Bluey and Bandit are Blue Heelers.
Like her name hints, Bluey is a blue heeler, also known as an Australian cattle dog, who can be born with blue or red coats. According to the American Kennel Club (AKC), this breed is “compact but muscular” with “boundless energy,” who become “bored and gets into mischief.” Sounds just like Bluey!
Several of Bluey’s family members are also Blue Heelers, including her dad, Bandit, and her cousin, Muffin.
What kind of dog is Bluey?
Blueys last name gives the answer to this question away: She’s a blue heeler, which is also known as an Australian cattle dog (what all the members of Bluey’s family are). This is fitting since the Heelers are residents of Australia, where the breed originated. Interestingly, not all of the characters on Bluey have breed-specific names. For instance, Blueys best friend Chloe is a Dalmatian, and her next-door neighbor Judo is a spitz.
But in the case of Bluey, her last name makes it clear what sort of dog she is. Plus, her first name is fitting since shes blue — although you should make sure the little ones in your family dont expect real blue heelers to come in such a vivid shade of the color. The dogs do have a bit of a blue tint to their coats, but most of them look more like Blueys cousin Muffin than they do Bluey and Bandit in real life. Australian cattle dogs also have red coats, a variation of the breed sometimes called “red heelers,” which is represented by Bluey’s Chili and Bingo.
Why Does Bluey Look Like A Boy?
There are a few reasons why Bluey may look like a boy. First, Bluey is a blue heeler, and blue heelers often have very strong features that can make them look masculine. Additionally, Bluey’s father, Bandit, is also a blue heeler, so she may have inherited some of her father’s physical characteristics. Finally, it is possible that the lighting in the show or in the scene where Bluey is pictured makes her look more masculine than she actually is.
No, Bluey is not cancelled. recent rumours to this effect are false. The show has been renewed for 11 new episodes, which will be released this month.
Bingo is not adopted. She is a biological daughter of Bandit and Chilli, and an older sister of Bluey.
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Since Bluey first aired in October, the Brisbane-made children’s animation has exploded in popularity. But what makes it so endearing?
Like many families, we have a “no TV before school” rule, but our resolve has been sorely tested by the arrival of Bluey, a new Australian cartoon that runs at 8am weekdays on ABC Kids.
My family aren’t alone in our fandom – since Bluey first aired in October this year, it’s proved extremely popular. The 26 episodes available on ABC iView have been watched 11 million times combined in the last month, and at the time of writing it was the most popular Australian-made program for children under four on the ABC Kids channel. This means that, at the moment, Bluey is being watched more than the Wiggles or Play School. So what’s the appeal?
Bluey follows a blue heeler pup who lives with her parents and her four-year-old sister, Bingo, in Brisbane. Mundane activities like going to the shops and visiting the doctor become an opportunity for imaginative play. Children’s television is awash with cartoons in which talking animals learn life lessons, but Bluey stands out from the blur of daytime television with its sharp script, its Brisbane setting and its ability to plumb the unexpected depths of everyday family life.
The seven-minute episodes are entirely made in Brisbane by Ludo Studio and written by Joe Brumm, whose previous work includes the British animated series Charlie and Lola. The idea for Bluey started around three years ago, when Brumm approached the studio about writing a program based on his own experiences of fatherhood.
“It’s an observational show about Joe’s family life, and some of mine too,” Bluey producer Charlie Aspinwall tells Guardian Australia. “When kids are at the top end of preschool they experience the world for themselves through unstructured play. It’s one of the most fun times to be a dad. You might be having breakfast and your youngest will be pretending to be a frog. Yet somehow you need to get the ‘frog’ out of the door in the next half hour. There’s so much comedy in how parents deal with difficult situations.”
The result is an offbeat, hilarious and tender show that captures the joy and frustration of parenthood in equal measure. Bluey’s father – voiced by Dave McCormack, frontman of the band Custard – is laconic, playful and certainly more emotionally intelligent than, say, Peppa Pig’s hapless dad. His relationship with his daughters forms much of the tension – and humour – in the show, which manages to somehow conjure up the magic of childhood without being schmaltzy.
Ludo Studio pitched a pilot of Bluey at the Asian Animation Summit in 2016. The ABC’s Michael Carrington was in the audience and felt the pilot captured everything he’d been pushing for at the ABC. “We hadn’t seen much Australian animation since Bananas In Pyjamas or Blinky Bill. This pilot was sensational, full of Australian colour and light. I made an immediate approach, but [producer of the Emmy award-winning animation Hey Duggee] Henrietta Hurford-Jones from BBC Studio was there too and asked to be let in on the deal. She could see Bluey had universal appeal,” he tells Guardian Australia.
The early response to Bluey in Australia would suggest that instinct was correct. Dry humour and vivid domestic detail packs each tightly scripted episode. In an episode called Takeaway, an excursion to buy Chinese food goes awry. Social realism meets slapstick as a child’s urgent need for a wee creates chaos while the family waits for their spring rolls. Yet the dynamic shifts in the last few moments of the episode, when Bluey’s father has an epiphany about the fleeting nature of childhood. For once, it isn’t the children in a cartoon learning a life lesson, but the parents.
My daughter and I have watched this episode several times and the ending makes me cry each time. My daughter thinks this is weird but I’m relieved to find I’m not alone – many parents on online forums have confessed to weeping into their cornflakes at the unexpected poignancy of this episode. Indeed, Aspinwall says the studio has been receiving daily fan mail from parents who enjoy the program as much as their children do.
The Wiggles are often called Australia’s biggest cultural export but could Bluey become a similarly global hit? The program will be screened on the BBC’s CBeebies preschool channel soon. BBC Studios holds the rights outside of Australia and are likely to do a deal that takes Bluey to the world.
The ABC will release 26 more episodes of Bluey in 2019, which doesn’t bode well for my family’s “no TV before school” rule. Still, it’s the kind of thing I can imagine featuring in one of those seven-minute episodes – a tiny, recognisable feature of ordinary family life, made remarkable.