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Mef is Bluey fan, you will know very well that we are in the middle of a confusing limbo. The last proper episode of Bluey aired in 2024. There is a Bluey movie coming out in the summer of 2027. Between them there is a big, dry gap of three years, three months and 16 days.
But Bluey is a machine that needs to be fed. There are Bluey books for sale, Bluey records to buy, Bluey toys and games and Lego sets and magazines and shoes and drinks and gnomes and blankets and bandages and pajama sets and 550-watt Bluey Mini Waffle Makers to be replaced. It’s hard to sell all these things when Bluey doesn’t have a place of gravity, so, with measured joy, here comes the new minisodes.
It’s best to think of minisodes as Bluey’s version of methadone. Much shorter in format than Bluey proper – the longest minisodes come in at three minutes, with only one or two episodes – they’re a kind of cartoon show, with a few weird spots that are playing very simply. This is the second set of minisodes to hit the air since the full series went dark and, as in the past, it is acceptable.
Choose the group of the new plant and Cinderella, which is just a place where Bandit tries to remember the story of Cinderella in bed, and creates all kinds of strange things. Also a stand-out is Honk, where Stripe plays a game with his kids that (spoiler alert) ends in an unexpected act of violence. What’s great about these episodes is that they feel like Bluey, to the point where they feel like moments of episodes cut out of time.
At their best, the minisodes allow the show to be more dramatic than the main show would allow. One of the new episodes, Tea Party, is successful because it moves away from detailed and realistic discussions of tea culture. However, minisodes are also very loose so there is a lot of chaff.
Four of the 10 episodes released feature people singing nursery rhymes, and one features people dancing wordlessly to classic songs. This is hard to justify, because it’s basically Bluey Do Cocomelonand Bluey’s appeal has always been that it is everything Cocomelon is not.
At its best, Bluey was always the most ambitious show on TV. Take part Apply Packetwhere two cartoon dogs trace civilization from prehistoric to post-human utopia in the space of seven minutes. Or Sleepytime, which has more to say about children coping with the death of a parent than any book ever written. When Bluey really stretched his legs, with the 28th minute of the special Sign, the result was kaleidoscopic; so sweet and so cleverly crafted that the emotional loss of his final moments hits like a car.
Each part was different. They all had a different feeling, a different attitude, a different sense of Joff Bush. They felt amplified in a way that a minisode – especially a minisode where someone sings Ten Green Bottles and nothing else happens – can’t.
This is a very important time for Bluey. Next year’s movie may represent the last time producer Joe Brumm will write for Bluey. Everything good about the show — its warmth, its universal appeal, its universal appeal — came from him. I have a very complicated relationship with the showand I saw how Brumm was able to take my small, fancy idea and turn it into an effective, disruptive, time-skipping piece of art. He is a special talent.
The big question is how Bluey will be able to challenge his absence. There’s a kind of show that manages to perfectly mimic the way they walk in a way that only true blue-eyed white people can tell the difference, like Larry David left Seinfeld. But there’s also the kind of show that looks and sounds like minisodes — classics running around without a real hit — and that can be scary.
As a filler episode to keep people buying until new episodes are ready, Bluey minisodes are fine. But if he’s a sign of where the show is headed, it might be time to worry about the future.
