‘Bluey’ Creator Joe Brumm On Making A TV Juggernaut, Not Compromising His Vision & The Heeler Family’s Future
EXCLUSIVE: Keep your eyes peeled for how Sunday’s extended episode of Bluey performs — its success just might decide whether TV’s most famous heeler dog family step foot in the feature film world.
In an exclusive interview with Deadline, Bluey creator Joe Brumm addressed the future of the Australia kids TV juggernaut, and it sounds like 30-minute special ‘The Sign’ — four times the length of regular episodes — will play a key role in what shape the story of anthropomorphic Australian sisters Bluey and Bingo takes next.
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To date, the three seasons have all run seven-minute episodes. “I’m loving going longer on ‘The Sign’, and I’d love to try to go longer — I definitely would not rule that out,” he said. “That’s why I’m very interested to see how The Sign goes down with the audience. Obviously it’s four times as long as a normal episode. Will the audience accept a stint with a longer story?”
The episode will launch on Disney+ in the U.S. and the ABC in Australia next week (April 14), and its title has sparked wild internet rumors about the show’s future. Many speculated the title is a reference to a ‘For Sale’ sign on the home the Heeler family — Bluey and Bingo and their parents, Bandit and Chilli — share, and whether this could spell the end or a change in setting. A new episode launched on Sunday, ‘Ghostbasket’, at least in part reveals the truth, which we won’t spoil here.
‘The Sign’ is one of the most anticipated episodes of kids TV in recent memory. Given that the first part of season three debuted as far back as 2021 in its home country on the ABC, a fresh story in a new format with a mysterious episode name has been the subject of huge speculation around the world. Will Bluey continue on or is there change to come? Brumm, a laid-back and unassuming Brisbane native, is either an expert at misdirection or genuinely isn’t sure when Deadline probes him on future plans, but ‘The Sign’ might help him decide.
The casting will highlight much of a global phenomenon has become, with The Stranger and The Underground Railroad star Joel Edgerton becoming the latest A-list star to cameo. He follows in the footsteps of Natalie Portman, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eva Mendes, and for Brumm, the Hollywood seal of approval came as a shock. “This is still essentially a show aimed at four-year-olds, yet we’ve have Lin-Manuel Miranda in,” he said.
Another moment that stuck with Brumm, who is a huge American Football fan, was seeing a photo of Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce and his wife, Kylie, celebrating their daughter’s birthday with a Bluey cake. “The thought of Bluey entertaining the kids of someone like that… there’s something really cool about that,” he added.
Protective instincts
Since its launch in 2018, Brumm has been famously protective of his show, which he scripts, produces and animates in his hometown. When it was sold internationally, first to the BBC and then to Disney+, he was steadfast in his refusal to allow local English-language voice actors replace his cast, particularly Dave McCormack, who plays the fun-loving family patriarch Bandit, and Melanie Zanetti, who voices the warm-hearted mom Chilli.
However, the show’s success has been understandably hard to compute: It was Disney+’s most-streamed title of 2023 with almost 44 billion minutes of the 145 available eps watched, according to Nielsen data, and was the U.S.’s second-most streamed title overall, behind only Suits. “It’s a bit weird. I’m stoked,” he said. “It’s an enormous relief because it was not a guarantee it would work internationally, and I had no idea if it would.”
Of course, it was originally a huge hit in its home country, Australia, where it broke viewing records on pubcaster the ABC. It also plays to massive audiences in the UK on the BBC, whose commercial arm, BBC Studios, controls the distribution and licensing and merchandising rights. That success breeds speculation.
Bloomberg’s cover story this week quoted an unnamed source who claimed Disney had “repeatedly” explored a buyout of the brand, noting it had previously passed over an opportunity to acquire the Bluey rights from BBC Studios, which in turn licenses them from Brisbane’s Ludo Studios. (Disney does take some merchandising revenue, it is understood.)
We hear the House of Mouse has spoken with the BBC and Ludo Studio to explore whether the brand can expand into theme parks, further TV seasons and/or feature films, but that there is no offer on the table to any of the parties involved. A deal wouldn’t be cheap. The brand’s value has ballooned, with estimates now at around $2B, as L&M sales boom. Disney declined to comment.
Brumm, an animator and creative at heart, said he broadly takes a “back seat” when it comes to the business of Bluey. Ludo controls the decision-making on his behalf, because he admits he had “no experience” of taking a show or a brand global.
How the show ended up with the BBC is a fascinating tale in itself. Having spent ten years in the UK working as a lead animator on shows such as CBeebies’ Charlie and Lola, Brumm and his British wife, Suzy, moved back to Australia with the intention of making more animation. Specifically, Brumm wanted to create an Australian Peppa Pig and produce it locally.
