I watched Barney this morning, the big purple dinosaur. He told me he loved me and I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I'm an approval-seeking dork who will take whatever validation I can get, and yet on the other hand it made me very uncomfortable. I find Barney ambiguous and disturbing, and yet I can't tear my eyes away.

Clearly, dinosaurs define gender roles in ways that are alien to us. Whenever I see Barney I think if the velociraptors in the first Jurassic Park movie who spontaneously changed sex so that they could reproduce. I think Barney was created by genetic engineers the same way that those Jurassic park dinosaurs were. Except, do you remember in Jurassic Park when the dinosaur DNA was missing some key neucleotide sequences and they augmented it with frog DNA? I think the same thing happened with Barney, only instead of frog DNA they used Liberace or Richard Simmons.

I've always kind of assumed Barney was a Tyrannosaurus Rex, even though he's about a third the size of one. He lacks brow ridges and the single barbed claw that would indicate he was a velociraptor. But I do believe Barney is carnivorous, and I think that's so because the kids on the show rotate out so much. I mean, you'll have four kids on for about six shows and one will leave and another come on, then the first one will come back and another leave, and I just get the feeling that it's this elaborate shell game that the producers are playing with us, so that we don't notice that when a kid reaches a certain age (or weight), he or she is not "moving on" with an acting career.

I think Baby Bop is like one of those dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park movie with the big fins on the side of their heads who spit that gross paralyzing venom at you (NOTE: I looked it up, they were dilophosaurus, but in reality they were probably not "spitters"). That's the kind that ate that fat guy from Seinfeld. So, Baby Bop paralyzes them and then she and BJ and Barney go into this feeding frenzy and sing a little rhyming song about the joys of devouring raw flesh.

Barney is always encouraging kids to imagine things. Of course, every kids' show in the history of the universe does that. If you stop and think about it, this is kind of stupid. Kids really don't need to be told to imagine things, because that's practically all they ever do anyway. Just once I'd like to see one of those shows take some kids on a tour of a psychiatric hospital or a homeless shelter where guys are shuffling around in dirty clothes too big for them, and say "This is what happens when you use your imagination TOO much."

Barney also says "I love you" all the time. No one is ever creeped out by that because he's almost a cartoon, but I think it's odd to emphasize it so much. Mr. Rogers never says he loves you, or Big Bird, or Howdy Doody. I think Elmo says it sometimes though, but somehow I find that less disturbing. Is Barney just more appreciative of a child's emotional needs, or does he simply have problems of his own? Or maybe its the Richard Simmons DNA, I just don't know.

It seems to me we spend a lot of time teaching and encouraging kids to do things that we know they're just going to have to repress later on. Like the imagination thing. You never hear someone tell an account to imagine that his ledgers balance, or a programmer to imagine his application works, or to a fireman to imagine the fire out. Or why do we teach kids to say "I love you" all the time? Sure its cute when they're two, but face it, just about everything's cute when they're two. Nobody wants a 42-year-old man walking around hugging everybody and saying "I love you". And why do we teach kids to "dance" all stupid every time they hear a song they like? Or that if they close their eyes they turn invisible?

It's not that I don't like any of these kids' shows, it's just that they all pretty much teach the same things, like reading and counting and sharing. About the only one I can think of that does anything different is Blue's Clues, which is more like logic and problem-solving.

You never see any parents on Barney, but of course you never see parents on most all of these shows. It's kind of insidious when you think about how we always tell our kids not to talk to strangers, but feel free to hang out in the schoolyard with the singing carnivore, or have cereal with the cartoon Tiger, or soup with those two sexually-indeterminate children on the Campbell's soup label.

I don't know what the answer is, I just don't think it's ever too early to teach kids useful skills, like to hang up on telemarketers, or never believe the first mechanic you take your car to, or how those "consolidate your debt" home mortgage companies rip you off. I'm not saying that kid's shows are bad, it's just that I am very seldom called on in my daily life to name the colors of the rainbow or what words rhyme with "house".