Blue's Clues

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 C. 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. 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" Conception In the mid-1990s, Nickelodeon, looking to create programming for preschoolers, hired a team of three producers, Angela C. 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, a freelance Nickelodeon producer at the time, had previously worked on Sesame Street, but he disliked its format and thought that it was too static and not visual enough. Santomero, who named Fred Rogers as a major influence, worked at Nickelodeon as a researcher and Johnson was a freelance artist and animator. Daniel R. Anderson of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who Canadian 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". 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", 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". 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. Premiere and later history ''Blue's Clues'' premiered in the United States 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. 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 and Barney & Friends. 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. ''Blue's Clues'' celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2006 with a prime time special and the release of a DVD entitled "Blue's 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!'', is hosted by Josh Dela Cruz and features many of the same characters in the original show. Steve Burns, the original show's first host, serves as a writer and director on the new show; he has also made guest appearances, along with the original show's second host Donovan Patton, and participated in the casting of Dela Cruz. 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". He was in over 100 episodes of ''Blue's Clues'' when his final episodes aired 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. 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, Patton 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" Rubin also provided the voice of Mailbox. == Format ==

In The Tipping Point, author Gladwell, who called Blues Clues the stickiest'—meaning the most irresistible and involving—television show ever", described its format: Steve, the host, presents the audience with a puzzle involving Blue, the animated dog ... To help the audience unlock the puzzle, Blue leaves behind a series of clues, which are objects marked with one of her paw prints. In between the discovery of the clues, Steve plays a series of games—mini-puzzles—with the audience that are thematically related to the overall puzzle ... As the show unfolds, Steve and Blue move from one animated set to another, jumping through magical doorways, leading viewers on a journey of discovery, until, at the end of the story, Steve returns to the living room. There, at the climax of the show, he sits down in a comfortable chair to think—a chair known, of course, in the literal world of ''Blue's Clues'', as the Thinking Chair. He puzzles over Blue's three clues and attempts to come up with the answer. Nickelodeon researcher Daniel R. Anderson called the structure of ''Blue's Clues'' a game that presented its viewers with increasingly challenging and developmentally appropriate problems to solve. as well as "camera techniques, children's voices, musical cues, sound effects, clear transitions, repeatable dialogue, and visuals". Nickelodeon originally aired the same episode daily for five days before showing the next one. The producers believed this telecast strategy empowered young children by giving them many opportunities to master the content and problems presented to them. Scholar Norma Pecora considered the broadcast strategy of airing the same episode for five consecutive days in a week "sound educational thinking", because children tend to watch the same episodes multiple times and learn from repetition, and "economically clever" == Episodes ==

All seasons are available streaming on Paramount+. The first season is also available on Amazon Prime Video in the United States. == Educational goals ==