Brumm had grown up in Brisbane around blue heeler dogs — in fact, his family owned one called Bluey, who he as described as a “wild” canine that would give the other family pets “hell.” Once he and Suzy had their two children, two girls, he combined the elements of parenthood and childhood memories to begin formulating a short which would serve as inspiration for a short that would become the Bluey pilot.
However, his Joho Studios, which he runs with animator Mark Paterson, was effectively a work-for-hire operation providing shortform animation for the likes of College Humor. It didn’t have the capability to make a full pilot, so Joho struck a deal with Ludo Studio, a small, award-winning production house to co-develop it. Following pitches at conferences such as MIPCOM and the Asian Animation Summit, former BBC kids boss Michael Carrington, who was working at Australian pubcaster the ABC, agreed to finance a longer pilot. Henrietta Hurford-Jones of BBC Studios (then BBC Worldwide) was equally taken by the project and had soon committed about a third of the budget for a full season on the ABC, while taking the worldwide program sales and global merchandise and licensing distribution rights.
The result was immediately a ratings smash in Australia, and has become a financial boon for BBC Studios, so much so that it recently raised its borrowing limit to £600M specifically so it can acquire more kids and family properties that could sit alongside Bluey. BBC Studios CEO Tom Fussell told the FT, “Bluey is the most streamed kids show in America at the moment, the second most streamed show in 2023,” he said. “We make all the sales, there’s a profit stream and everybody participates.” While that is broadly true, numerous articles in Australia have questioned how little the ABC makes from the mega-hit. The network couldn’t be contacted for comment at press time.
“To me, Bluey fitted well with the British television I grew up with,” said Brumm. “There enough of a thread and a familiarity.” (Talking of childhood and family, Brumm’s mother, brother and wife have all voiced characters, and local children often play Bluey and Bingo’s young friends — highlighting how the global mega-hit is a true local affair.)
It was when the U.S. came on board that Bluey really started to blow up globally. As Brumm recalls, prime to the deal, “everybody [in the States] wanted it,” though he was in the middle of scripting and animating the first season and was removed from the talks. “I remember Disney wasn’t on the table until they were all of a sudden,” he added. “It was definitely a moment when myself and a lot of people in the crew stood up and took notice at what we were doing.”
The show initially launched in the U.S. on Disney Jr in 2019 before moving to the Disney+ streaming service six months later. Results were instantly good and the ball hasn’t stopped rolling since. Disney did come under fire from fans and news outlets for changing or editing parts of the show (most widely reported is the cut of a scene in which a horse poops), though this was primarily on the broadcast network, which is subject to regulation that streaming is not. Broadly, the episodes have now reverted to their original Australian state, how Brumm wanted them. Brumm said the U.S. giant has overall been “pretty flexible” despite having a “unique set of requirements,” adding: “Disney has a brand to protect, I have a show to protect and I didn’t compromise in any way.”
Last year, Bluey mania reached a new height in the U.S. when a giant inflatable Bluey led the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade — not bad for an animated dog from Australia’s third-largest city. In that sense, it’s no wonder speculation that Disney might want more of the Heelers has grown.
‘Based on something real’
For Brumm, the runaway success of episodes such as ‘Sleepytime’ and ‘Rain’ among children and their parents is down to the “authenticity” of the stories. Just witness the hundreds of memes about parents ‘nudging’ their kids to watch more episodes, or read the Facebook and Reddit groups for full-grown fans who discuss storylines and often all-too-real adult issues the show brings to the fore.
“Most of the episodes that have cut through with adults are based on something real,” said Brumm. “Usually they’re related to something I’ve learned having kids, or my wife has experienced or just something I notice that my kids keep doing. An episode really wouldn’t start until I’d found a bit of truth like that. I wouldn’t necessarily understand it and often the episode is an exploration of that.”
It’s Brumm’s family interactions that “form the bedrock of Bluey episodes,” he said, “And that’s why kids and adults see themselves reflected in it. You love your children to death and they change you completely. They pull your insides out. You’ll cry so much more as parents, but there is so much more reward and meaning.”
Brumm is a major proponent of free play (giving kids the room to play however they want) and that underpins the series. He believes young children are socialized through interactions over games and the gratification of their narratives being accepted without question by their classmates and friends. “Play is the main thing going on under the hood of Bluey,” he said.
But what happens as Bluey and her younger sister grow up and swap imagination for video games and cell phones? With most of the storylines plucked from Brumm family life, how will that affect the show’s narrative — if it continues into the future? Brumm was typically thoughtful in his response, saying: “It would be fascinating — and we get a lot of requests to age the characters up. It would completely change the show, but there would be something really sweet about bringing through the new younger characters and having Bluey and Bingo at that babysitting age. That would definitely make a bunch of fans very happy.”
Whether that’s a tacit acknowledgement Bluey will continue into the future or not isn’t clear. What is obvious is that the ABC, BBC Studios, Disney and Bluey‘s global fanbase never want to see the Heelers go for a permanent ‘Sleepytime’.
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