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> Bluey is the best children's cartoon of this generation

Bluey is the best children's cartoon _for adults_ of this generation.

Our kids are about the same age and age difference as Bluey/Bingo are portrayed, and I can't express how much relief it gives to watch it see your own life played out line for line.

Some days, as a parent you wonder how (badly) you're doing, and Bluey takes some weight off as you realise (and talk to other parents about Bluey) that some things are just universal and you're possibly doing better than you think.

One of the things not talked (much) about is how families are much more isolated now - since the average person is from a two-child family, and has a two-child family, most of their peer group growing up and when they have kids is in the "same boat" so they don't really have insight and experience of what the youngest years brings.

Even the basic idea of "kids like games, make things games" that permeates Bluey is likely unknown to many new parents.

I completely missed your point, I think. Do you mean that the current generation of young parents didn't experience enough things being games as kids themselves?

My interpretation was that we haven't experienced it as adults; We may have experienced it as children, but my experience (maybe not everybody's) is that I don't remember enough about being a young child to necessarily know the best way to approach things with my own children, and we haven't necessarily seen how others do it.

I'm also much older (a decade) than my parents were when they had their first child.

Oh that decade; man you feel that in your bones when you're pushing 40+ and the parents of your kindergartener's friends are barely 25 ...

My wife tells me a story about a young lady in one of the baby groups who was looking for other mothers to get to know.

She's a selfless woman my wife, and goes out of her way for anyone, but she felt bad that she just couldn't get a long with this young lady to the point where she'd exchange numbers and arrange to meet up for coffee or whatever; while the young lady was also feeling alienated from her childless friends.

There were almost two decades between them and she just couldn't find anything to relate on and she felt really awkward; she still thinks about that occasionally and regrets not trying harder.

I'm the voice of (un)reason and have to reign in her selflessness sometimes for her own wellbeing and had to convince her she had herself and a new born to take care of first and foremost.

My earliest memories, sketchy and faint, are around eight or so years old.

By that time my youngest sibling was already out of diapers; I had literally zero experience with newborns and had changed ONE diaper in my life before the hospital shoved one in my arms and said "good luck, don't shake her."

Larger families of yore, the eldest kids would be in their teens when the last baby was born; they would have living memory (and probably even were enlisted to help). And as others have mentioned, you don't really begin to meet the parents of your children's friends until they're old enough to have friends, which is usually daycare at the earliest; often school for many.

You have to make an effort and action to join a "mom's group" these days; before local family, church, even the neighborhood would spontaneously be a "mom's group".

Absolutely, it's one of those things where you're truly thrown in at the deep end, so to speak, with no guidance or experience (you likely remember little to nothing about your time as a child in those early years) and have to work it out.

Nobody teaches you anything (besides some basic courses for new parents like NCT here in the UK) and there's really no-one to ask; your own parents likely did things very differently to how you would now, so you have to weigh any advice they can/do provide.

The biggest help, I've found, on all sides, is talking to other parents; those of our children's friends, and we're quite friendly with a bunch of them having spend a lot of time talking to each other during COVID and meeting for the children's play-dates after. Many of them, like us have two children, with a similar age gap, their eldest is the same age as we met at our first children's births and they go through the same phases at roughly the same time.

Sometimes you just need to ask, "is this normal", and they'll corroborate, and some times you just need to support them by confirming you have the same challenges.

> Bluey is the best children's cartoon _for adults_ of this generation.

One of my regular hangouts often puts Bluey on one of their TVs and I know for a fact there have been multiple occasions where no one at the bar even has children but we're all sitting there drinking beers while watching the antics of a family of cartoon dogs.

I will happily watch Bluey (as will my wife) if it happens to be on and the kids aren't around, I can't say that for any other cartoon they watch, even ones I can appreciate for the educational value they provide the children (our daughter loves Octonauts and learning and telling us all about sea creatures).

