Blue's Clues is a Nickelodeon franchise created by Traci Paige Johnson, Todd Kessler and Angela C. Santomero combined concepts from child development and early-childhood education with innovative animation and production techniques that helped their viewers learn. The series was originally hosted by Steve Burns, who left in 2002 and was replaced by Donovan Patton as Joe for the rest of the series until being replaced by Josh Dela Cruz as Josh for the rest of the series' reboot. The show follows an animated blue-spotted dog named Blue as she leaves a trail of clues/paw prints for the host and the viewers to figure out her plans for the day. The franchise itself was originally aired as a TV pilot called Blue Prints (which was shown later in the Blue's Clues episode "Snack Time"). A year later, the show finally debuted as CGI/Live-action preschool series on Nick Jr. which concluded until 2006. A puppet-styled Blue's Clues spin-off called Blue's Room premiered in 2004.
History[]
Background[]
By 1990, parents, teachers, and media experts had been criticizing "the lack of quality fare for children on commercial television" for many years. Up to that point, PBS was the only source for quality children's television; other broadcasters voluntarily set educational standards for their programming and "were expected to regulate themselves", but it led to little change in the quality of children's programs. By the time Blue's Clues premiered in 1996, there was a large number of TV shows for children, but most of them were violent and designed to sell action toys and other products; as co-creator Angela Santomero put it, "a vehicle for toy-based 'commercials'". According to author Diane Tracy in her 2002 book Blue's Clues for Success, "The state of children's television was pretty dismal".
There was little incentive for producing high-quality children's television until 1990, when Congress passed the Children's Television Act (CTA), which "required that networks be held accountable for the quality of children's programming or risk losing their license". The CTA set no hourly quotas and left it to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to determine compliance to the law, so little positive improvements were made. In 1996, the FCC passed additional regulations, including requiring broadcasters to, in a provision called "the Three-Hour rule", air at least three hours of children's programming per week, between the hours of 07:00 to 22:00, and that they be tagged with an E/I (Educational and Informational) logo so that children and their families could easily find the programs. The cable network Nickelodeon, which was recognized, along with PBS, as a leader in the creation and production of high-quality children's programming, was not required to comply with federal regulations to provide informative or educational content, but did so anyway, before the CTA became law.
According to Heather L. Kirkorian and her fellow researchers Ellen Wartella and Daniel Anderson in 2008, since television appeared in homes beginning in the mid-20th century, critics have often expressed concern about its impact on viewers, especially children, who as Kirkorian argued, are "active media users" by the age of three. Researchers believed that there were links between television viewing and children's cognitive and learning skills and that what children watched may be more important than how much they watched it. She reported that up until the 1980s, researchers had only an implicit theory about how viewers watched television, and that young children were cognitively passive viewers and controlled by "salient attention-eliciting features" like sound effects and fast movement. As a result, most researchers believed that television interfered with cognition and reflection and as a result, children could not learn from and process television. In the early 1980s, however, new theories about how young children watch television suggested that attention in children as young as two-years old were largely guided by program content.
Conception[]
In the mid-1990s, Nickelodeon, looking to create programming for preschoolers, hired a team of three producers, Angela Santomero, Todd Kessler, and Traci Paige Johnson, to create a new television program for young children. According to The New York Times, Kessler was the first creator to be brought on board to the project. Kessler had worked on Sesame Street, but he disliked its format and thought that it was too static and not visual enough, and was a freelance producer at Nickelodeon at the time. Santomero, who named Fred Rogers as a major influence, worked at Nickelodeon as a researcher and Johnson was a freelance artist and animator. Santomero later said that they "were young, and Nickelodeon took a chance on us".
Daniel R. Anderson of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who author Malcolm Gladwell called one of the "pioneering television researchers", was an adviser for the new show. Nickelodeon had hired Anderson as an adviser for its Nick Jr. block of preschool programs starting in 1993, although Santomero had already been getting his input about research informally. When Nickelodeon enlisted her to co-create Blue's Clues, he came on in a more formal capacity. Anderson later said that he "jumped at the chance" to serve as an advisor for Blue's Clues because "Nickelodeon was interested in providing programs that would actually benefit preschoolers rather than merely entertain them". Anderson also stated that the choice to produce the show as overtly and clearly educational was a departure for Nickelodeon and for any commercial network. According to research conducted by Nickelodeon, parents of preschool aged children wanted the shows they watched to be educational.