The creators and producers' mission of ''Blue's Clues'' was to "empower, challenge, and build the self-esteem of preschoolers ... while making them laugh". According to Anderson and his colleagues, the show's curriculum was based on "inherent respect for preschoolers and their ability to think and learn while having fun". According to Anderson, it was essential that the writers and creators of ''Blue's Clues'' have background and experience in early childhood development theory and research in order to ensure that the audience understood the dialogue, game, and recurrent program elements in each episode. Like Sesame Street, formative research was an important part of the development of each episode of ''Blue's Clues,'' which was included in the show's production budgets. "We wanted to learn from Sesame Street and take it one step further", Santomero said. The producers and creators used formative research, which the producers called their "secret sauce", during all aspects of the program's creative and decision-making process, and Nickelodeon provided the funding to support it. In addition to a curriculum that emphasized reasoning skills relevant to preschoolers' everyday lives, the producers wanted to include audience participation, called by Variety its "call and response style", Anderson stated, "Age-appropriate pacing and explicit directions give children an opportunity to have a voice". Anderson and his colleagues compared audience participation on the program with hands-on practice provided by a caregiver. Sesame Street tested a third of its episodes, but the ''Blue's Clues'' research team field tested every episode three times with children aged between two and six in a variety of preschool environments such as Head Start programs, public schools, and private day care centers, in order to ascertain their abilities, interests, and knowledge, to ensure the mission and philosophy of the program, and to ensure balanced demographic groups. There were three phases of testing: content evaluation, video evaluations, and content analysis. The producers and researchers also consulted outside advisers, who were chosen based on their expertise and the needs of each script. As Anderson stated, the formative research team served "as a liaison between the feedback provided by the preschoolers and outside advisers and the production team, including writers, talent, producers, directors, element artists, and animators". These learning opportunities included the use of mnemonics in the form of mantras and songs, and what Tracy called "metacognitive wrap-up" The thinking games presented in each episode used what Anderson called "a layered approach" that took the varying capabilities of the audience into account. Santomero said that they used scaffolding and that layering was inherent in the script and design of each game. They purposely presented the problem presented in increasing levels of difficulty, to prevent children from feeling frustrated and to master concepts, experience success, and feel empowered to attempt to solve more challenging concepts presented to them. The producers' goal was that all viewers understood the problem, even if they did not know how to solve it. As a result, the child was temporary frustrated by not knowing the answer because after giving them time to come up with it, child voice-overs provided the answers for them, so that they learned the correct answers, even if they were unable to come up with them. If the child was able to come up with the answers, however, they felt "part of a larger, knowing, child audience" this was done was in the use of pauses that were "long enough to give the youngest time to think, short enough for the oldest not to get bored". The structure of each episode was repetitive, designed to provide preschoolers with comfort and predictability. Since preschoolers tend to have difficulty understanding transitions, especially when they involve active inferences about time, space, and characters' perspective, the program's producers minimized transitions that required inference so that their viewers' intellectual resources could be devoted to understanding the episode's content. They accomplished this goal by limiting the number of settings during an episode and with the transitions occurring only between them and signaled by dialogue and enough time and information necessary to process them. The primary settings in ''Blue's Clues'' were the host's house and backyard, and transitions between them were usually done continuously, without the use of cuts. If transitions were accompanied by cuts, it was done by the host moving to and through a door and continuing as he entered the front or backyard. The biggest transition in ''Blue's Clues occurred when the host "skidooed" and jumped into a picture or book, done in a magical way with plenty of warning that it was coming, and began and ended in the new environment. Anderson reported that children clearly understood and enjoyed the skidoo transition. Santomero reported that the skidoo transition was inspired by the use of the trolley in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood'', which also served as a transition device. == Production ==

The producers and writers of ''Blue's Clues'' used content and television production techniques such as camera techniques, the use of children's voices, musical cues, sound effects, repeatable dialogue, and visuals in order to encourage and increase comprehension and attention. According to Dhingra and her colleagues, the researchers represented the preschool viewer. After coming up with an idea for an episode, the writers met with Alice Wilder, head of the research department for ''Blue's Clues, to discuss their idea. The research department and writers then discussed if the topic and approach to the topic was appropriate for preschoolers, and if they accepted it, the content of the episode was further developed. They would often bring in outside consultants who were experts in the subject matter and the processes in teaching it to preschoolers. Wilder considered the researchers experts in how the concepts they wanted to present would translate to the medium of television rather than in a classroom or museum, but they considered preschoolers, who evaluated each script from their perspective, to be their " true experts". The writer took the information they gathered from the research department, preschoolers, and experts and wrote a treatment, or detailed outline of the script, which included goals for the entire episode and for each game. The writers, Wilder, and the research team had a treatment meeting, which Dhingra and her colleagues described as "an organized creative brainstorm", which was rooted in the philosophy and mission of the show, the art of good storytelling, and the point of view of their viewers. The goal of the treatment meeting was to give the writers everything they needed to create a workable second draft of the episode script, and to ensure that it fit the needs of their viewers. The producers and creators of the show, during their interviews of preschoolers, created a rough version of the episode, with the host and preliminary animations and backgrounds, and showed it to preschoolers to gain further feedback and was designed to assess their reactions to the content and visuals. According to Dhingra and her colleagues, the greatest strengths of the development of all episodes of Blue's Clues'' were the high levels of collaboration between all departments involved in the creation of the show, the clearly defined strategies they used to effectively include their preschool viewers in the development process, and their use of the mission, philosophy, and structure of the program to create and develop each episode. Most of the show's production was done in-house, rather than by outside companies as was customary for children's TV shows at the time. ''Blue's Clues'' was filmed in a studio in Tribeca, Manhattan, New York. The show's creators understood that the look and visual design of the show would be integral to children's attachment with it. Johnson expanded on the "cut-out" style she had created during her college years. ''Blue's Clues'' was the first animated series for preschoolers that utilized simple cut-out construction paper shapes of familiar objects with a wide variety of colors and textures, resembling a storybook. Johnson also used primary colors and organized each room of the home setting into groups. The green-striped shirt worn by the show's original host, Steve, was inspired by Fruit Stripe gum. similar to picture book illustrations. The program's design was influenced by an understanding of the cognitive, emotional, and social capabilities of preschoolers. For example, the purpose of the notebook in ''Blue's Clues'', which was used to record the clues presented throughout an episode, was to teach preschoolers how to overcome their poorly developed memory skills by using external mnemonic aids and lists. The music, produced by composer Michael Rubin and pianist Nick Balaban, was simple, had a natural sound, and exposed children to a wide variety of genres and instruments. Rubin and Balaban used Anderson's research about the importance of using auditory cues to increase children's attention and inserted auditory signatures to encourage the audience to pay attention to the episodes "at critical junctures for learning". The host performed each episode in front of a "blue screen", with animation added later. Johnson hired artist Dave Palmer and production company Big Pink to create the animation, which was at that time a new technology, from simple materials like fabric, paper, or pipe-cleaners, and scan them into a Macintosh computer so that they could be animated using inexpensive computer software such as Media 100, Ultimatte, Photoshop, and After Effects. instead of being repeatedly redrawn as in traditional animation. Johnson credited Kessler with the idea of using the Macintosh. Their process looked like traditional cut-out animation, but was faster, more flexible, and less expensive, and it allowed them to make changes based on feedback from test audiences. Unlike traditional animation environments, which tended to be highly structured, the animators were given information about the characters and goals of the scenes they would animate, and then given the freedom to work out the timing and look of each scene themselves, as long as their creations were true to the characters and to the story. By 1999, the show's animation department consisted of Palmer, twenty animators, eleven digital designers, and five art directors and model makers. By 2002, Nickelodeon had built a "state-of-the-art" $6 million digital animation studio that housed 140 people, including 70 animators. == Reception ==

