Annnnnnnd Why Should I Care?

On “Unicorse,” the twelve-minute children’s cartoon that will save us all.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle

A unicorn-shaped piggy bank? It has coins in front of it, so “bank” is my best guess.
Not a puppet, but as close as the stock photo service can muster. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

First things first: I am not a Bluey parent. I know that Bluey — the Australian cartoon about a family of talking dogs — has become for Millennial parents what Sesame Street was for our Boomer moms and dads, a children’s show that’s actually watchable by adult standards. It has never been that for me, because I could never convince my daughter to watch more than a few episodes. She’s seen multiple seasons of Adventure Time. She can name several hundred Pokemon. She doesn’t give a shit about Australian dogs, and I cannot make her.

So I’m not a Bluey adult, and I’m not an adult-watching-children’s-cartoons-adult either; I just wind up seeing a lot of children’s television because there’s a child in my home, and I have to be near the TV so that she doesn’t press the wrong button and accidentally stream Saw IV.

I will put all of that aside, however for this week’s column, which is about the 2021 conflict resolution manual “Unicorse,” a twelve-minute Bluey episode that has done more to fix me — psychologically, spiritually, politically— than the core texts of several world religions. I’m going to spoil the plot for you, over the course of this column, but the show is on Disney+ and (again) takes less than fifteen minutes to…

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Responses (5)

What are your thoughts?

someone is being an asshole on purpose

It's their unidirectional goal, of course. They are indeed doing it on purpose. The simplest conclusion is truest. They are what they show themselves to be: fake-discourse unicorn puppets.

Interesting. When my daughters were little we had an adult friend with a little girl that was quite the monster. When visiting, the child would occasionally just up and hit one of our daughters with a toy. There was little response from the mother…...

I do not have kids, and therefore have only heard of Bluey in a distant way. But Unicourse is amazing. I agree that engaging with such a character is pointless. I've encountered a lot at work (I'm an English professor) and their "discussions" often…...