Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 461 posts

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#31

Post by lettergram »

Bluey is just a wholesome show focused on showing good role models. Much of the kids TV today is just trying to distract them, Bluey teaches lessons about family and is entertaining for adults too.

Reminds me of shows like Little Bear or Magic School bus. Teaching kids about topics, while entertaining them and modeling good behavior.

One other interesting note: all the home schooled families around us (from the hippy commune to survivalists, left & right) rave about Bluey. So it has a very good cross ideological / cultural appeal (given the global audience). Ultimately, I think it’s because it hits on a deep truth about supporting one another - that everyone can connect with and want to pass to the next generation.

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#32

Post by yardstick »

hackernewds wrote: post #25
jboggan wrote: post #18

Bluey is a godsend in our household. It's not annoying and the amount of classical and original music woven into each episode is wonderful. There's one particular episode - "Sleepytime" - which I cannot bring myself to watch anymore because I get so emotional. Every parent I talk to with young kids who has seen the episode agrees and knows what I mean. It's really that good, and despite being a fun little show there…

can I watch this episode adhoc, or do I need to watch the rest? emotional entertainment really gets me

You can watch it adhoc.

Edit: Pretty much all the top Bluey episodes have a good emotional pull to them. See https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/mar/21/the-10-best-...

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#33

Post by 29athrowaway »

bennyg wrote: post #11

My only problem with Bluey is actually a problem with the Disney+ app on my Vizio TV. The episodes are all fairly short, but then there’s like 5m of credits before the next episode starts and it’s kind of annoying to manually fast forward through them via remote. I often reach for stuff on Netflix just so the next episode will auto play after a few seconds instead of requiring actual manual intervention to keep the l…

Kids are not supposed to binge watch content.

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#34

Post by jimbob45 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30
laingc wrote: post #22

As the father of two young daughters, I adore Bluey. Quite apart from how good the episodes are for adults, I really enjoy the following aspects: 1. It portrays wholesome and positive family relationships, particularly between father and daughters. The girls are also good to one another, with occasional conflict kindly and realistically resolved. 2. It tells simple stories without pushing political messages. Unfortun…

> children’s television at large has become another victim of the culture wars Out of curiosity, as a non-parent, do any galling examples come to mind?

[flagged]

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#35

Post by monkeydreams »

jboggan wrote: post #18

Bluey is a godsend in our household. It's not annoying and the amount of classical and original music woven into each episode is wonderful. There's one particular episode - "Sleepytime" - which I cannot bring myself to watch anymore because I get so emotional. Every parent I talk to with young kids who has seen the episode agrees and knows what I mean. It's really that good, and despite being a fun little show there…

'Sleepytime' ruins me whenever I watch it.

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#36

Post by hdhfjkrkrme »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #19
jboggan wrote: post #18

Bluey is a godsend in our household. It's not annoying and the amount of classical and original music woven into each episode is wonderful. There's one particular episode - "Sleepytime" - which I cannot bring myself to watch anymore because I get so emotional. Every parent I talk to with young kids who has seen the episode agrees and knows what I mean. It's really that good, and despite being a fun little show there…

My wife will run in from the other room to skip “Sleepytime” because she knows she’ll be bawling by the end of it if she even thinks about it. Does me the favor because I will be too. My endorsement of the show is that it feels like one of the great sitcoms like Cheers or Frasier, Golden Girls or Roseanne. The stories are never pandering or simple. You never quite know where they’re going to go with a plot line so wh…

> Most kids shows seem like a low effort afterthought full of contrived vapid nonsense.

Kids brain is not adult brain. You need a different kind of training material.

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#37

Post by a_bonobo »

jboggan wrote: post #18

Bluey is a godsend in our household. It's not annoying and the amount of classical and original music woven into each episode is wonderful. There's one particular episode - "Sleepytime" - which I cannot bring myself to watch anymore because I get so emotional. Every parent I talk to with young kids who has seen the episode agrees and knows what I mean. It's really that good, and despite being a fun little show there…

'Onesies' and 'Babyrace' are also highly emotional episodes. Onesies is, hidden for children, about the inability to conceive children, not being able to deal with your relatives' children; 'Babyrace' is about the doubt all parents have about their parenting ('You're doing great' is aimed directly at the audience)

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#38

Post by dclowd9901 »

dexwiz wrote: post #23

Kids shows teach lessons, but Bluey has all sorts of compassionate parenting lessons. I would love to be as good as a father as Bandit. My favorite scene is him assembling flat pack furniture without reading the instructions, proudly declaring he won’t take advice from a cartoon dog.

There’s some really fun “blink and you’ll miss it” jokes in the show. At some point, one of the kids is acting like a dog, and I think Chili asks Bandit “what is she doing?” And he replies “I have no idea.”

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#39

Post by stephen_g »

One thing that I appreciate about Bluey, apart from the other things people have commented on, is that the animation style is very aesthetically pleasing. So many kids shows have the exact same 3D CGI style, and some of them honestly look just uncanny-valley creepy.

Another thing that most people wouldn't experience is seeing episodes set in places I might have been in the last couple of weeks. It's obviously stylised and interpretive, but a lot of the buildings and places are very accurately represented!

Re: How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment

#40

Post by Caligatio »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27
seized wrote: post #12

As a parent it's just a genuinely nice show to watch. There is so much complete crap out there now that Bluey is a breath of fresh air. A few others are good fun as well like Grizzy and The Lemmings. But Bluey reigns supreme. Although I wish the phone game didn't have in app purchases. At least the Bluey video game on Steam is good and without in app purchases or micro transaction nonsense.

> so much complete crap out there now that Bluey is a breath of fresh air Out of curiosity, as a non-parent, what makes it crap?

I'm not the OP so I don't know what they define as "crap." However, there is a lot of programming out there that solely exists to keep children's attention while doing nothing with it. The most egregious example that comes to mind is the CoComelon channel on YouTube: literally 1-2 hour videos of nursery rhymes with mediocre animation. It's not some small channel either; one of their 2+ hour videos has 484M views.
Post reply on HN