I can't think of another cartoon targeted at that young an audience that I'd even consider sitting down and watching a half-dozen episodes of without a kid around, but I can imagine doing that with Bluey. Like I've for-sure left it running for multiple episodes after the kids left the room, and enjoyed it.

Older-audience stuff like Avatar: The Last Airbender or Justice League Unlimited, oh yeah, for sure, but something specifically aimed at lower-grades elementary school kids? Nope, can't think of another, not even nostalgia shows from my own childhood. I'd maybe do an episode just like "oh wow, remember this?" but not a session watch.

> Bluey takes some weight off as you realise (and talk to other parents about Bluey) that some things are just universal and you're possibly doing better than you think.

No question, the I can't count the number of times I've sent the "Baby Race" to other parents who ask me "When did your kid start to talk?"

We watch the Bluey bike whenever the kids say "I can't do it!" or the Dad can't draw episode.

Or the curry quest, when I had to travel for work (after all the pandemic "no work travel").

Bluey's dad is an inspiration, like the puppets episode is so funny & I keep saying "Bauxite" in random times without context.

I’m like that with the ‘unicourse’ puppet he has.

Randomly saying ‘aaaaaaand whyshouldicare?’ tickles me!

That's one criticism I've heard about it actually, but not sure how much it's actually true. Basically that people love Bluey because it appeals more to adults, but that may make it not as good as other shows for child development (which adults might find boring).

I don't know that I buy that though, I think the shows that claim they're for child development but are insufferable to adults would be better of just skipped entirely, probably those skills are better learned from real life play and interaction than tv.

Of course there's also the mad science of cocomelon and their 'distractatron' https://www.readtrung.com/p/why-i-love-bluey-and-hate-cocome... - nothing can be worse than that.

Writing and writers changing every few decade. Reacting to the output of the previous gen.

Popular shows of 80-90s avoided trauma and ambiguity. Everything was simple and morally clear.

Then there was a huge counter reaction overload where we got Anti-Heroes, Moral Ambiguity, Trauma, "Realism" etc in every other show.

As viewers got tired and yearn for hope, faith, meaning, sincerity we got another wave (Ted Lasso, Reservation Dogs etc). Similar to the writing in Bluey they takes us back to Sincerity, but much smarter since they don't avoid Trauma. And show the viewer how healing and connection happens without power struggles.

Its basically a response to cynicism and fatigue. With comfort and care.

> Popular shows of 80-90s avoided trauma and ambiguity. Everything was simple and morally clear.

Popular western shows did; I've started watching the Gundam series, the first set started in '79 and while superficially it looks like your generic saturday morning cartoon, it starts off with trauma (many people killed) and while the villains are obviously evil - genocide, nazi ideologies ("sieg zeon"), etc - they also get more character development than what the protagonists get. The villains are the underdogs, only 1/30th the size of the "federation", and the good guys have a new set of superweapons that seems to win and kill their people on every occasion. There's two episodes where a "villain" character is introduced as a lover, ambitious military man, etc, then gets killed, his would-be wife killing herself in the next episode.

Anyway, that's just recent experience, I'm sure if you revisit some of the 80's / 90's shows you'd see more trauma / ambiguity too. I'm thinking of the X-Men series for example.

That first run is pretty interesting because they clearly had the foresight to make things morally grey and the villians human. It's very clear they added some mustache twirling villiany to a few episodes as an afterthought. It's not even clear until like the last dozen episodes that Zeon is evil.

I know Gundam quality is a huge spectrum, but the 'sloppiness' of moral ambiguity in the first one is pretty great. Way too often (Z Gundam) they just do a timeskip and say "what if the good guys became bad after they won?"

> It's not even clear until like the last dozen episodes that Zeon is evil.

Zeon is literally portrayed as eugenicist Nazis early in the show. They literally chant "Sieg Zeon!" while saluting. Literally the very first episode shows Zeon dropping a space colony on Earth, essentially nuking a major population center (and says half the civilian population dies in the war.)