Santomero, Kessler, and Johnson met in a conference room at Viacom, which owned Nickelodeon, in New York for a month to create Blue's Clues. According to Santomero, the creators of Blue's Clues wanted to create a children's television show that was "something very simple and graphic and slow", emphasized social and emotional skills, treated children like they were smart, and helped them feel empowered. The character Blue was originally conceived as a cat, and the name of the show was to be Blue Prints, but the show's name was changed and Blue became a dog because Nickelodeon was already producing a show about a cat and because, as Anderson reported, children who watched the pilot, which was used for testing, "almost universally called the show Blue's Clues". Even though most children's television shows at the time were built around male characters, Blue was female and as The New York Times put it, "never wore a bow".
Kessler handled the show's "computer-based production", Santomero the research, and Johnson the design. By 2001, the show's research team, which worked collaboratively with the show's producers and creators, consisted of director of research Alice Wilder, who joined the Blue's Clues team shortly after the show's debut, Alison Sherman, Karen Leavitt, and Koshi Dhingra. They were given $150,000 to produce a pilot, about a quarter of the budget for other Nickelodeon shows at the time, which was used in 1995 to test the show's interactive elements with its potential audience. The pilot was considered lost, but in 2021, Santomero announced that she owned a copy of it, and that the pilot was filmed in 1994, although it was unclear if it would ever be released due to legal issues.
Premiere and later history[]
Blue's Clues premiered in the U.S. on September 8, 1996. The premiere was the highest-rated premiere of any Nickelodeon program, and the show became crucial to the network's growth. Scholar Norma Pecora called Blue's Clues the "cornerstone" of Nickelodeon's educational programming. By the end of 1997, it was the highest-rated show for preschoolers on commercial television, and was the third-highest rated show when compared to children's shows on public television. Within 18 months of its premiere, Blue's Clues was as well-known among the parents of preschoolers as more established children's shows such as Sesame Street. In 2002, Tracy reported that it was one of the highest-rated shows for preschoolers, was preschool children and their parents' favorite cable preschool program, was viewed by approximately 13.7 million viewers each week, and aired in about 60 countries.
In 2000, after 75 episodes, with "no fanfare" and no announcement from Nickelodeon, co-creator and co-producer Todd Kessler left Blue's Clues and the network to pursue other projects. He told The New York Times that he had "no hard feelings" regarding his departure. Kessler continued to be listed as an executive producer for the run of the show and for any future spin-offs. Also in 2000, CBS, which was also owned by Viacom, began airing the show as part of the centerpiece of its Saturday and Sunday morning children's programming. In 2004, Blue's Clues stopped production, which Santomero called "devastating", although it continued to air on Nickelodeon, and a spin-off, Blue's Room, was launched in the same year. It featured puppets, as well as the original show's second host. Blue's Clues celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2006 with a prime time special and the release of a DVD entitled "Blues Biggest Stories", which consisted of eight half-hour episodes spanning the show's history.
In November 2019, a reboot of Blue's Clues premiered. The show, called Blue's Clues & You!, was hosted by Joshua Dela Cruz and featured many of the same characters in the original show. Steve Burns, the original show's first host, served as a writer and director on the new show; he also made guest appearances, along with the original show's second host Donovan Patton, and participated in the casting of Dela Cruz.
Casting[]
- Main article:List of Blue's Clues characters
The most important casting decision was that of the host, the only human character in the show. The host's role was to empower and challenge the show's young viewers, to help increase their self-esteem, and to strongly connect with them through the television screen. The producers originally wanted a female host. After months of research and over 1,000 auditions, they hired actor/performer Steve Burns based on the strength of his audition. Burns received the strongest and most enthusiastic response in tests with the young audience. Johnson said what made Burns a great children's TV host was that "he didn't want to be a children's host ... He loved kids, but he didn't want to make a career out of it". Burns was in over 100 episodes of Blue's Clues when he left the show in April 2002. Burns himself stated, "I knew I wasn't gonna be doing children's television all my life, mostly because I refused to lose my hair on a kid's TV show, and it was happenin'—fast."
