If you promise a ‘Bluey’ party, you’d better have a good Bluey
The most scared I’ve ever seen my daughter was when she turned a corner in Times Square and came face to face with a fake Cookie Monster. The second most scared I’ve ever seen my daughter was at Disneyland, when she saw someone in a Princess Sofia costume with a giant Princess Sofia head.
Even executed perfectly, as the Princess Sofia character was, it was a harrowing experience for her to see the star of her most beloved show, looking not quite the same as she did on the screen. The Times Square Cookie Monster was multitudes worse than Sofia, with a ratty, blue, furry costume and menacing eyes. Even I jumped at the sight of him (or her, who’s to say?) and urged my daughter to walk as quickly as possible away, past the imitation Elmo lurking a little too close for comfort.
For kids, or my kids at least, seeing any version of their favorite television characters in the real world has been jarring. Which I get. I once saw William H. Macy — one of my favorite character actors — at a museum in Los Angeles, and he looked kind of sad, which I think is just his resting face, but it still haunted me for days. It’s not how I imagined him, and I couldn’t reconcile my expectations with reality. Imagine how much more difficult that reconciliation must be for humans who have been on this planet for less than 10 years.
All that is to say that it really should come as no surprise to the hosts of a “Bluey”-themed event in Las Vegas that children were traumatized by the Bluey at the party.
Fox5 in Las Vegas reported that when the restaurant Dirt Dog announced a “Bluey” day centered on kids’ favorite television dog, they did not anticipate lines out the door and hundreds of guests. “I knew ‘Bluey’ was big, I just didn’t know how big,” one Dirt Dog employee told the news crew. That kind of feels like not knowing who The Beatles were in the ‘60s but OK.
Guests were frustrated that the employee-made baked goods quickly ran out and that the face painting was done by amateurs. I might argue that at a free event, you get what you pay for. But I have a lot more sympathy for the kids when it comes to the disappointment and terror they felt upon seeing Dirt Dog’s version of Bluey.
“We could see his beard,” a young girl named Sophia told Fox5. Indeed, photos of the event show a man in a hooded “Bluey” onesie that I’m pretty sure are pajamas, with his bearded, human face and bare, human man-hands fully visible. “The kids were distraught. Some kids were crying, some kids were upset, crying in their parents’ shoulders,” Sophia’s mother told reporters.
There’s one important lesson that I thought the world had learned after the Glasgow Willy Wonka Experience, wherein patrons paid 35 pounds expecting a magical, chocolate-factory experience and instead got a nearly-empty warehouse with a few AI-generated posters and some embarrassed actors. It’s that you can’t pull a fast one on kids. If a mall Santa looks just a little off, kids will rant about it for years. One time I dressed up as a clown for my younger sister’s birthday party and those eight-year-olds read me the riot act.
Kids know when they’re being scammed because they’re smart. They just haven’t been shamed into hiding their emotions about being scammed like adults have. And honestly, maybe we’d be better off being more like them. I recently got scammed into paying for a year of pest-control services because I felt bad for the salesman at my door. And that made me want to cry. Maybe I could have gotten out of the contract more easily if I had.
Dirt Dog apologized on social media and vowed to learn from the experience. The management wrote, “We are truly sorry this event wasn’t to standard. We will work on improving all of the events going forward so we can bring you the highest quality as you all deserve. We appreciate everyone taking the time to send us your feedback.”
As someone who gets a lot of feedback, I’m pretty confident they don’t mean it when they say they appreciate it, but the rest of the statement seems sincere enough. Fox5 reports that Dirt Dog is planning to make it up to the disappointed families by bringing in “The real ‘Bluey’.” I would advise against that.
The “real” Bluey is on the television screen, and it’s best that she remains there. Trying to pass off any real-life version of a character to whom a child is wholly devoted without upsetting them is a climb steeper than Everest. Like Everest, it’s a task best left to the pros. Not a man in pajamas.
