The topic of Chris’s acting rarely came up at home or among friends, and Chris himself - because of the values his parents had instilled in him - never brought it up unless he was asked. To his friends, Chris Barnes was just Chris - almost. There were a few times when his brothers and friends would take him to the Paramus Park mall and parade him around to get the attention of all the girls, then move in and start talking to them. They’d use Chris as the bait and then reel in the catch for themselves!
Chris never liked the character of Tanner Boyle or the kind of attention it brought him, and tried almost right from the start to distance himself from Tanner. It didn't help that, aside
Chris never liked the character of Tanner Boyle or the kind of attention it brought him, and tried almost right from the start to distance himself from Tanner. It didn't help that, aside from the starring role in Ron Howard’s Through the Magic Pyramid
(also known as Tut and Tuttle), he was never really given the opportunity to excel again after making the first two BNB movies. One of the assumptions I’ve heard regarding this - I’ve heard that Chris himself expressed this - is that the role of Tanner actually had an unexpected negative impact on his career. the parts became less high-profile and not as well written and directed, and eventually dried up completely by the time Chris reached the ripe old age of seventeen. Sure, a lot of child actors fall out of favor as they get older, but what I see here is someone who was treated pretty badly by "Hollywood" while he was still in his prime. Add to that the fact that he's still not able to break free from Tanner after more than thirty years.
"Tanner" may have affected Chris’s professional life in another way, too. There are many versions of the “Why Chris Barnes wasn’t in The Bad News Bears Go To Japan" story, but I think I now have the definitive answer, thanks to a "friend of the family": Chris was apparently offered the part, but then his parents caught wind of a scene involving a hooker and that, for them, was the last straw. They'd been getting more and more uncomfortable with the language and behavior of "The Bears" and decided that any more would clash too much with their own values, and Chris was out of the movie. I believe that he then did the guest spot on the TV show Taxi to fulfill his contract with Paramount.
As far as the list of Chris's full acting credits, that's been a lot of work! There's nothing listed for him at The Screen Actor's Guild, and a lot of the credits on other sites have been less than accurate or refer to other performers with the same name. I think I've got everything now, and I'm assuming, based on Paramount's media materials of the time, that The Bad News Bears was his first on-camera job