Thomas and star Josh Radnor also reflected on how the character became less ironic over time.
What do Barney Stinson and Darth Vader have in common? This episode of How I Met Your Mother.
On the July 14 episode of the How We Made Your Mother podcast, hosts Josh Radnor (who starred on the series as Ted Mosby) and Craig Thomas (who co-created the series) broke down season 1, episode 15, titled "Game Night," with episode writer Chris Harris. Thomas, 49, explained that he and fellow creator Carter Bays knew that they wanted Barney, played by Neil Patrick Harris, to have a messy backstory.
"It was definitely in the back of our head [that] we're going to peel back the suit and see who that guy used to be," Thomas said of Barney, a womanizing, perpetual bachelor who always wears a suit.
How I Met Your Mother premiered in the fall of 2005, just months after the third Star Wars prequel, Revenge of the Sith, hit theaters. "Seeing Darth Vader become Darth Vader in that," Thomas said, "... may have been the inspiration for just the way we would learn Barney's backstory."
Harris said that in the writers' room, Thomas and Bays, 49, knew they wanted to show how Barney "was a hippie in the late nineties and what turned him into the suit-wearing, some might say 'monster,' that he became." The challenge of the episode was finding a way for that backstory to feel alive. "We had the Darth Vader nugget, and the rest was actually hard to get," Thomas remembered. Eventually, they decided to have Jason Segel's Marshall draw it out of Barney using a game.
In the story of the episode, a younger, hippie-ish Barney is set to go to the Peace Corps with his girlfriend. Instead, she leaves him for a businessman who wears a suit. A dejected Barney receives a flyer for a suit store that declares, "Suit up!" and his path in life is set.
"When that sequence begins and that semi-Darth Vader music kicks in and takes you in that sequence, you know you're really in for the ride at that point," Thomas said. "That's such a satisfying moment when that sequence begins. This whole episode has been leading to this."
In the sequence, clearly inspired by the Revenge of the Sith scene where Hayden Christensen's Anakin is given the iconic black suit and rises up as Vader, HIMYM viewers see Barney lose his long hair and facial hair. He puts on an all-black suit, an expensive watch and slick shoes, rises up out of a chair and winks at the camera.
Harris called it "really avant-garde and weird," and Radnor, 50, praised the series for being a "weird cinematic hybrid" of a "classic sitcom" with film elements. Harris said the music is "perfect," and Thomas said the "great" all-black suit was "the suit Darth Vader would wear."
Later in the episode, the hosts and guest discussed how, over the years, some viewers didn't understand that Barney was supposed to be a parody of a certain type of person, not a role model.
"I still love and appreciate Barney as a character, but I think you have to watch him with the right understanding," Radnor said.
"There is that danger of the thing that we're mocking is the thing that people genuinely love instead of loving to laugh at," Thomas said.
He noted that in season 1, they did "a very good job" of showing that Barney was not actually the confident womanizer he projected, but instead rather insecure. Barney ultimately became a breakout star from the series, with fans often quoting his "legen -- wait for it -- dary" sayings.
"I really like how in season 1, we did keep our eye on the ball, I think, of this guy, there's a lot underneath that suit," Thomas said. "...And I think in later seasons, sometimes we lost sight of that for different patches of time and started to lose the kind of ironic distance from it and sometimes did the thing rather than ironically commenting on the thing."
"The premise here is that there is someone who is inside of a Darth Vader costume. And there's more to him than meets the eye. And that's so much more interesting than a guy who just hooks up with lots of women and seems really cool," Thomas said. "I want to see who is that guy, really. And that's the best part of this episode."