It's pretty clear Zeon is evil. What's unclear initially is that it was the Zabi family that made it evil.

Originally, Zeon was an idealistic movement by an essentially leftist philosopher (Zeon Deikun) whose work was co-opted by a militant autocratic family (the Zabi family). The leftist guy gets assassinated, and a big part of the series is watching his son, Char (the primary antagonist of the show) trying to take down the Zabi's while fighting for independence from the Federation.

I would argue it's the best children's cartoon ever.

Also, as a dad, Bandit's character is so well written. I relate to him in every single episode that I've watched. Nearly every other dad character in children's programming is a flat, 2-dimensional, drooling idiot that nobody respects.

Even if Bluey was strange Australian propaganda to make fatherhood desirable and respectable, it still wins because it actually works at it.

Avoiding the "dumb sitcom dad" has been done before a few times, and well (Bob Parr of Incredibles; Stoick the Vast of How to Train Your Dragon; King Fergus of Brave could be some examples) - but Bandit just is a dad; he's not perfect, he's not brilliant - but he's there (except when he has to leave) and he loves - his children, his wife, himself.

And even though he says "I'm not taking advice from a cartoon dog" we all end up doing so.

How could making fatherhood desirable and respectable ever be considered "strange propaganda"? We live in very weird times indeed.

> How could making fatherhood desirable and respectable ever be considered "strange propaganda"?

Strange things are afoot in the "manosphere" - influencers & podcasters can push a lot of product around the idea of masculinity.

Yes very weird stuff, unlike the conventional narrative we've typically seen across the media which is that men are simple-minded buffoons incapable of boiling an egg. This is completely normal and good.

I think part of it is that dads are fine being the “lovable buffoon” - even Bandit plays such. But underlying it is a seriousness that is always present but rarely seen (the “enough of that game” line in Daddy Putdown, for example).

Everyone knows the sitcom dad, and yet dads rarely strongly complain about it. Even in this thread it’s more praise for Bandit than anger at Homer’s portrayal.

> Even in this thread it’s more praise for Bandit than anger at Homer’s portrayal.

Initially, and more-or-less consistently for the first 7-9 seasons or so before it switched format and kinda became a straight (if goofy and heightened) version of the thing they'd been satirizing, The Simpsons was a satire of the standard family sitcom format developed over the preceding decades (with roots going back to radio).

At least in those seasons, the characters should be immune from criticism of being too stereotypical (for TV) since that's exactly what it was deliberately leaning into and satirizing—it's a combination of played-straight (and amped-up, even, for Homer) sitcom tropes with subversions of other tropes, with the latter mostly revolving around introducing more-"real" (if still played for laughs and caricatured) characters to the family sitcom format, especially when it comes to authority figures—the principal, teachers, mayor, et c.

> ...men are simple-minded buffoons incapable of boiling an egg

...and yet these buffoon sitcom dads almost always have a huge house in the suburbs, even when they have a stay at home spouse - who's way out of their league.

It's almost as if it's a deliberate depiction for a blank canvas of a character, similar to the plain-jane central character with no personality in YA novels who inevitably gets involved in a love triangle involving the hottest guys (one bad-boy and one nice guy). Being formulaic doesn't make it anti-${DEMOGRPHIC}.

Really depends on the media you consume.

The "men are simple-minded buffoons" media is mostly comedy, and mostly resonates because we have, indeed, all been simple-minded buffoons at some point (who among us has not failed to boil an egg at least once? It's relatable).

But I can also name off the top of my head media where men are geniuses, and smart, and kind, and wise, and brave... And some of it isn't even Star Trek.

Honestly, if you're typically seeing men as buffoons across media, you may want to change your subscription services.

It's specifically fathers and not men - men are the heroes in countless movies, but only rarely are they such as fathers unless the movie needs to pluck your heartstrings.

Bandit singing "99 bottles of thing on the wall" in a couple episodes is just fantastically real.

A professor once said that some of the best art is really a head-fake.

