Lyrick Studios

Richard Leach ran a publishing company, RCL Enterprises, that produced religious texts and school books. He moved it from Chicago to Dallas, and in the late 1980s, according to the Dallas Observer, he began looking at the new home video business. His daughter-in-law Sheryl Leach developed a purple dinosaur character for toddlers. Early interviews also credited her friend Kathy Parker. Richard Leach put up $700,000 in cash for the first Barney videos. Barney & Friends then went to public television, and the family company became Lyrick Studios. The Observer described it in 1997 as a Richardson company. A 2011 Texas House resolution lists Barney & Friends among the productions made at the Studios at Las Colinas in Irving. In 1994 Forbes listed Barney among the country's highest-paid entertainers, with an estimated $84 million in royalties and $500 million more in merchandise.

Leach then backed a second show. His son-in-law Rick Duffield, a Yale Divinity School graduate who had written educational videos for the company, spent 1993 developing a series about a dog. The idea came together when Duffield found his old notes on classic novels: the dog would imagine himself into the great books. Leach paid for a producer and a seven-minute sample, and PBS contracted for 40 episodes. Wishbone premiered on public television in 1995 through Big Feats! Entertainment, a Lyrick subsidiary. It was shot in North Texas, partly on a backlot in Allen about six city blocks long with more than a dozen full-size buildings, the fictional town of Oakdale. By 1997 Big Feats had made 49 episodes at about $500,000 each, Wishbone had about seven million viewers, and the show had twice been named the best children's program by the Television Critics Association. Licensing followed: 35 companies made 104 Wishbone products. The Observer also reported a pay dispute between the company and the Dallas-Fort Worth musicians' union over the scores recorded by Dallas Symphony Orchestra players.

By 2001 Barney had sold more than 130 million videos and books worldwide, and Lyrick also handled the Australian group the Wiggles and the singer Joe Scruggs. That February, the FTC cleared Britain's HIT Entertainment, the maker of Bob the Builder, to buy Lyrick Studios and its subsidiaries Big Feats and Lyons Partnership in an all-share deal. The Guardian noted that Lyrick was much larger than HIT, then valued at about 400 million pounds, and that analysts saw the deal as HIT's way into the U.S. market before Bob the Builder's popularity faded. Barney, Wishbone and the rest of the catalog became HIT properties. The Lyrick name faded, but the work stayed in Texas for another decade: HIT produced new Barney seasons in Carrollton from 2003 to 2009, and the old Lyrick Studios, Inc. entity, now doing business as HIT Entertainment, collected state incentive grants for Barney through 2012.