of the film’s release this weekend, I spoke with Kelly about the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve heard you talk about this a little bit, and it feels kind of obvious that Barney is the main inspiration here. But what made you want to tackle this topic specifically? Where did the story come from within that inspiration?
Casper Kelly: It’s a little unusual, because usually [with] my work, I had the idea. But here, it was the producers, BoulderLight [Pictures], J.D. Lifshitz – they did “Barbarian,” “Weapons,” and “Friendship.” They had wanted to do sort of a “Barney” horror movie, and they thought I’d be the right person for it.
I was a little reluctant at first, because I feel like there is a lot of mascot horror already, of that subgenre of horror. So it took a little thinking about it to find an entry point that would allow me to say something interesting and have things that are interesting for me to talk about. But I definitely know “Barney” – my kids grew up with “Barney.” So it is something interesting to interrogate, among other things, why he’s so hated. Sort of like disco music, where – this is way before your time – everybody just suddenly decided they hated disco, and that it was terrible music when it really isn’t. “Barney” was the same way. I think my kids knew the song making fun of him about hating him before they even saw the show.
It almost makes you feel bad for Barney, a little bit. Obviously, Buddy is far more violent than Barney ever was. But there is this sort of weird thing – he just wants someone to love him, and I think it’s very understandable, in that respect.
Kelly: I’m glad you noticed that! I mean, he’s a bad creature. But I do understand him, and I do have a bit of empathy for him. A little!
Just a tad. It’s interesting to me that you were reluctant – I guess I should preface this by saying, I can’t count how many times I watched “Too Many Cooks” in college. But looking at your work, whether it’s “Yule Log’ or “Too Many Cooks,” there’s this throughline of the danger or dark side of seemingly innocuous pieces of culture. So, it makes sense to me that they’d ask you to do this, but I’m curious if that’s a theme you gravitate to, or is that something you just kind of fell into?
Kelly: It’s a good question. I don’t really know – I did this other podcast, and they said a recurring theme that they see is the theme of being trapped. Like, arguably in “Too Many Cooks” they’re trapped, and then arguably here they’re trapped.
I don’t think about that. I just make things. There’s a saying I love that I’ve been saying a lot – if you want to know what a novel is about, the last person to ask is the author. They’re kind of working intuitively, and it’s for the critics and audience to figure out, to an extent, what they think it’s about. I guess this is a long-winded way of me saying, let me make three more movies and we’ll see what the throughline is. But I’m not sure, I don’t know [Laughs].
You mentioned finding the storyline in this one. One thing that stuck out to me is the idea of a child, or even an adult in this case, being sucked into a television show. It’s very poignant, and I’d love to hear you talk about finding the story that made sense for you, in terms of this larger thing you were asked to do.
Kelly: I kind of don’t want to say too much, but I’ll say that I was attracted to these shows where everyone is so well-behaved – not like real life. When I was a kid watching a show, and I compared it to myself and my family – although I love my family, we get along great. But we’re not perfect. So when these kids are able to just break into song and do this dance routine, I’m like, “Why can’t I do that? Am I not good enough?” It brought in themes of facades and perfection, and what’s under that perfection? Themes like that were interesting to me.
In terms of getting sucked into the TV, I mean God knows I can get sucked into the TV – or now, the phone. This is probably my personal worst, but one night I spent like, six hours just going through Instagram. The feed just got me perfectly, and it was hitting every note of things I’m interested in. Suddenly I’m like, oh my God – it’s been six hours. It’s happened to me!
I want to talk a little bit about casting. I was watching an interview with you and Delaney Quinn, who plays the main little girl. Obviously, she’s very young, so this could change, but she was talking about the fact that she wasn’t getting a lot of horror auditions. I’m curious, what drew you to her? I thought she was quite good in this.
Kelly: Yeah, I think she’s great in this. I was very happy that she loved horror and was thrilled to get this role. But I think for me, it was – when you have auditions, you give them a scene. Some people will do five pages, but I’m like, “That’s a little cruel for a kid. I’m gonna do two pages, maybe.”
So, you’re watching this one scene over and over as you’re going through the auditions, and you start to hate the scene. You start to hate the lines, and you’re like, “I need to rewrite this scene because it’s not working.” Then, all of a sudden, someone comes along where you’re like, “Oh my God! It’s working! I’m not an idiot, the scene is good!” That was when Delaney was performing it. A lot of it is really just a feeling. It just feels right all of a sudden, and it didn’t before.
I think that’s what’s great about all the kids, and in general, I think you really captured the look of those types of shows. I was thinking a lot about “Out of the Box” when I was watching it. I’d love to hear you talk about the way you worked with the camera and the production design to capture the feeling and look of those specific 90s kids shows.
Kelly: There are so many details and so many people involved. It’s like a whole industry, you know? There’s Zach Kuperstein, the [director of photography] – we talked about the whole film grammar of how the camera would move. He used less of the sensor, so it would be less high-res and so forth. Anna Kathleen, the art director, figured out a color palette of the world, and the design. Everything is man-made.
Yeah, I loved the practicality of it. It looked awesome.
Kelly: Yes! And the music – we learned that “Barney” is really wall-to-wall music, which I hadn’t really noticed before. When we edited and it didn’t have music, it didn’t feel right. So Michael Yezerski had to create music for all that, and another composer, Shawn Coleman, did the actual songs the kids sing. And the puppet design – it’s just a matter of marshaling all these elements for a purpose.
