The big purple dinosaur with the personality of an especially manic and unctuous hairdresser makes his long-awaited, years-overdue feature-film debut in Barney's Great Adventure. The movie's understandably thin plot revolves around a multicultural group of telegenic tykes who are hauled to their grandparents' farm for summer vacation. Once there, they encounter the aforementioned dinosaur and set upon a great adventure to retrieve a magical, multicolored egg. Along the way, the value of imagination is praised; surly preteen alienation is discouraged; and a young boy learns the meaning of friendship. Of course, the question of whether Barney's Great Adventure will entertain adults is moot: A large part of Barney's appeal to children—perhaps the main source—is that he's never meant to appeal to anybody other than themselves. In an age of smartass, pop-culture-savvy heroes for kids, small children must find something comforting and reassuring about Barney's simple-minded, irony-free universe of pretending, learning, and imagining. Appropriately enough, then, Barney's Great Adventure will bore adults to tears: Barney is more irritating than enchanting, and the ever-present music—a mixture of poorly performed favorites and anemic new concoctions, most notably "Barney: The Song" by Broadway composer Jerry Herman—is terrible. Naturally, the film seems pitched to appeal to the tastes of a dim-witted three-year-old. Worse still are the sporadic appearances of Barney's two female companions, BJ and Baby Bop, a pair of junior dinosaurs so cutesy and infantile that they make Barney seem like a Noel Coward-esque bon vivant by comparison.