Ratings for ''Blue's Clues'' were high during its first season, and it was Nickelodeon's most popular preschool program. It has been described as the first commercial television show for preschoolers that was both educational and profitable. Its creators met regularly with businesses that developed ''Blue's Clues merchandise and products to ensure toys that were educational and met "the same high ... standards as the show". Blue's Clues had sold almost 40 million units of its 45 VHS and DVD titles by 1998 and generated over $1 billion in product licensing in 2000. The launch of Blue's Clues'' products at FAO Schwarz's flagship store in New York City was the most successful product launch in the store's history and was attended by over 7,000 people. It won eight consecutive Emmys between 1998 and 2005 and won a Peabody Award in 2001. , shown here in 1990, appeared in the popular ''Blue's Clues VHS Blue's Big Musical Movie''. It was his final film role prior to his death four years later, in 2004. Starting in 1999, a live production of ''Blue's Clues'' toured the U.S. to positive reviews. As of 2002, over 2 million people had attended over 1,000 performances. The producers were concerned with children's response to the host, who was played by Tom Mizer (a different actor than the host of the TV show), but his young audience enthusiastically accepted and embraced him. Actors were encouraged to improvise and respond to the audience, which resulted in changes throughout the show's run. The show's script included humor that both children and their parents could enjoy. Regional versions of the show, featuring native hosts, have been produced in other countries. Kevin Duala hosted the United Kingdom version and the show became part of pop culture in South Korea. In total, ''Blue's Clues was syndicated in 120 countries, and was translated into 15 languages. Blue's Clues'' won an award from the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness (GLAD) for promoting deaf awareness in the media. == Cultural influence and impact ==

