> so much complete crap out there now that Bluey is a breath of fresh air
Out of curiosity, as a non-parent, what makes it crap?
Out of curiosity, as a non-parent, what makes it crap?
Paw Patrol is essentially the laziest most nonsensical writing, because of course you don't have to write well if you have enough colour being vomited at the screen and you're really just trying to sell toys.
Bluey is essentially the opposite of that. There's decent stories, it seems to tackle some tough stuff sometimes, and just generally it seems well-written and much more representative of what life is like for people (them being dogs notwithstanding).
Separately, I've also seen some straight up terrible stuff on Youtube. Just random garbage which is probably these days more LLM-generated but clearly used to be created by throwing darts at a board. For example, I opened up youtube kids, said I was a parent, and clicked Explore and this was one of the first videos that came up: https://www.youtubekids.com/watch?v=tOXszq1-rxs The themes tend to be (ab)using well-known properties kids already know to get them to watch your video. This came up as related, and at least involves a Yoga routine but you can see the other elements are there: https://www.youtubekids.com/watch?v=QM8NjfCfOg0
There's lots of videos of kids unpacking presents, or having tantrums to get what they want, or weird videos of adults shouting at children... Or videos showing people play computer games for hours on end.
You are vastly underestimating what small children can understand.
At least back when my kid was small the YouTube algo would start feeding them up after the second or third video. You’d turn around to make dinner and come back to this never ending loop of … crap.
Frankly, I was pretty impressed with the hustle and curious what the tech stack looked like.
And that's before even considering factors like providing educational or positive-role-model value, just a sheer "is the script, like... a story, with characters?" level. Or the animation quality (universally garbage, of course).
[1] Not even getting into the absolute insanity of Youtube—look up some of the kid-targeted "story"-type Minecraft machinama on there to see some of the most uncanny "narrative" ever, tons of them go on and on and on with the trappings of a story but no actual story, just things happening one after another and weird nebulous goals that never seem to get any closer, like some kind of drug-fueled automatic-writing experiment, it's a friggin' fever dream. And that's before you get to the extremely weird Youtube crap aimed at kids.
So like every JJ Abrams production.
"They throw Kirk off the Enterprise! And... uh... Old Spock just happens to be there! Like, right there! Because it's less work for me if he just is, for no reason! I don't want to think of a real reason and maybe have to go back and revise stuff, or remember things later, to integrate that! He just is!"
"They escape on the Millennium Falcon, and Han and Chewie show up... uh, I guess they'll need another ship for that, so now we have two. And I guess there was a homing beacon on the Falcon, that got activated, and Han just happened to be about five minutes away and already sitting in his cockpit and ready to go and not already on the way somewhere else, in hyperspace? Yeah, doesn't matter, I just need him to be there now so he is, doing something else would be hard. Oh shit I have two ships now, and I need them all on the Falcon, so, uh... monsters and pirates destroy the extra ship I just introduced! Yeah there are monsters and pirates now. Do either of those stick around or come back, or are they, like, foreshadowed? No, I just needed them to destroy this ship that I manifested for my own convenience, but no longer have any use for."
"I need these characters to go somewhere else, so, uh... someone/something shows up and chases them away! There are no other consequences or meaningful connections, they just get chased so that they leave and go to where I need them to be."
Et c.
[EDIT] To be fair, most writers do some of this, they just don't do it quite so willy-nilly and build entire plots that way.
[EDIT EDIT] This also doesn't necessarily mean his movies are bad. The plotting... I mean, that part's bad, incredibly bad, like, paragon of bad plotting, should-be-covered-in-film-schools bad, in some of them. But it's not impossible that a movie could still be entertaining, or even good, despite that. I don't mean this to dismiss his entire body of work as absolutely and entirely bad, and actually started out defending him as markedly better at everything than the kind of scripts and TV shows I was writing about, which he certainly is.
It’s like that experiment with chess masters. They show them a board mid-game then ask them to re-create it (which they can do easily), but then they do the same with a random configuration of pieces, which they fail. It’s because there’s no logic to it for their brain to “chunk”. I think it’s the same reason why a movie that you didn’t think was “bad” is completely forgettable. Your brain is built for remembering narratives, but it can sniff out when it doesn’t make sense. Has nothing to do with genre. You can probably remember the main beats of a Pixar film you’ve seen once, even though it was talking toys or whatever.
Parent of five here. Crap = glorifying bad behavior, teaching bad values (this will be different for every family), depicting no consequences for poor decisions, and/or resolving conflict using only violence.
In general, things that mom and dad don’t have to either retcon or have a long discussion about why it is bad.