Endearing Behind-the-Scenes Secrets About Bluey You'll Love For Real Life

If you've ever activated dance mode, played a game of keepy uppy or exclaimed, "It was the '80s, man!", chances are you're a parent who has discovered the wonder that is Bluey. 

Noting the lack of of kids' shows that could be enjoyed both by preschoolers and parents desperate not to listen to one more round of "Baby Shark", Australian animator Joe Brumm dreamed up a concept around the titular precocious blue heeler.

Sharing tales of the Brisbane-based 6-year-old blue heeler, her 4-year-old sister Bingo and their always-game-for-pretend-play parents Bandit and Chilli, the goal was to create "a good co-viewing show where the parents could genuinely watch it with the kids," Brumm explained to The Hollywood Reporter in 2023.

"There were shows like that in older demographics, but they were a bit few and far between at the preschool stage, and I thought this is probably where you need it the most because you do end up watching a lot of it."

He built it—the series debuted in Australia Oct. 1, 2018 before making its way stateside in 2019—and they came. 

Relying on his background in creating short film, Brumm packed each clever, seven-minute episode with the sort of humor that appeals to both the potty training set and parents (in "Whale Watching", for instance, little kids are drawn to Bandit and Chilli's impersonation of the enormous marine mammals; adults clock the parents' admission that they're feeling "sleepy" after a New Year's Eve bash) and deftly tackled topics like infertility and those fraught first postpartum months.

The result: The Disney+ series was watched for some 731 million hours in the United States last year, making it the second-most popular streaming show behind Suits.

It also counts Brittany Mahomes, Ryan Reynolds, Tia Mowry and basically any celeb parent with a kid under the age of 7 as fans and with merchandise ranging from books and stuffed animals to the popular Bluey's Big Play: The Stage Show, it's now a brand worth about 2 billion dollarbucks. For real life.  

And yet Brumm is simply running his own race, thrilled that his own daughters took to the series. 

"Bluey was me wanting to do something for them then," he told The Hollywood Reporter when asked if he was dreaming up something new for his now-tweens, "and so yeah, I think you still want that as your kids get older. But look, I just really love telling stories and having a successful show like this and getting to work with brilliant people, it’s been the highlight of my career." 

Aw, biscuits! Now we're tearing up like we just watched "Baby Race" for the umpteenth time. 

But whether you're a dedicated Bluey watcher or someone who was, uh, born yesterday, take 20 minutes where no one can come near you to read these behind-the-scenes secrets. 

1. With a wealth of experience making kids’ television, creator Joe Brumm knew exactly what he didn’t want to do with Bluey. Desperate not to follow the same tired formula, he worked to avoid two pitfalls. 

"Well, the first one is this sort of thing that always gets said, which is, 'Kids’ shows need to be about kids having agency and power because they don’t have any in real life,'" he told The Hollywood Reporter. "But it’s like, have you met my kids? That’s all they’ve got is agency and power."

The second, he shared, was staffing up with kids' TV writers. "I think a lot of them are really creative people, but they’ve labored in an industry, and in a demographic, which just accepts the same homework turned in," he explained of his stance. "And I just thought, 'Look, that will just get you the show which I’ve already seen.' So, I just didn’t hire any writers."

2. Just one minute long, Brumm’s pilot episode lifted an anecdote from real life.

"My girls always used to ask me to push them on the swings and they’d say, 'Can you put us all the way around?'" he detailed to The Hollywood Reporter. "So Bandit’s pushing them, and Bluey’s saying, 'Push me all the way around,' and so he ends up pushing her all the way around."

While it got shopped to various places, he said, "I don’t think people knew what to do with it," noting producers were unsure if this was meant for kids or adults. "It needed developing, but the seed was there!"

