Listen… as a parent, I love Bluey. I do. The overnight Disney Junior hit cartoon does an excellent job of entertaining both adults and kids and the more you watch, the more you realize that the show might actually be geared more towards navigating parenthood than keeping your kids quiet for 23 minutes. The theme song alone is enough to stop the fiercest of tantrums dead in its tracks. On top of that, the dad does the lawnmower during the opening title, which was my mosh pit move for years.
But the show won’t truly capture the essence of having kids until there’s a scene of Bandit going overboard on reprimanding Bluey and Bingo in public. This is why I demand that Robert Iger and co. release the episode of Bluey where Bandit snaps and loses his fucking mind on the girls on the way out of Hammerbarn.
Forget unrealistic beauty standards, the real media lie is that all parents maintain calm and collected, ready with a lesson to be taught at all times like The Heelers do. It’s not all Sleepytime and Baby Race in the real world; parents these days need vindication if they aggressively grab their kid by the ear and yell profanities like an oil rig worker (shout out Uncle Rad!) for all to witness. Bluey and Bingo need to have the fear of whatever Australia’s version of God is put into them.
Ideally, if you want the scene to be authentic, a recurring character like Calypso or Lucky’s dad would witness the meltdown and attempt to intervene, only to be included in Bandit’s out-of-character wrath. Why is it that any time you’re at a low point in the middle of a meltdown, there’s always someone you know close by? Doesn’t seem fair that the whole class’s parent group is going to know that Dad has a temper, but that’s life, squirt.
Every kid, even fictional ones as well-behaved as Bingo and Bluey, has that Australian cattle dog in them to push their parents to limits never thought imaginable. Sure, “What Would Bandit Do?” is a great mnemonic device for parents who are on the verge of strangling their kids Homer Simpson style, but it’d be nice if just once Bandit resembled a shell-shocked alcoholic on the verge of losing visitation rights and having to stay 100 yards away from Chilli.
Help me out here Disney, because I for one can’t keep pretending that I only say “biscuits” and “wackadoo” for much longer. Bandit has a dark side like the rest of us, I know it. No Dad is that perfect. Let him unleash it.