What if Barney went psycho? ‘Buddy’ is brainchild of Atlanta filmmaker

Chris “Casper” Kelly’s warped mind takes seemingly innocent tropes of the 1990s and twists them into something far more sinister.

The Atlanta-based former Adult Swim producer has created a nutty viral video mocking 1990s sitcom opening credits (“Too Many Cooks”), a comedy series satirizing workplace sitcoms (“Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell”) and a film about a possessed Yule log (“Adult Swim Yule Log”).

Now Kelly is taking one of his crazy ideas into movie theaters for the first time in the form of “Buddy,” about a 1990s-era children’s show character who might remind viewers of the purple dinosaur Barney. But Buddy loses his mind and starts killing the kids.

The movie, filmed in Cleveland, Ohio, in the summer of 2025, opens this weekend on more than 1,000 screens nationwide, including a sold-out screening Friday at Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre with a Q&A panel featuring Kelly.

The film opens with child actors on a brightly colored set of a kids TV series circa 1999 that evokes “Barney & Friends” and “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” Buddy (voiced with nasally assurance by Keegan-Michael Key) is a seemingly chipper bright orange unicorn who teaches kids life lessons such as overcoming fear and keeping a house clean. At the end of each episode, the kids rush in to hug him.

But Buddy reveals a dark side after Josh (Athens native Luke Speakman) refuses to do a dance, opting instead to read. Freddy (Delaney Quinn) figures out something is awry when Josh disappears, a new child pops up, and Josh’s book is found in the garbage … with blood on it. This idyllic children’s show world starts to unravel, becoming progressively stranger and gorier.

Partway through, the film shifts to purportedly normal suburban parents Grace (Cristin Milioti) and Ben (Topher Grace) with two kids — except Grace thinks she may have had a third daughter who was wiped from existence.

The two worlds soon collide, and the psychopathic unicorn becomes more Chucky and less Barney. Subtlety is not an option.

Atlanta's Casper Kelly has been a longtime producer and writer for Adult Swim series like "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell" and that viral classic "Too Many Cooks." (Courtesy of Roadside Attractions LLC)

“I’m a maximalist,” Kelly said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the San Francisco Coffee Roasting Company in Virginia-Highland. “I put as much as I could into this movie.”

Kelly said he isn’t sure how he ended up with such an oddball sense of humor: “It just came naturally to me.”

But there are clues. Kelly grew up in North Carolina entranced by reruns of 1960s sci-fi shows “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” as well as the surreal mid-1970s Saturday morning live-action TV series “Land of the Lost.” He voraciously read Philip K. Dick novels. He had a poem published in the sci-fi mag “Amazing Stories” and wrote a fan letter to speculative fiction author Harlan Ellison.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with a double major in film and history.

In the mid-1990s, Kelly moved to Atlanta and joined Cartoon Network, creating promos. Hungering for a change, he began writing episodes of “Squidbillies” and “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” for Dave Willis. He and Willis later developed “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell” together.

“He is able to crawl under the surface of the artifice of pop culture and get to the horror lurking underneath,” said Willis, who visited Kelly on the set of “Buddy” in Cleveland last year. “I’m really proud of him. It’s so hard to make a movie, and the fact he got to the finish line speaks volumes of his talent.”

Kelly said Buddy’s world is a blend of kid shows of yore. There’s a mail delivery person like “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” a talking mailbox like “Blue’s Clues” and a gabby backpack (hilariously voiced by Patton Oswalt) like “Dora the Explorer.”

He tried to make the show feel as grounded as it could be under increasingly bizarre circumstances. “Audiences can add the satirical elements themselves,” Kelly said, like when Annoyance Theatre in Chicago in the 1990s did live theater shows reenacting “Brady Bunch” episodes with no changes in the script.

The film features multiple Atlanta-based puppeteers including Chris Brown, a former resident puppeteer at the Center for Puppetry Arts, and Cedwan Hooks, who sewed many of the costumes including five versions of Buddy. Hooks was also inside the costume of Betty Bunny, Buddy’s obliviously loyal sidekick.

“I was so obsessed with Barney as a child, my sister tried to put a damper on it by telling me he was just a man in a suit,” Hooks said. “That actually made it more interesting to me.”

The set, Hooks said, felt so much like home, “when we got to the horror, part of me was like, ‘Oh man! I wish I could keep shooting the children’s show we started with!’”

Hooks said Buddy had to look as trusting and innocent as possible, but right before the start of production, Kelly noticed that Buddy’s pupils were too small.

“He looked like he was up to something,” Hooks said. “So at the last minute, I found enough plastic to create bigger pupils and made Buddy look warmer. The eyes are the most important part of a puppet. That’s what people connect with.”

Atlanta actor/puppeteer Cedwan Hooks (left) and voiceover artist/puppeteer/actor Jimmica Collins shared duties in the film "Buddy." Hooks played the body of Betty Bunny while Collins voiced her. (Courtesy of OMOS Photography for Hooks; Rodney K. Gary of OMOS Photography for Collins)

While Hooks was in the suit, Betty Bunny was voiced by Athens native and Atlanta resident Jimmica Collins, who also controlled Buddy’s facial expressions and helped actor Sergey Zhuravsky get in and out of the unwieldy costume.

“I grew up as a fan of Barney and was familiar with his sidekick Baby Bop,” Collins said. “When I saw Betty, I needed to find a voice that matched how she looked: happy. She just wanted everyone to be happy. That was her goal no matter what was happening.” (Spoiler: this was not a viable long-term strategy.)