If you were a kid who grew up watching “Barney & Friends,” the voice of the actor who spoke to a group of Elgin-area high school students Tuesday night might have been instantly recognizable.
Dean Wendt, an Elgin native, has made a career as the voice of the lovable purple dinosaur, a role he landed in 2002 and has continued over the years as part of the TV show and videos, including four television episodes produced in 2025, according to online data base IMBd.
He returned to his hometown as the surprise guest speaker at School District U-46’s Beacon Academy Awards, held at The Hemmens Cultural Center in Elgin.
Each year for the ceremony, South Elgin High School teacher Ben Erickson brings in someone to share their experience working in various aspects of the media.
Wendt, speaking before the event, said he was thrilled to be invited to an event that would allow him to visit his hometown for the first time in more than 20 years.
“It’s a little surreal, honestly,” he said of the homecoming. “I haven’t been back in a long time and this felt like the right reason to come home.”
Wendt’s career as a voice actor, which has run the gamut from children’s shows to national ads to personalized messages through Cameo, has its roots in Elgin. He became obsessed with radio when he was a kid starting in the days when WLS-AM played the top 40 music hits.
“I actually built my own fake radio station as a kid,” he said. “I called it WFP, recorded shows, brought turntables to school dances and treated them like live remote broadcasts. I was doing content creation before anyone called it that.”
Wendt also acted at Elgin High School, appearing in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and starring as the narrator in “Our Town.”
“I attended the Northwestern Cherub program at Northwestern University in the summer of 1985. Elgin gave me the bug. Everything else just followed from that,” Wendt said.
He attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he hosted a morning radio show. After graduation, he made his way to California and then to Texas, where he currently lives.
“I’ve been in the Dallas/Fort Worth area for many years now. It’s home,” Wendt said.
As for landing the Barney gig, he recalled what was a very informal audition, “not at all the grand Hollywood moment you’d imagine for a role that was watched by tens of millions of kids. The callback was more of the same. And then I got the call. The job that would define my career came in the most ordinary way possible.”
Voice actors record their lines for the show on a live-to-tape basis, he said. They never dubbed the dialogue.
“We called it Dinosync. The guy in the suit would follow what I had to say, and vice versa,” Wendt said.
Being one of the people who provided the voice of the iconic dinosaur over the years provided Wendt with a treasure trove of stories and cherished memories, he said.
“The one I keep coming back to is, ‘I Love the Holidays.’ The very first song I ever sang as Barney — my first recording session, getting ready for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, 50 million people watching — was ‘I Love the Holidays.’ Twenty years later, the last song I recorded for the show? ‘I Love the Holidays.’ Same song. I didn’t plan that. Nobody planned that. It just happened that way, and I still get chills thinking about it,” he said.
Then there was an appearance on “Live with Regis and Kelly.”
“Touring was a big part of the job,” Wendt said. “You’d hit TV shows and radio stations all over the country, and in New York that meant Regis and Kelly. So we’re mid-segment and it just hit me out of nowhere: everybody in the world is doing Regis impressions. What if Barney did one?”
Without warning anyone, he looked at Regis Philbin on live TV and said, “Can I do an impression of you?” Philbin kind of froze and went sure.
“I did Barney doing Regis. The crowd went completely sideways. The Barney office was not as thrilled. I had to remind them a few times that the show airs at 9 a.m., and the kids are in school.”
That led to an invitation to take part in the Relly Awards, an actual competition for best Regis impression, Wendt said. He went up against talk show host Jimmy Fallon, actor Neil Patrick Harris and others. He didn’t win but was invited back to emcee the event — as Barney.
That’s not Wendt’s only Regis and Kelly story.
“I was in the green room waiting to go on, and John Travolta walks by, sees me, comes right in and starts telling me what Barney meant to his family,” Wendt said.
“Then, with zero warning, he starts singing, ‘Hey Mr. Knickerbocker, boppity bop.’ Every single word. Every hand movement. He knew it better than I did. Then he hugged me. For a long time. At some point I stopped waiting for it to end and just started looking at his shoes. He walked out, went on stage and told Regis and Kelly he’d just been backstage singing Barney songs with me.”
Wendt immediately called his mother, a lifelong Travolta fan.
“First thing out of her mouth, ‘Did you get his autograph?’ I said, ‘Mom. I think I got something better than an autograph.’”
The memories that hit the hardest, though, are visiting children’s hospitals.
“We’d go all over the country and visit kids who were really sick — scared, going through things no kid should ever have to go through. Barney would walk in and something would just change in the room. A kid who hadn’t smiled in days would smile,” he said.
“That never got old. Not one single time in 20 years. That’s what Barney really was to me. Not a job. A privilege. I genuinely mean that.”
He acknowledges that Barney has invited backlash, as documented in 2022’s “I Love You, You Hate Me” documentary, which chronicled the mean-spiritedness Barney brought out in some adults. But he and his family haven’t really dealt with such vitriol, he said.
“Barney represents unconditional love and pure joy, and sometimes that makes people uncomfortable. Cynicism is easy. Sincerity is harder. I think some adults resented how openly, relentlessly positive he was. Barney is for the children. Not the adults.”
Tuesday’s speaking engagement was the first of its kind for Wendt, who planned to emphasize that a career doesn’t necessarily start with a plan.
“It starts with something you love, that you do for its own sake, and you follow it relentlessly. WFP was that for me,” he said.
Mike Danahey is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
