Barney & The Backyard Gang: Waiting for Santa (1990) Christmas Special Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. My birthday is this weekend so I'm looking forward to that, and it's a little less than four weeks until Christmas. Which means it's time for Christmas themed reviews, which I started last week with my review for The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. I'm gonna have comic book reviews that are Christmas themed, more than I did last year, and I'll have one Christmas movie review up closer to the day. Today though I'm going to review Barney & The Backyard Gang: Waiting for Santa which was released on VHS on May 11th, 1990, so nowhere near Christmastime. It's also the best-selling Barney tape ever, probably because it was the only Barney Christmas special until Barney's Night Before Christmas was released in 1999. There isn't a whole lot to talk about so there will be spoilers in case you didn't grow up with this tape. Let's get into it!

 While The Backyard Show (1988), Three Wishes (1988), and A Day at the Beach (1989) sold relatively well the original releases of the tapes, and their earliest re-releases most likely, were mainly sold in Texas, where the show was in production. And with Barney & The Backyard Gang actually being a separate license from the one for Barney & Friends and other Barney releases, unless you grew up with these tapes, you might not even be aware that this set of eight VHS tapes even exists. Waiting for Santa was the first tape to be released knowing that there was an audience for Barney outside of Texas. It's also the first tape where Barney is a magenta colour rather than the darker purple that he was in the first three tapes of the series. 

Barney and the kids, Amy, Luci, Tina, Adam, and Michael are asked by Santa to help the new kid at Tina's school, Derek, by taking him to the North Pole so that Mrs. Claus can show him that Santa knows that Derek has moved recently. While there the kids meet a snowman, who could've been Frosty had the Lyons Group, the company who owned Barney at the time, had the license to that character, and they pretend to be Elves and sing and dance, while Mrs. Claus and Barney remind them of what Christmas is all about. Then they all go home and Barney, Michael, and Amy fall asleep on the couch, while Barney reads The Night Before Christmas to the kids and Santa shows up. As you can see, not much happens in it.

As mentioned Waiting for Santa was a first for alot of things that would appear later on in Barney & Friends. It was the introduction of Derek, the first time Barney is a magenta colour, though the costume doesn't quite match up with how the character looks in Barney & Friends or on the cover of the 1993 to 1998 re-releases of Waiting for Santa (as you can see above), it's also the first time that the show doesn't revolve around the kids playing in Amy and Michael's backyard prior to Barney coming to life/appearing, the first time Barney does his "Barney Shake" trick, though he only uses it two more times, both in the The Backyard Gang series, and the first time Sandy Duncan doesn't appear as Amy and Michael's mom as she was a big part of the reason the first three tapes got made since she was a pretty big TV star at the time and had voiced Todd's girlfriend in The Fox and the Hound (1981). 

Rewatching it last night for this review, I noticed that, aside from shots of Barney's flying sleigh from the front as the gang are heading to and from the North Pole, which had clearly been shot in front of a green screen, this tape is the one that has the highest production quality to it though I don't think the budget was increased for it, given that it was a low budget, independent, production. Aside from Barney in Concert (1991) and Rock with Barney (1991), you know that the kids and Barney are on a soundstage somewhere because the sets look like they were produced for a stage production rather than a TV show or movie and that the backgrounds are backdrops. Particularly during outdoor scenes (and that goes all the way through the first six seasons of Barney & Friends too). But here, except maybe for the outdoor scenes at the North Pole, it doesn't feel like it was filmed on a soundstage, and I think that's because alot more happens on interior sets, like Amy and Michael's living room, Derek's bedroom, and Santa's Workshop than on exterior sets. I mean even Amy and Michael's garage in The Backyard Show looks like it was built for a stage production rather than for a movie or TV show. 

This is also the first episode in the series, where the five remaining kids from the previous three tapes, Michael, Amy, Adam, Luci, and Tina are all starting to look and sound older in comparison to how they were in the first three tapes, which is interesting considering this tape, along with the next one, Barney's Campfire Sing-Along, was produced in November of 1989.

I actually wanted to talk about the production date for a moment. A long time ago, when I did my Disney Sing-Along Songs: Disneyland Fun (1990) review, I stated that there was probably six months to a year before the tape's release date that the show was filmed. So everything filmed for Disneyland Fun was probably taped in either late 1989 or early 1990 as that tape's release date was August 14th, 1990. The production date for Waiting for Santa confirms this in a strange way as it was produced in November, 1989 and was released in May, 1990. So that kinda gives me a good idea of the turnaround between the filming of Disneyland Fun and it's release on VHS. Which is why I wanted to bring it up in this review. 

The acting is decent for a show made for kids. One of the reasons my siblings and I loved the Backyard Gang tapes and the first two seasons of Barney & Friends is because of the kid characters. They were all pretty relatable, even though they were actually older than any of us were at the time. In this episode though, Derek was the most relatable because we moved several times between 1991 and 1997 and each time I was concerned that Santa wouldn't be able to find us because we'd moved. And of course Barney, played by David Voss and voiced by Bob West, is fantastic as well. This is the in between stage version of Barney where he isn't the original Barney & The Backyard Gang Barney with the dark purple colouring and the much deeper voice, nor is he the Barney & Friends Barney with the more iconic voice. He's like a mix of the two, with a slightly deeper voice, but with the magenta colouring for the suit. 

The songs on this tape are pretty good too. Only four of them would appear in episodes of Barney & Friends or other Barney Home Video releases right into the 2010s. Those songs are "Jingle Bells", "Winter's Wonderful", "Skating, Skating", and "Jolly Old St. Nicholas". The rest of the songs sung in this episode are only used in this episode and then were never used again.

Waiting for Santa is actually the last Backyard Gang tape that my siblings and I got when we were kids. I think we got it for Christmas in either 1993 or 1994 from the grandparents as I know it was the 1993 re-release (the cover is shown above) rather than a later re-release, I just don't remember when we got it exactly. It was way after we'd gotten the 1992 re-releases of The Backyard Show and Rock with Barney, the only other Barney & The Backyard Gang tapes that we owned, though we rented and borrowed all but one of the remaining five tapes in the series. But I think I'll do a separate VHS Corner post about Barney & The Backyard Gang as a whole, and the various VHS releases the series had the late '80s and throughout the '90s.

Overall this is a great Christmas special for little kids, and for those who grew up with Barney, whether you watched the Backyard Gang tapes as they were coming out, discovered Barney with season 1 of Barney & Friends, watched the final two seasons of Barney & Friends in 2009 and 2010, or only know the character through the Barney Home Video DVD releases that came out in the 2010s, after the TV series ended in 2010. Because Lyrick Studios let the license for Barney & The Backyard Gang go in 1997, and only Waiting for Santa and Barney in Concert would get re-released after that, Waiting for Santa in 1998 and Barney in Concert in 2001, kids who watched Barney in the 2000s and the 2010s wouldn't know about The Backyard Gang especially once Barney videos stopped being released on VHS in 2006 as none of the Backyard Gang videos ever got released on DVD. I'll get into that more when I talk about Barney & The Backyard Gang as a whole in a VHS Corner post sometime in the near future. 

Waiting for Santa is on YouTube if you have kids who might like to watch an early version of Barney, or if you loved Barney growing up and either would like to revisit this early episode, or see what Barney was like when he first started if you're someone who is younger and grew up with Barney after 2001. I recommend it as a fun Christmas special.

Alright my friends, that's going to be it for me for today. I will be back tomorrow for a comic book review. Not quite sure which comic yet, but it'll be a Christmas related issue for sure. I don't have a ton of those, so we'll see. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.