Buddy Review
One of my first words on this planet was ‘Barney’ (which I just said as ‘Barn’). When I texted my mother to clarify whether this was true, she said, “sadly, yes.” To say I am an expert in the field of educational furry mascot characters is attested to by my lifelong study. As a child, I was obsessed with the big purple dinosaur and his friends, who would sing and dance to teach me about life, never to let the water run, and so many other things that laid a solid foundation for childhood enrichment.
But I got older, and I got weirder, as we all do. Long gone were the days of my dinosaur friend from my imagination who came whenever I may need him. I traded that all in for my near-lifelong obsession with horror. One of my biggest gateways into horror as a kid was the same as everyone else’s: Scooby-Doo. There was one particular Scooby story that stuck with me, and that was the Blair Witch Project parody bumpers on Cartoon Network. Watching them felt like I was getting away with something because the Blair Witch Project was only for adults, or so I was told. Years later, after watching Too Many Cooks about a million times, I learned that the director, Casper Kelly, was also a part of the team that created those.
With Casper Kelly’s Buddy, that childhood innocence of Barney has collided headfirst with my love of bizarre, absurd horror. It’s the perfect evolution of all of the themes, concepts, and the subversions that Kelly has been playing with in his work. I have a deep admiration for Kelly’s approach to horror because it comes from his own perspective. It is clear in every project he creates that he is making something that he loves. It doesn’t fit into any of the standard trends or norms of what is going on outside of his own bubble of creativity. It’s why I will always be one of the first to be seated for a new Casper Kelly project, because I never know what I am going to get.
Buddy creates its own world in the vein of Barney the Dinosaur and similar programs, but Barney is the clear north star for this project. The inspiration goes down to the most minuscule level, becoming a pitch-perfect satire through the broken lens of horror. The tropes of educational children’s television are all on display, with the ever-looming, unnerving nature of horror as the undertow of it all. When the kids improvise during one of the educational songs, you can feel Buddy’s sinister nature bubbling to the surface. There is a palpable fear that builds from the corruption of innocence that the film explores. Casper Kelly once again finds a way to make show credits scary in a brand-new way, after how they were used in Too Many Cooks.
Kelly’s approach to satirizing television draws on so many typically overlooked elements to build something insidious. Recreating the same vibrancy and life of a children’s television show in a 4:3 for TV square aspect ratio brings back the nostalgia of what TV was like when these kind of shows dominated channels like PBS. Even the video clips with the ’90s animated backgrounds add a huge weight of authenticity to the show you are supposedly watching. A number of ideas and concepts that were born of innocence for a program like Barney, or even the more absurd nature of Pee Wee’s Playhouse are toyed with in new ways to sell a very different flavor of horror.
When you have a set filled with anthropomorphic objects like mailboxes, couches, and more, there is a lot of potential for creating fear in new ways. The objects themselves are treated less as scary, which they could be; they, too, are victims of Buddy’s reign over this space. The children who, in normal circumstances, are all smiles and laughter are faced with something they shouldn’t have to comprehend at such a young age. It adds to the fear in a monolithic way because the threat is so much larger than the ones who have to face it. It’s a perfect storm to toy with a format that has never been done in a truly brilliant way as it is done in Buddy.
As I watched the children being forced to sing a song about how much they love Buddy, I couldn’t help but think about the “I Love You” song from Barney in a new light. There is a particular lyric in the song, “Won’t you say you love me too?” that feels like the root of the horror in Buddy for me. There is a need for Buddy to feel loved, cherished, and needed in a sinister way, whereas Barney’s is derived from a place of innocence. Turning that screw just an inch to the left, with Buddy’s concept, unlocks a world of horror born from the necrotic dinosaur corpse of Barney, giving rise to something brand new for the genre. Buddy is a must-see for anyone who still thinks about those kids who may still be trapped inside Barney’s world of imagination.
Dressed as a unicorn, a beloved children’s TV host reveals his true self as a dark and violent force of nature.
