According to South Park co-creator Trey Parker, The Lyons Group once offered him a buttload of money to direct a long-forgotten Barney movie if he could only fit his sense of humor under a G rating. That’s like if an NBA team tried to pay Michael Jordan millions of dollars to play basketball without jumping.
Even before South Park premiered on Comedy Central back in late 1997, the entertainment industry understood that Parker and his creative part Matt Stone were destined to be massively successful, and all of Hollywood was clamoring to capitalize on their talent. The two stop-motion short films that originated the characters and style of South Park, both titled The Spirit of Christmas, were cult hits in entertainment circles, as was Parker and Stone’s black comedy live-action film Cannibal! The Musical.
However, none of Parker and Stone’s early work indicated that the pair were especially interested in family-friendly projects, unless some rash film executive only saw the first 30 seconds of The Spirit of Christmas before calling the pair’s agents.
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Presumably, that’s exactly what happened when The Lyons Group reached out to Parker about a lucrative opportunity to completely change gears and direct the 1998 kids’ movie Barney’s Great Adventure, an infantile musical comedy that flopped hard upon release. In an interview with Parker and Stone that Rolling Stone published just a couple months before the premiere of Barney’s Great Adventure, Parker revealed that he could have made $1.5 million if he accepted the directing job, but he would have had to sell his sacrilegious soul to the purple dinosaur.
Before Parker and Stone made the second The Spirit of Christmas short, the pair really could have used the Barney-sized payday that Parker would later turn down. “We were seriously starving. Down to a meal a day,” said Stone of their dire situation, which Fox executive Brian Graden and future South Park executive producer saved with a $1,200 commission for the short that would soon change Parker and Stone’s lives.
“Right after The Spirit of Christmas, it got to the point where we were doing three meetings a day and getting offered multi-picture deals from every studio,” Parker said of the proto-South Park project that put him and Stone on every entertainment executive’s radar.
But, as Parker explained, not every bigwig knew exactly what they were trying to buy. “I got a call from my agents saying, ‘Trey, you’ve been offered to direct a picture for a million and a half dollars,’” Parker recalled of what would have been his first (and probably last) big break. “And I said, ‘Wow, what’s the movie?’ And they said, ‘It’s Barney: The Movie.’ I said, ‘Who the hell wants me to direct Barney: The Movie?’”
Parker explained of the very flawed reasoning behind his would-be career in kids’ entertainment, “They said, ‘They want it to be a G-rated thing, and they saw that you can make really funny stuff with kids since you did The Spirit of Christmas.’”
Clearly, the Barney executives never actually finished The Spirit of Christmas — or, alternatively, they wanted to spice up the Barney film with a quick fistfight between Santa and Jesus.
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