Bluey is about half a show for kids and half a show for parents. It shows the kids neat things and fun ideas for play and it quietly whispers to the parents, over and over again, "You're doing fine."

> My only complaint is that I am a grown-ass man and shouldn't be tearing up every other episode of a children's cartoon...

This, so, many, times :)

Why are you bawling your eyes out listening to Aussie music?

Oh, just some real estate things ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ngwtA3WRK8

> My only complaint is that I am a grown-ass man and shouldn't be tearing up every other episode of a children's cartoon...

Or maybe you should! Maybe we shouldn't be making people feel bad for being emotional! Maybe it's really successful art to be making so many people feel so strongly!

> My only complaint is that I am a grown-ass man and shouldn't be tearing up every other episode of a children's cartoon...

You should try moving across the country with littles, after selling their childhood home, and then watching the finale...

Bluey is great, agreed.

I'd say Bluey is a better Peppa Pig. Now, hear me out -- it's surprising how many gags meant for grownups are there in Peppa Pig (e.g. "one must become one with the mud" is not humor for kids), but the art is... well, it's intentionally flat and boring. But Bluey has a lot of the same kind of humor, with visually appealing characters and world.

Peppa Pig is more ... "cartoony" if I can use the term, whereas Bluey is more "real life" - and I don't think it is just the animation (rounded rects live!) - Bluey is established with a continuity and detail that makes it seem we're looking into a real world as opposed to vignettes created for our amusement.

Yes, agreed. Bluey is simply better in all ways. I meant to say Peppa is deceptively not crap, it just looks bad. But at moments it's hilarious. It is for younger kids though, who I think require less "continuity".

Peppa Pig is really underserved by the art; it's a much better show than the better-animated Cocomelon, for example.

Cocomelon is particularly bad and weaponized intentionally against kid attention: https://www.readtrung.com/p/why-i-love-bluey-and-hate-cocome...

The creator of Bluey worked as an animator on Peppa Pig and wanted to create something like that for his home.

Peppa Pig is in general funnier than Bluey. Visually, I also agree, Bluey is far superior. I just can't help, as a parent, the feeling of inferiority as there's no way two working parents have the energy and patience to make everything a game with their kids. That's the main crux of why I prefer Peppa.

As a non-parent who has only consumed either shows while staying with parent friends, I found Peppa Pig quite grating while Bluey was actually a fun watch. I can't imagine having Peppa Pig on frequently.

Peppa has a more "grating" and generally louder tone, agreed, but it's deceptively simpler than it seems. After you watch it for a while (something you can only really do if you have kids) it starts to grow on you, and you start noticing the subtler humor that is aimed at the parents.

Yeah. I think for me it's just the tone. Then again, I'm also deeply put off by the "everything is fast and loud" tone of a bunch of more adult-oriented content (eg: Adventure Time, Phineas and Ferb, or Rick and Morty are all unwatchable to me).

There are some real laugh-out-loud moment in Peppa Pig (like at the fair, where everyone was telling Mommy Pig that girls aren't good at said game and she in her anger absolutely demolishes it). However, I find those moments coming up less in Bluey. I almost always laugh at how Grandpa Pig says "metal detector", too.

I think if I didn't have kids, I would like Bluey better. Likewise, I would be able to watch it without any discrimination.

Not just the best children's cartoon, but one of the best TV shows I've ever seen in terms of how close it comes to realizing its full potential. I have a hard time finding points to criticize.

My only complaint is the children’s bedtime story books are incredibly effective at delivering their core task - they deliberately draw the stories out so long that they put both parties asleep.

We've acquired a handful of their books and they're just not great for reading to a toddler. The dialog is in speech bubbles, and the layout is more like an episode. I have to come up with filler text and structure on the fly. Give me a Franklin or Little Critter, any day.

> My only complaint is that I am a grown-ass man and shouldn't be tearing up every other episode of a children's cartoon...

Cricket. Every time. .. I love it.