Bluey Is a Godsend. But for This, It Deserves to Wear the Cone of ...
This fall, Bluey the brand was suddenly everywhere. I couldn’t hide from it. If you are the parent of a toddler, you know Bluey, the Australian cartoon about a family of blue heeler dogs, beloved by the short set and their exhausted parents around the world. But more likely, you know about Bluey even if you don’t have young children. It’s this year’s top streaming show, so far, in the United States.
It’s always hard to say whether a kid-culture thing has become more omnipresent as your kid grows up and gets more vocal about their tastes, or whether you just started noticing it more. But I could swear, this year Bluey merch took over Targets, indie bookstores, and trendy gift shops that stock mostly novelty “I ???? NY” T-shirts. Going anywhere with my Bluey-enthusiast 3-year-old became a struggle. I hit my breaking point when we went to a book festival. While my husband and I looked at hard-to-find Chirri & Chirra books, reissued Remy Charlip rarities, and The Little One, an astonishing translated-from-Japanese picture book by Kiyo Tanaka, our daughter, in tears, insisted that we go to another table so we could buy her a Bluey book, essentially a novelization of an episode she’d seen dozens of times.
We had no desire to buy her something that we could easily get at a big-box store, so we tried to steer her over to another local bookstore’s booth, but we were thwarted. Even there, alongside a beautifully curated selection of kids’ books, Bluey options lined the table. My daughter made a beeline for a Bluey Halloween mix-and-match board book. It was cheap and from a show I liked, so I said yes to it, assuming that it was drawing from good source material or might say something interesting about Halloween. How bad could it be?
It turned out, pretty bad. This book had no value as a book, i.e., something that communicates stories and ideas to a reader. No, it was just a series of pictures of the many dogs of Bluey dressed up in Halloween costumes, a benign little book-shaped thing that technically made no sense because Australia doesn’t have Halloween in the same fashion we do. Search Amazon for “Bluey Halloween costume,” and you will see that licensed outfits from Party City and Spirit Halloween, allowing American kids to dress up as Bingo or Bluey, are readily available, so you’ll probably have kids at your door playing Heeler this week, accompanied by parents in Bandit sweatshirts. I saw five Bandits milling about at the playground this weekend, fielding happy children coming up to them, as well as one dog dressed up like Bluey.
I’ll be honest. That book, and these costumes, actually pisses me off. Because to me, it’s clear: Bluey has sold out.
As anyone with a small child in their house can attest, Bluey is a joy to watch, an oasis of emotional intelligence in the often moribund world of flat-looking, made-by-computers toddler-centric television, where dogs are cops and one sweet young girl seems to be trapped in a windowless room with her cats. Once your kid starts attending school and socializing, these other brands come into their lives practically by osmosis. My daughter has never seen Paw Patrol, but she occasionally refers to her favorite stuffed animal as Skye, after the girl character on the show. Walking through a Target involves dodging a gauntlet of please-buy-me stuff from Gabby’s Dollhouse and the Disney princesses.
Now that our house has started filling with Bluey rubbish, I’m trying to figure out why the existence of this crap bothers me so much. I think it’s because this show once felt like a magic alternative—an auteurist project with an even emotional tone, a creative masterpiece, an island in a sea of trash. Bluey has the DNA of just one guy, creator Joe Brumm, coursing through it. He’s written every episode, and the show is based on his experiences with family and his insights into the idiosyncrasies of raising kids. Sure, his initial aim with the show was to create something along the lines of Peppa Pig—another unavoidable brand, which has been going strong since 2005—but Bluey has managed to cross over beyond its toddler audience to attract parents and even Gen Z audiences, all a credit to its strong writing. It remains charming, even three seasons and 154 episodes on.
Bluey hit the U.S. at an interesting time. Although it premiered in Australia in 2018, it made its streaming U.S. debut in January 2020, with a second season dropping in July of that year. For families facing the demands of the pandemic, Bluey became a de facto babysitter, an additional parent, and nearly a member of the family. There is an intimacy to streaming television for toddlers, because these weird little gods of repetition want their favorite things over and over again. That meant that the quality of Bluey, the way it was rooted in personal, observational humor, stuck out, head and shoulders above the rest of toddler television.
