After 150+ episodes, Bluey has cemented itself as one of the wittiest, smartest, and most touching cartoons in recent memory. Also, it’s really funny for kids and dads and moms and 45 year olds without children, alike. Who doesn’t like Bluey?
The show revolves around the Heeler family: Bluey, her sister Bingo, Mum Chilli, and Dad Bandit. As you might expect, Bluey has more lines than any other Heeler or character.
Bandit, Bluey’s dad, comes in second. This kind of makes sense since Joe Brumm, the creator of Bluey, is himself a dad of 2 kids. At first glance, it seems that Mum, Chilli, is the least important of the family. But if you look at the progression of dialogue throughout the series, her “output” has more than doubled from season 1 to season 3.
The three seasons have essentially the same number of episodes (52 episodes in seasons 1 and 2, 50 episodes in season 3), so it’s a significant shift. When she does speak, Chilli tends to have longer lines (sometimes more poignant that others). It turns out it takes about 3 seasons for Bingo to find her voice and Bluey is still working on finding her ears.
Although Chilli has the least number lines of the four, she has the most words per line when she does speak. Bingo, the youngest Heeler, is probably Chilli’s junior by at least 5 whole dog years, so this makes sense. It’s a tad trifficult to measure the importance of Chilli just by how many lines she’s given, though.
I’m Not Taking Advice From A Cartoon Dog.
The Heeler family has a colorful cast of friends and extended family, although these are definitely minor supporting roles when it comes to dialogue.
Muffin is one of Bluey and Bingo’s cousins and has the most dialogue outside of the nuclear family. She’s responsible for some of the more relatable lines including, “I was sick yast lear” and “horseys can’t talk.“ Unicorse, the cheekiest of all characters, is technically not a separate character, but he deserves his own spot on this chart. The same goes for Shaun, although not pictured above, who has 50+ lines of dialogue in the series including the ever delightful, “Marp, marp, marp, marp, marp, marp!”
Approximately half of the episodes have only Bluey’s immediate family in the script, and although there are well north of 130 characters in the series (more depending on how you count), the main focus is on the 4 Heelers. Below are the top 10 episodes by number of characters’ appearances. Of the more than 150 episodes, few have many extra characters at once. “In some cases the least complex things can give the most pleasure.”
More Bluey (the dog)
Since Bluey gets the most amount of dialogue, it make sense that in episodes where she talks most, the total amount of dialogue tends to also be high. In fact, out of the top 10 episodes measured by the number of lines Bluey has, 9 of them are also on the top 10 list of episodes measured by total dialogue. And that doesn’t really change from season to season which probably just means that the writers think Bluey is the favorite. (Favourite?)
Common Words
After removing the stop words (in Natural Language Processing, those are words like it, the, a, etc.), there aren’t any real surprises. Maybe the most surprising thing is that Bandit calls out Bingo’s name more than Bluey’s name. But Bingo certainly calls out her big sister’s name more than any other word. Unfortunately, quantity does not equal quality, otherwise we would see brekky and dollarbucks on the list below.
There is a lot of overlap in what the characters say and it’s clear they are a family just by looking at the chart above.
Boring Things are Still Important
All the data here came directly from the scripts of 3 seasons of Bluey. Out of the 154 episodes, a few scripts were incomplete or were filtered out because they were too messy and it wasn’t worth it to try and clean them up. There were about 18,600 actual dialogue lines in the data set attributed to 200+ characters, but that includes really minor characters like “Hospital Kid’s Mum” who has 2 lines of dialogue and a few characters played by Bluey or Bandit (like The Lawyer, The Fox, etc.) that escaped my collating and grouping of duplicate characters. So they live on as their own.
Just for fun, one more word cloud for the whole collective family:
