FOr for most people, Bluey’s latest episode, “Surprise,” was just that. Deliberately unannounced, it was released like a Beyoncé album, ambushing audiences still coming to terms with their recent heart-wrenching 28-minute masterpiece, The Sign.
But for the past three years, I’ve been waiting for a surprise. Because your name will appear in the credits. It says, “Created and written by Joe Blum, based on an idea by Stuart Heritage.” I’m just as weird about this as everyone else, but let me explain how I ended up getting a minimal role on my favorite TV show.
Like many parents, I discovered Bluey on Disney+ during lockdown. Although the premise was bland and unassuming – a cartoon about a family of dogs – I showed it to my kids and they were instantly hooked. Each episode was a perfectly realized short film. Some were played in real time. Other works ended with breathtaking time jumps into the future. One could argue that in seven minutes he managed to chart the entire trajectory of human evolution, from swamps to a distant intergalactic future. He was incredulous. He wanted to know who wrote it, so the author of Bluey put in a request to interview Brumm.
In June 2021, the interview was finally realized. Blum is very personable and eager to express his uncertainties freely. When we spoke, he said he was writing Season 3 and was finding it increasingly difficult to come up with ideas. His children were the same age as Bluey and his sister Bingo when the show began, so he could easily draw on their experiences as inspiration. But now they were growing up. “A 4-year-old and a 6-year-old are completely different than an 8-year-old,” he told me. “It’s even harder for me to see through their eyes.” But my children were about the same age as Bluey and Bingo.
The next month I took them camping by myself. I’ve written about the camping trip before, and how it was meant to be a Band-Aid to get us through a particularly rough time, but I didn’t mention that we spent most of it on the playground.
In the playground, each child wanted to play a different game. They got into an argument about which one to play first. Either play Floor Is Lava or some kind of complex robot defense game where you have to use a climbing frame as a fortress. Exhausted, I foolishly told them they could play as much as they wanted at the same time.
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Parents will understand that it is difficult to follow the logic of children’s games. But with overwhelming sleep deprivation, it’s impossible to keep up with two kids’ games at the same time. I spent what felt like an eternity defending the climbing frame from an invisible robot attack, only to hear another kid scream. “No, Daddy, you’re standing on LAVA!” So I jumped on the seesaw and the other one yelled, “No, Daddy, you’re putting a robot on it!”
This went on and on and on, much to everyone’s dismay, until I lost my temper, locked myself in a bathroom stall, and sent Blum a 60-word email explaining my situation. He immediately responded that he liked the idea and wanted to pursue it as an episode. “You’ll find everything you need to survive in that bathroom,” he added kindly.
That was almost three years ago. Since then, information has been pouring in. I heard this idea was going to be incorporated into a larger story, but nothing beyond that. I wasn’t even allowed to watch the preview video. This was due to the episode’s placement within the series. Bram always envisioned The Sign as a finale, but in a surprise Bandit joke about selling her house. That would have ruined “The Sign,” so it was decided to continue until the end of the season. And since “The Sign” was the biggest moment in Bluey’s history, I had to wait for the episode like the rest of the world.
The wait is now over. The surprise is her Bluey episode about a father who tries desperately to quickly understand the logic of his children’s games. The official description for this episode is: “Bluey and Bingo want dad to play her two different games, so dad tries to play both at the same time.” It was an experience.
My involvement in the world of Bluey began and ended with that one short email. My kids are now older than Bluey and Bingo. Their interests have changed. Their energy has changed. The best part of this was that Blum built a time machine for me. It took a snapshot of a very specific moment in my family’s life that would otherwise have been lost, and crystallized it forever. What an honor!