Now, to be clear, Bluey has always been big business. And perhaps, to my jaded American eyes, it once seemed less grossly capitalist and calculating simply because it was from Australia. (I know. But when your social safety net is less precarious, don’t you get more artistic freedom? I know!) Yet when Bluey exploded out of the gate as a hit in 2018, the licensing, and subsequent merch, came quickly. Circa 2022, the show was already in 60 countries, with 110 licenses and 1,000 products. At that time, Fiona Lang, then the general manager of BBC Studios for New Zealand and Australia, was seeing extraordinary demand for Bluey the brand. As she told the Sydney Morning Herald, “The usual rules about how you go about licensing have been thrown to the wind.” Lang explained that while the process of building out a kids’ brand tends to take five years, Bluey was going through this expansion at a great speed. There were Bluey pajamas, Bluey dresses, Bluey toothpaste, Bluey collabs with yogurt brands—the type of reach that is generally reserved for established kids’ shows.
Last year, rumors started going around that Bluey could be ending with its final batch of Season 3 episodes, which we heard were going to be about the Heelers potentially selling their house. Interviews with Bluey creatives added to the chatter. A hiatus after Season 3 had been announced, sort of—quoted in a 2023 Bluey feature in the Courier Mail, Bluey producer Daley Pearson said, “We are just going to get our heads on a bit, it’s been four or five years and we’ve made 154 episodes, it is kind of unprecedented to do that back-to-back.” Brumm had mused about the future of the show to Vulture in a 2021 interview: “Do you re-voice the kids? … Do you age up the show with the kids? Set it five years in the future? … Is there an even wilder solution out there?” A 2024 Bloomberg feature did nothing to stanch the fear that Bluey was coming to an end, as Brumm worried about the changing voices of Bluey and Bingo and said that he’s finding that he has fewer experiences to draw on for the show.
Of the final three official Bluey episodes (not counting the recently released “minisodes,” one-offs that feel like B-sides), “The Sign” is the one that feels like a direct reflection on the worries of creating a hit TV show, as channeled through a plot about the Heelers possibly moving elsewhere. Heeler father Bandit explains to the kids that the family is going to move because he got a new job in another city, “and it pays a lot more money, which means we can give you kids a better life.” Never mind the fact that, to this child care–starved, space-starved American, their palatial Brisbane house, limitless reserves of time with their kids, and sweet hippie-ass school all appear to be elements of the good life. Bandit thinks there’s more to be had elsewhere.
As a watcher of Bluey, I was expecting the episode to delve into this move in its characteristic cheeky and thoughtful manner. But the episode is devoted mostly to a wedding set at the Heeler house. It’s almost as if the moving plot is secondary, which is why it feels fully peculiar and unearned when the episode ends, postwedding, with a twist: The Heeler family isn’t moving after all. They’re all packed up in their car, ready to travel to the next house, but Bandit doesn’t drive away. He steps out of the car, throws away the For Sale sign, and the Heelers run back into their empty home, embracing and having a nice takeout meal on the floor in the living room. The soundtrack crescendos, way too sentimental.
A big family move is a rich topic that could benefit from a Bluey perspective, but “The Sign” doesn’t follow through with its premise. There’s something wishy-washy about the episode that, to me, speaks to what Brumm is going through. It feels as if he’s worrying about selling out, which befits a Gen X–age creator who had the privilege of making the first few seasons of his hit show in somewhat of a vacuum. It seemed as if Bandit’s worry about money and a better life can be read through the lens of Bluey as a brand. Brumm could end the show, but a truck full of money has absolutely pulled up to his door. And the Heelers are back in their house, ready to have more adventures. There are touring shows (Bluey’s Big Play) and spin-off board books for babies and rumors about possible full-length movies. Bluey will be around for a while. After all, it’s a brand now.
Perhaps it makes me sound like a scold when I tell you that I’m mad that I can’t trust Bluey outside of my TV. Junky Bluey merch that exists simply to take my money and add to the waste in this world feels antithetical to the specificity and weirdness that makes Bluey so good and rewatchable. Perhaps in Brumm’s public musings about what to do with his sudden big, big, BIG hit, there’s a lesson for other artists. You can do good work that gets fans by word of mouth, but once the world swallows you up, maybe you have to lean into that money, for a better life—and it’s up to the fans and parents to figure out the work of interpretation.
Some spark has been lost, at least for me, a parent of a now-4-year-old who watches the Heelers on a near-daily basis. And while I don’t fault Brumm for following the money, I do wish that we lived in a world where he could just continue to make his weird, singular show without sanctioning the many, many brand extensions that come out of a hit show’s merchandising deals. Kids are a remarkable audience, and Bluey the show respects how kids are weird, hilarious, and endlessly creative. Bluey the brand takes advantage of that curiosity only to sell them more crap.
