![]() (A third creator, Todd Kessler, left “Blue’s Clues” in 2000.) Now in their 50s, the pair met at Nickelodeon in their early 20s when Santomero was using her master’s degree in child developmental psychology in the research department and Johnson was working as a freelance producer and animator. Johnson and Angela Santomero, another creator, are determined not to let that happen. “Blue has the legacy and brand equity, but there’s a lot of pressure, because you can only screw it up,” he said, laughing. Still, Vince Commisso, president and chief executive of 9 Story Media Group, the production company behind the new show along with the animation studio Brown Bag Films, understands the risks. Don’t panic - they’ll all be back, plus a few new citizens. Pepper and the other inhabitants of Blue’s storybook world. The other challenge is the show’s totemic status to a generation that feels ownership over Magenta, the Thinking Chair, Mrs. A potentially lucrative one, too: The original “Blue’s Clues” was the first billion-dollar consumer brand for Viacom, its parent company. So why not take the kids, too? “People want that comfy blanket feeling of the good old days,” said Traci Paige Johnson, one of the show’s creators.įor broadcasters like Nickelodeon - confronted with cord-cutting and depleted, fragmented viewership - the vaults of old shows look like a lifeline, a direct path to an intergenerational audience. ![]() ![]() With anxieties about an uncertain world percolating among adults, fleeing to the familiar is a retreat to safety. Elsewhere at Nickelodeon, “All That” and “Rugrats” are getting their owns remakes and “SpongeBob SquarePants” is getting a spinoff, “Kamp Koral” - while “Carmen Sandiego” has returned on Netflix, and “Animaniacs” has been revived by Hulu. Now it’s back, riding the twin entertainment trends of 1990s nostalgia and the resuscitation of corporate intellectual property, joining a fleet of children’s shows born of a backward glance. Finally, Dela Cruz’s pie-eyed face lit up as if you’d responded brilliantly, and he gushed, “Great job!” His co-star was a dot made by a laser pointer, a stand-in for his “best friend,” Blue, the waggy puppy who would be added later by animators, with a subtle 3-D revamp to increase her cuddle factor.ĭela Cruz sang about how smart and hardworking you, the imagined viewer, are, then leaned close to the camera to ask a question: “What’s your superpower?” Then came the silence: one, two, three, four beats long, an eon in TV time. Joshua Dela Cruz, 30, bounced around an empty stage in a striped shirt (blue, not the original host’s signature green), strumming his handy dandy guitar. 11 on Nickelodeon - silence was still the star, even though the host was new and (relatively) loud. Last winter, on the Toronto set of “Blue’s Clues & You!” - a reboot premiering Nov. TORONTO - Two decades ago, “Blue’s Clues” stormed children’s television with something colorless, low-tech and ordinary: silence.
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