‘It’s the best show on TV’: How Bluey became a worldwide success story
Bluey, the adorable blue heeler pup, has become an Aussie export success in the most unimaginable way. Here’s how she did it.
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If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, the saying goes. And Bluey, the most Australian of stories, has certainly made it.
Each year, New York City is brought to a standstill by the Thanksgiving Day parade, a tradition almost a century in the making.
Three million people line the streets – almost double the number who live in Manhattan – to kick off the November public holiday by watching a cavalcade of giant balloons, dancers, marching bands, floats and musical acts.
It is the most American of celebrations, which is what made the appearance at the last parade of an inflatable cartoon blue heeler pup all the more remarkable.
Bluey – the low-budget cartoon made in Brisbane – is one of Australia’s loveliest success stories.
Premiering in 2018, the animated television series about a Queensland family of heelers enthralled children and parents alike, breaking the ABC’s download record in just four months.
The show’s makers wondered if it would work in the US, and even briefly considered redubbing the distinctive Aussie accents. But when it launched on Disney a year later, Americans were similarly delighted.
So by the time the balloon version of Bluey – the height of a four-storey building and the width of seven taxis – soared down New York’s 6th Ave last November, she had stamped herself in the pantheon of iconic children’s characters.
To prove the point, it was Bluey’s smiling face on the front page of the next day’s New York Times.
Meanwhile, thousands of fans flocked to Madison Square Garden that week for the premiere of Bluey’s Big Play, kicking off a 53-week US tour of the theatre remake. The show’s self-proclaimed “biggest fan”, late-night TV personality Jimmy Fallon, even hosted the voices of Bluey’s parents Bandit and Chilli – not that Dave McCormack and Melanie Zanetti could get a word in.
“It’s the best show on TV,” Fallon gushed.
“I think the show is so funny, it’s clever, it’s game-changing. I love it so much.”
AUSTRALIANS are accustomed to growing up on a diet of TV dominated by American accents.
Children in the US typically miss the same cultural crossover – at least until Bluey flipped that script over the show’s three seasons, with often hilarious consequences.
Social media is littered with stories from bemused American parents trying to understand why their children are asking to go to the dunny, eat brekky or put on their thongs.
In a TikTok video that has been viewed more than half a million times, a mum said her daughter had even begun to speak in an Australian accent.
“And now every Wednesday, I have to get the tiny human up extra early so she can ‘take the bins out’ with me,” she said. “I feel like my life has just become re-enacting all different episodes of Bluey.”
The show’s innate Australian-ness is sometimes lost in translation – Disney blocked an episode from US viewers in which Bandit was accused of farting in Bluey’s face, only to back down and reinstate the episode on its streaming service.
But the Australian sense of humour, the scenery and the celebration of family is at the core of Bluey’s appeal in the US, as well as other markets, including the UK.
McCormack didn’t see it coming. A musician with no experience in television, he was asked if he would be interested in voicing Bandit by a friend as they crossed paths in a lift – the very definition of a sliding doors moment.
“I thought this’ll be nice, it’ll be on YouTube as some sort of one-off short animation. And then here we are,” he told Jimmy Fallon in November.
For Rose Myers, the director of Bluey’s Big Play and artistic director of Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre Company, Bluey’s impact overseas became clear during a preview of the theatre performance in Elmira, a town in upstate New York. The crowd was filled with parents and children dressed up as their favourite characters, not to mention families without kids who also gathered to watch the new episode every Sunday.
“The traffic is so much the other way,” Myers says, pointing to the influx of American culture in Australia.
“So there is a real satisfaction to take something from here and see it resonate.”
She also credits the “genius” of writer and creator Joe Brumm at capturing “the joy of family life”, based on his own experience of being a father to two girls.
“He’s written every episode of that show, and every one is a little nugget of gold,” Myers says.
“He really loves to write how the parents are kind of understanding something, and the kids are understanding something at the same time, both in their own worlds.”
“In the pandemic, that was really brought home … The people around us are the meaning of life, and the show encapsulates that.”
Along with the Ludo Studio production team, Brumm brought his extended family to the theatre show’s premiere at Madison Square Garden, regarded as the world’s most famous entertainment venue.
“It’s pretty interesting for those guys, because they’ve created this beautiful thing that has huge resonance with families in Australia, and obviously that translates all over the world,” Myers says.
“But when something does go out to the television, you’re not really understanding that as fully as when you enter the room with 4000 people, virtually all of them dressed up in some sort of Bluey paraphernalia and all of them so excited to be there.”
“I think that really brings home what they’ve actually achieved in making the show.”
BLUEY’S Big Play first hit the stage at the end of 2020 in Brisbane after 10 months of development between Brumm and the Windmill Theatre team.
Tapped to lead the production, Myers says she felt “enormous pressure” for it to live up to the reputation of the beloved TV series.
“It was the first time they had handed their creation over to other people … We’re good buddies now, but there was a bit of hesitancy at the start,” she laughs. She was immediately keen to use puppetry to bring Bluey and her family to life on stage.
“The fact is that you can sell tickets to Bluey pretty easily because it’s so popular, but all of the people involved wanted to ensure that a really high-end work was created with beautiful production values,” she says.
Rehearsals were regularly impeded by Covid restrictions – the team had to race across state borders several times within a matter of hours to keep working – before the premiere at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.
Brumm, who was in the crowd, told Myers it brought tears to his eyes.
“That was the biggest tick of approval for me,” she says.
Once the decision was made to take the performance to the US – after 447 shows across 65 venues in Australia – Myers’s team tweaked it to encourage audience interaction that was frowned upon during the pandemic, such as replicating the show’s game of “keepy uppy”.
“When you make a theatre show of something that is so beloved as Bluey, you have to think about what we can do on the stage that you can’t do on the TV,” she says.
At Madison Square Garden, that became even more important. “Having an audience of that size, they kind of become a dynamic in the show themselves, which is kind of like a rock show in the way they interact,” Myers says.
The 50-minute stage show is now on tour until the end of August, reaching fans in 40 cities from San Antonio and San Francisco to Seattle and St Louis, a jam-packed schedule that will see the cast spending a couple of nights a week on sleeper buses.
“It’s really rock and roll,” Myers says.
Adding to Bluey’s rock and roll credentials is the show’s star-studded list of US super fans.
Singer Billy Joel, who has had a record-breaking monthly residence at Madison Square Garden since 2014, says he watches Bluey all the time with his daughters. He threw his six-year-old a Bluey-themed birthday party last year.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton, nominated Bluey as the TV show he most wanted to be involved in. Last year, his wish was granted when he voiced a horse named Major Tom.
Other celebrity fans have also made cameos, including Oscar winner Natalie Portman, who narrated a whale documentary for the show in its third season. Eva Mendes – who says Bluey is the favourite of her family with husband Ryan Gosling – voiced a yoga instructor.
Fallon, on his show, suggested Hollywood had to be Bluey’s next step.
Zanetti, the voice of Chilli, backed his call for a Bluey movie, while McCormack went even further by lobbying for a trilogy on Bluey’s origin story.
Myers says taking the theatre performance to other countries is also “very much on the cards”. The UK looms as the frontrunner for its next tour, while she has ideas for a stage sequel.
“I would love to do another one,” Myers says.
Meanwhile, a fourth season of the TV show is reportedly in the works, despite suggestions last year that it could be coming to an end – which sent fans into meltdown.
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