3. Brumm almost dipped into another longstanding kids’ program. With his pilot initially not getting much traction, "I always thought it would be kind of funny to do an R-rated Peppa Pig," he confessed of his for-adults vision. "Using Peppa Pig’s grammar but telling the story about parenthood as it really is, you know, mastitis and all that. And I wrote that script out, and it was 22 minutes."

He put a pin in that plan after seeing Australian show The Letdown tackle some of the same material "and I pivoted back to preschool," he said. But the dream isn’t fully dead. "I reread it recently," he shared, "and I really like it. I’d love to make it one day."

4. Brumm, uh, dug deep when coming up with jobs for Bluey and Bingo’s parents. Dad Bandit Heeler is an archeologist while mom Chilli works part time at airport security, you know, sniffing out trouble.

5. Yes, Bluey is, in fact, a girl, but producer Daley Pearson is entirely unbothered by the confusion. "I hesitate to correct people, especially kids, that say, 'I really love him,'" he said, per Australia’s New Idea. "I think kids see what they want to see. They want to be Bluey, so if they’re a boy, they see themselves…I think it was a bit of a happy accident."

6. Though everyone from Natalie Portman and Eva Mendes to Lin-Manuel Miranda has done a guest appearance in the series' three seasons, many of the vocal credits remain anonymous with the show not disclosing who gives life to Bluey, Bingo and their pack of canine companions, other than to share that they’re the kids of the production crew.

7. Meanwhile David McCormack and Melanie Zanetti—who voice Bandit and Chilli, respectively—didn’t actually meet until November 2022, when they both traveled to New York City.

"So, we record separately. We live in different cities and I travel a lot for work, so this is the first time," Zanetti shared on an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. "It was wild. In New York!"

8. Taylor Swift isn’t the only one to have mastered the art of hiding a few Easter eggs. A tennis ball and a small dachshund toy appear in at least one frame of every episode of Bluey—a nod to two things universally beloved by dogs.

9. How very dare the networks try to censor Brumm’s work. But sometimes when he gets pushback about a line being inappropriate for kids, "I’d say, 'Look, I can’t change this. This is too funny.' Or, 'I like it too much,'" he confessed to THR. "And so, we’d just be like, 'Well, we just won’t show that entire episode or that scene or that sequence.'"

Among the episodes altered for American viewing: "Exercise", "Dad Baby", "Perfect" and "Family Meeting", an episode that centers around Bluey accusing her dad of “fluffing” directly in her face.

10. But there was one come to Jesus moment where Brumm relented. Harkening back to his Catholic school days, he wanted to acknowledge the kids he met who weren’t necessarily religious.

So in "Shadowlands" there was meant to be a line "where they’re pretending all the sunlight is water, and they’re going, 'But you know we can’t get to the things,' and they go, 'Well, maybe we can walk on water,'" Brumm recounted to THR. "And they go, 'No one can walk on water.' And I was going to have Snickers say, 'Jesus can.' And Bluey just say, 'Who’s Jesus?' And then we’d move on."

Though the exchange was "particularly funny" to Brumm, he agreed it was the correct decision to cut it: "It doesn’t belong in a preschool cartoon. It’s too weird. But it still made me laugh."

11. One very trifficult fight came when the show was being licensed to stream around the world. At one point, someone floated the idea of changing the distinctly Australian accents to more Americanized ones for the U.S. version.

"I heard from someone at Disney, who happens to be Australian, that it was absolutely going to happen and this person just fought and said, 'No, you’ll lose so much,'" Brumm shared, "and she managed to convince them to stick with the Aussie accents, which I can categorically say saved the show internationally."

12. Why, yes, Brumm can pick a favorite child episode.

"Flat Pack", where Bandit and Chilli attempt to put together a patio swing set while Bluey and Bingo build their own world out of bubble wrap and cardboard has "my old short film background behind it," Brumm told THR, "and, to me, it just does a lot of things. It doesn’t exclude the kids, it tells a funny little thing, but it’s also a very meaningful story for me, who’s trying to figure out my life and all that."

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