The extensive use of research in the development and production process of ''Blue's Clues inspired several studies that provided evidence for its effectiveness as a learning tool. As Anderson and his colleagues reported, Blue's Clues'' had "a beneficial cognitive and social impact" the longer younger children watched it, which increased steadily over time, and that its benefits to cognitive development are both durable and cumulative. They also believed that the research conducted on the program demonstrated that when children's television programs were based on information gained from child development concepts, had a systematic curriculum, and were designed with "a research-based understanding of how children use and understand television, it can be a powerful and positive influence". As they stated, "it appears that the program is not only doing well, but it is also doing good”. for educational television; he and Variety reported that audience participation became an important part of other educational preschool TV programs such as Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street. Anderson also reported that after ''Blue's Clues'', all of Nickelodeon's educational programming included the use of formative research. Anderson reported that the results of the study were "clear, striking, and to us, very interesting". Anderson stated, "As children learned how to solve the problems they would shout out the answers, talk to Steve, point to the screen, jump up with excitement, and so on". The study also demonstrated that watching ''Blue's Clues'' changed how children watch television and that their problem-solving skills and interaction would transfer to other programs they watched. In 1999, Anderson and a team of researchers, some of which were his colleagues at Nickelodeon, studied how episode repetition affected comprehension, audience participation, and visual attention. The researchers tested whether repeated viewings of the show resulted in mastery over the material presented, or whether viewers would habituate to what they watched or become bored. The study demonstrated that for the first few repetitions, children pay close attention to the educational content because it was more cognitively demanding. The researchers concluded that audience participation was lower because children were devoting more of their cognitive resources to understanding and solving the problem presented in the episode. When they mastered the problems, which the researchers suspected happened the third time the children viewed the episode, they paid the same amount of attention to the educational content as to the entertainment content, which was less demanding. Audience participation, however, increased because their cognitive resources were freed up and because they knew the answers to the questions asked by the host and other characters. Anderson and his colleagues believed that their study proved that episode repetition appeared to foster their viewers' empowerment, as demonstrated in the viewers' enthusiastic efforts to help solve problems the host and other characters posed. As Anderson and his colleagues put it, "These results further support the notion that when content is new and challenging, preschoolers pay greater attention, but when it is in a recurrent format and therefore readily mastered, they interact more". In other words, "Interaction in ''Blue's Clues'' to some extent thus reflects mastery". Nielsen ratings of the show's first season, when the same episode was shown daily, were flat over the five-day period, which indicated to Anderson that young children did not tire of its repetition or of its complexity over time. In 2000, another team of researchers, including Anderson, Crawley, and other Nickelodeon colleagues, studied if watching ''Blue's Clues changed the way children watch television and if they learned "an interactive style of television viewing”,, shown here in 2009, appeared in several Blue's Clues'' episodes introducing American Sign Language to its young viewers. In 2002, Crawley, Anderson, and their colleagues conducted another study on the effects of ''Blue's Clues, this time researching whether more experienced viewers mastered the content and cognitive challenges faster and easier than first-time viewers. They surmised that experienced viewers would comprehend and interact more with the recurring and familiar segments of the show designed to aid comprehension, but they found that familiarity with the structure of an individual episode did not provide experienced viewers with an advantage over the inexperienced viewers. Crawley and Anderson also studied whether experienced viewers of Blue's Clues'' interacted more with other children's TV shows and whether the viewing behaviors they learned from ''Blue's Clues could be transferred to other shows. They found that although experienced viewers of Blue's Clues'' interacted with an episode of another series, they did not spend more time watching it than viewers unfamiliar with the show. The researchers stated, "It is apparent that, although preschoolers learn to enthusiastically engage in overt audience participation, they do not, by and large, have a metacognitive understanding of why they do so." Erin Ryan and her colleagues performed a 2009 study on the effect of the use of American Sign Language (ASL) in ''Blue's Clues'' episodes. They analyzed 16 episodes over two weeks for the content and frequency of the signs used and found a high incidence of ASL use by various characters, but that it was inconsistent, especially in the connection between English words and their corresponding signs. The purpose of signed communication and its connection with ASL and the Deaf community was also not clearly explained. The researchers speculated that hearing children with no previous ASL exposure would become familiar with ASL and with deaf people by these episodes, thus reducing the stigma attached to deafness and hard of hearing individuals. Based on other research about the positive effects of teaching ASL to hearing children, the researchers also speculated that it could lead to an increase of vocabulary skills and IQ, as well as improve interpersonal communication. They surmised that deaf children would feel more included and less isolated and have more opportunities to view positive models of ASL and deaf people. Georgene L. Troseth and her colleagues at Vanderbilt University studied how toddlers used information gained from prerecorded video and from interactions with a person through closed-circuit video, and found that two-year-old children did not learn as much from prerecorded videos because the videos lacked social cues and personal references. Two-year-olds who viewed a video with instructions about how to find a toy in an adjoining room from a non-interactive researcher did not use the information, even though they smiled and responded to questions. Troseth speculated that their research had implications for interactive educational shows like ''Blue's Clues'', which although was "on the right track" because the host invited interaction with the show's viewers, did not provide children with the social cues to solve real-world problems. Troseth stated that repetition, repeated exposure, and familiarity with the show's host may increase children's ability to learn facts and to use strategies they learn from ''Blue's Clues to solve new problems. Her research suggested that Blue's Clues'' engaged young children and elicited their active participation because they mimicked social interaction. == 2019 revival ==

On March 6, 2018, Nickelodeon announced a revival of the series, with a new host and 20 new episodes. An open casting call for the show's new host occurred in April, and production began in the summer of 2018. On September 13, 2018, it was announced that the show would be titled ''Blue's Clues & You!'', and Josh Dela Cruz would be the host of the revival. The show premiered on November 11, 2019. It was cancelled and ended after five years, with the last episode released on September 27, 2024. == Notes ==