Did anyone ever like attempt to document and compile the variations of Barney the dinosaur murder ballads across the elementary school system in the early 2000s. Like legit it has always fascinated me as a phenomena and I would love to know if there were like traceable regional variations or what.
Looking at the tags so far I’m kind of fascinated by how much the ‘I Love You’ parodies vary in their phrasing/murder weapons but the ‘Joy to the World’ ones are nearly identical
here is my collection of barney murder songs as they appeared in the notes and comments of this post at about 4 pm pacific 7/25, somewhat arbitrarily color coded to show similar memes. it appears that "baseball bat and 2x4" is the mode configuration but there is so much variation that that exact phrasing only makes up a small part of the set. if i knew more about statistical modeling i would turn this into some kind of data tree that shows which phrases are most likely to follow other phrases.
