Blues Clues 3d Game
Charise Farag
Blue's Clues is an American live-action/animated interactive educational children's television series created by Traci Paige Johnson, Todd Kessler, and Angela C. Santomero. It premiered on Nickelodeon's Nick Jr. block on September 8, 1996,[2] and concluded its run on August 6, 2006,[1] with a total of six seasons and 143 episodes. The original host of the show was Steve Burns, who left in 2002 and was replaced by Donovan Patton (as "Joe") for the fifth and sixth seasons. 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 producers and creators combined concepts from child development and early-childhood education with innovative animation and production techniques that helped their viewers learn, using research conducted thirty years since the debut of Sesame Street in the U.S. Unlike earlier preschool shows, Blue's Clues presented material in a narrative format instead of a magazine format, used repetition to reinforce its curriculum, structured every episode the same way, and revolutionized the genre by inviting their viewers' involvement.
Research was part of the creative and decision-making process in the production of the show, and was integrated into all aspects and stages of the creative process. Blue's Clues was the first cutout animation series for preschoolers in the United States and resembles a storybook in its use of primary colors and its simple construction paper shapes of familiar objects with varied colors and textures. Its home-based setting is familiar to American children, but has a look unlike previous children's TV shows.
Upon debuting, Blue's Clues became the highest-rated show for preschoolers on American commercial television, and was critical to Nickelodeon's growth. It has been syndicated in 120 countries and translated into 15 languages. Regional versions of the show featuring local hosts have been produced in other countries. By 2002, Blue's Clues had received several awards for excellence in children's programming, educational software and licensing, and had been nominated for nine Emmy Awards.
A live production of Blue's Clues, which used many of the production innovations developed by the show's creators, toured the U.S. starting in 1999. As of 2002, over two million people had attended over 1,000 performances. A spin-off called Blue's Room premiered in 2004. A revival of the series titled Blue's Clues & You!, hosted by Josh Dela Cruz premiered on Nickelodeon on November 11, 2019. The show's extensive use of research in its development and production process inspired several research studies that have provided evidence for its effectiveness as a learning tool.
By 1990, parents, teachers and media experts had been criticizing "the lack of quality fare for children on commercial television" for many years.[3] 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.[4][5] 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;[6] as co-creator Angela C. Santomero put it, "a vehicle for toy-based 'commercials' ".[7] According to author Diane Tracy in her 2002 book Blue's Clues for Success, "The state of children's television was pretty dismal".[4][note 1]
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".[9] 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.[10][11] 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.[5] 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.[12][13][14]
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"[15] 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"[15] 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.[15] 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.[16]
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.[17][18] According to The New York Times, Kessler was the first creator to be brought on board to the project.[19] 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.[20] Santomero, who named Fred Rogers as a major influence, worked at Nickelodeon as a researcher and Johnson was a freelance artist and animator.[21][22] Santomero later said that they "were young, and Nickelodeon took a chance on us".[23]
Daniel R. Anderson of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who author Malcolm Gladwell called one of the "pioneering television researchers",[24] was an adviser for the new show.[25] 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.[26] 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".[26] 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.[14]
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.[27][28] 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",[23] emphasized social and emotional skills, treated children like they were smart, and helped them feel empowered.[23] 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[29] and because, as Anderson reported, children who watched the pilot, which was used for testing, "almost universally called the show Blue's Clues".[30] 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".[23]
Kessler handled the show's "computer-based production",[22] Santomero the research, and Johnson the design.[22] 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.[31][32][33][note 2] 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.[36][37][38] 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.[37][39] In September 2023, the full pilot unexpectedly surfaced online, putting an end to the nearly two-decade long search for it.
Blue's Clues premiered in the U.S. on September 8, 1996.[2] The premiere was the highest-rated premiere of any Nickelodeon program, and the show became crucial to the network's growth.[39][40] Scholar Norma Pecora called Blue's Clues the "cornerstone" of Nickelodeon's educational programming.[41] By the end of 1997, it was the highest-rated show for preschoolers on commercial television, and was the third-highest rated show behind children's public television shows; Barney & Friends and Arthur.[42] 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.[40]
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