How The Family From 'Bluey' Can Change Fictional Families.
Image source: X
In the past, children’s entertainment was the one area where people went “it’s just for kids. who cares?” As long as the kids were entertained by loud noises and flashing lights in front of the TV for an hour while you made dinner, that was good enough. Sure you had your classics, but a lot of it was just filler.
We’re slowly starting to move past that, though.
As the years have gone on, studio executives have begun to realize that it would be better if the parents also enjoyed watching the shows with their little kids. Now instead of vapid shows with cardboard characters, shows for six year olds have started to be pretty… good.
Which brings us to Bluey.
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The animated phenomenon out of Australia is being widely hailed as one of the greatest kids’ shows of all time. On the IMDB top TV episodes ranking, the award-winning episode Sleepytime makes the top 25, putting it in the company of such episodes as Breaking Bad’s Ozymandias, The Rains of Castamere from Game of Thrones, the two final episodes of The Last Airbender, and the Weeping Angels episode of Doctor Who. This is a nine minute, largely wordless episode of an Australian preschool show we’re talking about. Bluey is so successful, that it’s hit the point where even grown adults with no children have become big fans, which is almost unheard of for a show aimed at such a young demographic.4
Image source: X
The show revolves around the titular Bluey, a six/seven year old Blue Heeler puppy living in Australia with her Dad Bandit, also a Blue Heeler, and her mother Chilli and sister Bingo, both Red Heelers. The show is slice-of-life and mostly revolves around Bluey and Bingo roping their parents into their latest silly game, which, to their credits, the parents go all in on in a way that would make Daniel Day-Lewis impressed. It has a ton of heart, charm, humor, and is also not afraid to touch on difficult topics such as death. It’s a fantastic show. And, like any show, it wouldn’t work if it weren’t for the strength of the main characters.
It would have been so easy to make this a cookie cutter show for the kids to distract themselves with. In fact, the show was originally tossed around as an Australian Peppa Pig, and we need another Peppa Pig about as much as we need another Caillou. If Bluey went the route of most kid’s shows, Bluey’s whole character would boil down to “happy and energetic” and nothing else. Bingo would be happy and energetic, but smaller and more annoying. Chilli would either be happy and supportive and that’s it, or she’d be an overwhelmed, exasperated character who is the only functioning one to take care of the other three. Bandit would be fat and have an IQ equal to a nearby rock. We’ve seen these characters several times.
However, they’re not that. Bluey is happy and energetic, but she can be a little too assertive, and she doesn’t always think things through or puzzle out the right solution. These are shown as character flaws that she has to learn to overcome, not features. Bingo can also be just as energetic as her sister, but she’s also far more shy and reserved, and sometimes she needs to overcome that to step up and set boundaries. Chilli is a loving mother who would do anything for her kids, but still lets them know that she needs to take time for herself.
Then… Bandit.
In the earlier days of television, the stereotypical father figure was wise, supportive, caring, and always ready to be there to help their kids with anything they needed. Not all, of course, but that was the general stereotype. That would all change when a certain balding, yellow, doughnut and beer-loving meteor crashed into TV, changing the archetype for dad characters forever.
Image source: IGN
Once the popularity of Homer Simpson exploded, dads in media were changed forever. He was far from the first dumb TV dad, of course, but he changed everything. His character influenced dad portrayals in everything from TV to movies to even the cover art of board games. It was funniest to have the dad be the dumbest person in the family. Peter Griffin, Randy Marsh, Peppa Pig’s dad, these are only a few names in a long list of characters who were largely influenced by Homer Simpson.
Don’t get me wrong: Homer is hilarious, and it makes sense why he is so popular. It’s just less than ideal to see seemingly every TV dad, especially every cartoon TV dad, taking some level of influence from him.
Which brings us back to Bandit.
Is Bandit silly, even outside of the games he plays with his daughters? Definitely. Does he always say or do the right thing in every situation? No, but nobody does. Is he dumb? Far from it. He has a PhD in archaeology and is successful enough in his job that he’s able to afford a multi-million dollar home. He imparts real wisdom and shows emotional maturity to his daughters that we don’t often see in TV even outside of children’s programming. He’s also not a perfect father.
He’s snapped at his kids once or twice, and, being honest, him and Chilli need to do a bit better job setting boundaries for the games their daughters play. Still, it’s refreshing to see a dad character who isn’t blandly happy, or a complete moron who means well, but their own stupidity and selfishness gets in the way of them actually being great parents. We need more Bandit Heelers and fewer Daddy Pigs.
Another great aspect of Bandit and Chilli in the show is that they feel like a real married couple. They act around and talk to each other in different ways than with their kids. If you removed Bingo and Bluey from the show, they would both still be very much fleshed out characters with a deep relationship with each other. Just in the way that they talk to each other, you believe that there was a time between them before they had kids. It helps make them feel like real people.
So what do we have at the end of the day? We have parents who deeply love each other who have a relationship outside of the kids, we have a father character who isn’t a Homer Simpson knockoff, or a knockoff of someone who is a Homer Simpson knockoff, we have a child protagonist that is more than just “happy and energetic”, we have a little sister character that is neither a younger version of the protagonist, nor supremely annoying, and we have a mother who isn’t just blandly happy and supportive, nor exasperated by how dumb her husband is. It’s kind of amazing. When you look at just the four Heelers, it’s no wonder why Bluey has made such an impact.
People enjoy watching things they can connect with, and we can connect with the Heelers because they all feel like real people, even if they are just cartoon Australian dogs. How can they change kid show families? We can start having even more shows where the characters feel more like real people, who go through struggles that we can relate to. Kids pick up a lot from the shows they watch. If more writers took inspiration from Bluey, we’d have no more bland mothers, dumb dads and annoying little sisters. Who wouldn’t want that?
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