Back from extinction: US kids' TV icon Barney to receive major CGI reboot

We're not exactly sure how Mattel was able to acquire the rights to an imaginary dinosaur, but here he comes...

Barney the Dinosaur: time has smiled on '90s playschoolers' fave

Barney is a dinosaur - but if you inhabited the school playgrounds of the 1990s, the next lyric that comes to mind, to the tune of his once-inescapable TV show's Yankee Doodle-referencing theme music, might well reflect how you felt about the imaginary dinosaur and his pals.

Whether he was a treasured memory, or the subject of a gleefully-delivered sung chronicle of dinosaur-slaughter, the US entertainment complex's penchant for reboots and renewals of classic intellectual properties (ie. patents and copyrights behind the characters) has finally caught up with the big purple T-Rex.