Because we can’t get enough of Blues Clues
Posted
August 11, 2006 at
4:00 am by
Jessica
You know how ya know when you’ve really gone over the deep end as a mother?…When you are in such dire need of a stiff one on the rocks that reality and REM sleep are indistinguishable, when your mind is so vapid that the demons of soul snatchery have made themselves at home in your dispondant glaze, your husband waves his hands in front of you and you don’t blink and he asks if you’re okay. Your kids are in bed and even your eyelashes hurt — your toe-nails are exhausted, but the real kicker is, Blues Clues is on and you’re still watching it 10 minutes after the kids have been tucked in. These are 10 minutes you’ll never get back. Watching flies fall on dog poop would have felt like less of a violation.
Even years after the bastard Steve, “Joe”, who is even more creepy and ridiculous (wear the t-shirt proudly) that the original, it is still everywhere, on television all-day-long and merchandise still warrants valuable, retail shelf realestate. I am still slightly impressed and intrigued by it’s ability to hynotize toddlers and more than that, how old it makes me feel now that it is 10 years old!
What’s even more bizarro is that the special that aired August 6th (check your local listings for reruns ad nauseam) was reviewed by The New York Times. (Why is the New York Times reviewing Blues Clues? Aren’t they wasting valuable anti-war space???)
Even if you were not a small child or living with one over the last decade, you may have been at least vaguely aware of Nickelodeon’s “Blue’s Clues.”
This enormously successful Peabody Award-winning series is about a powder blue dog, appropriately named Blue, who leaves paw-print clues to help her live-action human master — and, more important, her millions of preschool viewers — solve a mystery. The mysteries tend to involve colors, shapes, numbers and the alphabet.
On Sunday night “Blue’s Clues” celebrates its 10th anniversary with a prime-time (8 p.m.) special, “Meet Blue’s Baby Brother,” which has childlike charm to spare.
As the title indicates, Blue has a brand-new sibling. The mystery in this hourlong show is just who that lucky puppy is. Blue and her master, Joe (Donovan Patton, who replaced the original host, Steven Burns, in 2002), set off on an adventure, following special gold paw-print clues. Read the rest of the review…
[TAGS]Blues Clues[/TAGS]
Tags: Blues-Clues |
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1. jjwalsh said:
August 17, 2006 @ 11:43 pm
As a teacher, I like Blue’s Clues and I appreciate what they are trying to do.
When I first started teacher training, we were taught to pause to let the students react and answer the questions instead of answering it for them or just speaking at them in lecture style, that is how they learn.
And that is what the pregnant pauses on Blue’s Clues and Dora are all about. Annoying or not, it does work well and keeps kids interested and interacting with the show and therefore learn better. My son and I thought Steve was better than his brother Joe, but since they kept up the same show style, my son soon accepted Joe as well. We haven’t seen any of the latest ones, but they sound fun.
As anyone who has read the popular book, “The Tipping Point” will know that Blue’s Clues was based on a lot of the researched successful points from Sesame Street, but they took it further and tried to make it more interactive to teach better- helping kids remember the content and lessons of the show easier. Each and every episode is tested on kids to see how effective and interesting it is and then re-hashed by the writers and editors to make the best show possible.
I respect that kind of effort and research done in broadcasting for kids shows. So many of the kids cartoons and shows just seem thrown together based on ideas and quick moving images they think kids might be interested in instead of based on actual research or trials with kids.