Would you say that’s fair?ĭela Cruz: I want to have beef with Bluey so bad. Our show, in the kind of format we created, does lend itself to what social media does.ĭela Cruz: Like without Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer wouldn’t exist.

I’m just waiting for the day when Blue’s Clues hits TikTok for the next generation.īurns: It really does translate well-the parasocial thing? A lot of kid shows talk to the camera, but we listened, which I think was fairly radical. I’d love there to be a million movies of Blue’s where I get to hang out with these two. Now I just hope that we get to do this all the time. But Steve and Donovan pulled me aside before we started, and they said, “I don’t know if anyone told you, but I don’t think you should feel pressure to do or replicate anything that we did.” That gave me the permission to be like, oh, be yourself and play. Josh, now that you’re three years into hosting Blue’s Clues & You, is there still pressure to fill Steve and Donovan’s shoes?ĭela Cruz: After I got the role, there was this whole thing going around like, #NotMySteve, which was hilarious. That was my favorite part, just to see how Josh has grown the show. Twenty-five years ago, this counted as dancing on Blue’s Clues. There’s a reason why, when the mail showed up, I danced like this. It’s like a video game where someone has the cheat code. Donovan and I would just sit on the side and be like, we couldn’t do any of that. It was out of control to watch.īurns: Watching what Josh was doing-it was mind-blowing. Patton: There’s a section where Josh is basically flying around at the top of the theater, on the top of a ladder.

Now I’m just third banana, and I have no responsibilities. I show up, sometimes I write scripts, and I’m like, Steve enters and eats a cookie. I was late twice in seven years, and neither time was my fault. What you did was remind me that oh, it’s all play.īurns: Back in the day, I was super professional. It’s not a great thing for us to be left unsupervised.ĭela Cruz: I remember that day because I was nervous. We were the worst, just giggling and stalling and it was terrible. We have to support Josh he’s probably nervous. We were like, we have to be professional. What was it like the first time they got the three of you in a room together?īurns: The day when we were doing Josh’s first episode of the reboot, Donovan and I were on set because we did a little cameo. There is a group text.īurns: No one must ever see that group text. Because most of the time, I’m in Toronto, Donovan is in LA, and Steve’s in New York. Joshua Dela Cruz: We’re cousins on the show, and in real life, it does feel like a family reunion whenever we do get to get together. In real life, Burns also writes, directs, and produces on the reboot-and, as evidenced by last year’s viral address to his now grown-up viewers in honor of the show’s 25th anniversary-isn’t above acknowledging that particular traumatic event to the millennial psyche known colloquially as When Steve Went to College (“kicking ’em in the childhood!” as he puts it over Zoom).

The latter two remain highly involved with the franchise to this day via recurring roles: Canonically, Joe works at the local Present Store while Steve runs a detective agency. It’s been 26 years-six seasons, three hosts, one successful reboot, and one feature film, Blue’s Big City Adventure, released on Paramount+ last month-since a certain cerulean-spotted canine reconfigured the possibilities of children’s television, and still the Blue-niverse has endured, owing in large part to the show’s ultra-beloved mononymous human intermediaries, Steve and “Joe” (“Donovan” being a little too syllabic for the average preschooler), who hosted the original show from 1996 through 2006, and now Josh, who took his seat on the Thinking Chair for a new generation of young critical thinkers via the 2019 reboot.Īs in all societies, the transition of power hasn’t always come to pass without its share of uproar (and wacko rumors), but the show’s original millennial fandom-now aging back into Nick Jr.’s demographic by way of parenthood-has forged an uncommon brotherhood between Cruz, Patton, and Burns. Here’s the mail, it never fails, and so on and so forth. For a microsecond, all is well with the world. For once, doing this on Zoom feels right: I’m peering through my screen at Joshua Dela Cruz, Donovan Patton, and Steve Burns all seated cozily together on a couch somewhere in Los Angeles as they each wave hello and wait expectantly, as if they’re welcoming me to my own personal episode of Blue’s Clues.

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