After the producers conducted 1,500 auditions, Burns was replaced by actor Donovan Patton, who played Steve's brother Joe, introduced to the audience in articles in Nickelodeon's magazine and on its webpage and an arc of three episodes. Burns' departure generated "outlandish rumors" and was featured in a Time magazine story. Patton had never seen Blue's Clues before he auditioned for the part, and like Burns, who worked with him to help him prepare for the role, was also popular with preschool test audiences. The producers later reported that finding someone who could match Burns' "deceptively simple performance" was difficult. Patton became a "household name", although as Johnson stated, his character was named Joe because "Donovan was a little too hard on a preschooler's tongue". According to The New York Times, Donovan played the role more relaxed and "taller" than Burns.
Even though research demonstrated that children tend to pay less attention to adult male voices, Burns and Patton were chosen as the program's hosts because they were popular with their audience. Daniel Anderson insisted that Burns and Patton were the best actors for their roles out of the hundreds who auditioned, calling them "actors who could mime as demanded by the mixed action and animation format", and reported that there was no evidence that children paid less attention to them than to other parts of the program. He also said that Burns and Patton overcame what he called "attentional bias against men" in three ways: by behaving energetically and childlike; by breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience, often by looking directly into the camera and asking their audience, "Will you help?", and like Fred Rogers, forming a direct relationship to the audience; and by "always doing something". Anderson insisted that by forming a relationship with the audience, the actors' male voice became cues to the audience to pay attention and stated that it was the hosts' style of presentation that determined child attention.
Johnson was cast as Blue's voice because, of the show's crew, she was able to sound the most like a dog. Nick Balaban, who wrote the music for the show along with Michael Rubin, was cast as the voice of Mr. Salt. Balaban initially used a Brooklyn accent for Mr. Salt before settling on a French accent. Rubin also provided the voice of Mailbox.
Series' origin[]
The Pilot[]
- Main article:Blue Prints
The series' pilot was originally shown in 1995 only for the Test screenings of the show's official debut on Nick Jr. Although the pilot was never aired, its plot was adapted into the series' first official episode, "Snack Time."
The original series[]
- Main article: Blue's Clues
After finishing the Pilot's Test screenings, The show itself made it's official debut on Nickelodeon's Nick Jr. program in 1996 with a very first episode of Blue's Clues from the first season.
Spinoff[]
- Main article: Blue's Room
In 2004, American puppet television series spun off from Blue's Clues called "Blue's Room" was officially started out as short segments on Blue's Clues episodes in Season 6.
Series reboot[]
- Main article: Blue's Clues & You!
In 2019, A live-action/computer-animated Blue's Clues reboot was succession with a new host, Josh Dela Cruz and newer characters not shown in the franchise are shown in the reboot.
Series' films[]
Direct-to-video film[]
- Main article: Blue's Big Musical Movie
This is the only film based the franchise. After the show ended, reruns continued to air on Nick Jr. until June 29, 2019.
Paramount+ original film[]
- Main article: Blue's Big City Adventure
This announcement for a Blue's Clues film has now becoming a Movie, And the fans are going crazy for it too. This is the first film to be produced by Paramount Animation, 9 Story Media Group, and Nickelodeon Movies, distributed by Paramount Pictures. Filmed in New York City, it will be released on Paramount+ on September 20, 2022.
video game series[]
Main article:Blue's Clues (video game series)
The series was also included into a educational adventure video game series based on the television show of the same name developed and published by Humongous Entertainment.
The first game, Blue's 123 Time Activities, was released in 1999. The game works on Windows 95 and above, and on System 7.5.3 (with PowerPC) to Mac OS X Tiger.
List of Games:[]
- Blue's Birthday Adventure
- Blue's Treasure Hunt
- Blue's 123 Time Activites
- Blue's Clues Kindergarten
- Blue's Big Musical (video game)
External Links[]
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