Taking the bait: leave Bandit alone.
A pair of haughty academics take a shot at Australia’s favourite cartoon dog.
As any parent will tell you, the most wonderful thing about parenthood is watching Bluey. The cartoon, featuring colourful, huge-eyed canine kids and heavily-involved parents, tells bite-sized stories of childhood adventure and is a standout for the way it makes magic of the banal yet imagination-enhanced play of children.
At the other end of the media spectrum is website The Conversation. Billing itself as a site of academic rigour, The Conversation posts thinkpieces, sometimes good, but often the fork-on-blackboard sooking of cultural cacti, squatting on valuable university real estate and emerging from their bubble only to remind us that universally beloved things are bad. From the latter boiling pot we scoop out this piece, so universally reviled that you’d think it was an ill-thought Anzac day tweet: “Everyone loves Bandit from Bluey — but is he a lovable larrikin, or just a bad dad?”
THEME: Bandit is a Bad Dad
Look, sometimes you get the harder side of a debating topic. Let’s see how Kate and David do in backing up their position. Things are not off to a positive start for the anti-Bandit crowd: here are just a few highlights.
Awarded a Father of the Year award in 2019 and widely cited as the model of modern fatherhood
Child psychologists have explained how Bandit inspired their approach to pretend play and improvisation.
So, these are some pretty compelling points. You’re gonna need some Rolf-Harris level of horror to upset this position, I’m thinking. Luckily, the authors deliver:
But there is a darker side to this lovable character.
Bandit never strays far from the reductive stereotype of the Australian larrikin
I’ll give you a moment, dear reader, to recover from the horror. Bandit, despite loving his kids and giving them the kind of engagement and attention that every parent dearly wishes they had time for, is a LARRIKIN.
This is apparently a bad thing
I’m not gonna block-quote the middle of the article. You can read it if you want. Long story short: larrikins. This might be interesting and/or important if the larrikin label wasn’t one that the article authors themselves selected, and tried to paste onto Bandit under the weight of a bunch of extraneous info about larrikinism.
There’s not too much to talk about here, since it’s plainly filler — the idea that larrikinism is something to be avoided might be appealing to certain types of people who have never left their own blackboard forum, but if you’re trying to convince the rest of us, you’re gonna need a more dastardly villain than Darryl from The Castle.
We don’t know what the word bully means
We’re on the downhill stretch right now, by which I mean things are about to go downhill.
Undoubtedly, Bandit’s larrikinism contributes to his likeability: he is an entertaining and engaged father who is heavily involved in his childrens’ lives.
Sorry, what? How exactly does the first half of that sentence connect logically to the second half. Aren’t both of the article authors writers?
Occasionally, however, we catch a glimpse of Bandit’s darker side, with his playful teasing of his young daughters sometimes devolving into bullying.
Oh no. Let’s see what kind of bullying behaviour Bandit, potential bad dad, gets up to.
In one episode, Bandit agrees to open Bingo’s ice block before repeatedly licking her frozen sweet in front of her. Afterwards, Bandit apologises to his daughter for being “a bit mean”.
If there’s one thing that characterises bullying, it’s immediately apologising for your behaviour.
While the show itself restrains judgement
Sorry, what? You mean like how Chilli, immediately after hearing about Bandit licking Bingo’s ice block, chastises him? And he immediately owns up to it? Did you watch the episode Teasing (Season 1, Episode 48)? No, you did not. You probably also missed the bit where Bandit immediately says sorry, and Bingo immediately forgives him, then teases him straight back. You know, like happens in a healthy, loving family. Perhaps the authors are unfamiliar with the concept.
While the show itself restrains judgement, often it is Bandit’s wife Chilli who pulls him into line. When Bandit forgets to pack sunscreen and snacks for a swim at the pool, it is Chilli (the “boring” parent, in Bandit’s words) who saves the day.
This episode is literally about how boring things can be important. And Chilli gets massive love from the kids for showing up with all the necessary boring stuff. The authors are criticising the show for a supposed failing when addressing that failing is literally the entirety of the episode.
The universal veneration of Bandit is perplexing since, in situations like at the pool, he comes across as a mildly incompetent caricature, lampooned as an overgrown child in need of regular supervision and training.
Christ. Okay. Situations like at the pool are anomalies in the show, for exactly this reason. The sheer anomalous-ness gives rise to the idea that perhaps Bandit was deliberately forgetting things to demonstrate the point of the episode, a lesson which Bluey and Bingo absorbed, but which the authors apparently did not. Also: there’s a lot of episodes, so if you’re going to say “like at the pool”, you may do well to highlight pool-like examples.
Bandit is also surprisingly conservative when it comes to gender values.
This is the entire paragraph. Y’all got any more of those supporting arguments?
Bandit is a “traditional” man who wishes to be viewed as the head of the Heeler household.
Okay, maybe this is supposed to connect to the previous paragraph (sentence). The only problem with it is that it’s complete fucking bullshit, and it shows the authors’ lack of familiarity with the subject matter. The head of the Heeler household is Mum. “Mum” is the first word of every episode. Just about the only time you could claim that Bandit was trying to be head of house is in Asparagus (Season 1, Episode 49), where he tells Chilli to take her elbows off the table. After which she gives Bluey a magic asparagus to turn Bandit into a donkey. Which he immediately goes along with. Classic traditional head of house behaviour.
When he reluctantly submits to wearing make-up, he is subsequently mocked by his mates for doing so.
So, (1) It’s other people doing the mocking. It’s a basic logic fail to attribute attitudes to the person being mocked. I’ll do you up a powerpoint later.
(2) This (“Stumpfest”, Season 2, Episode 6) is where Bandit (an allegedly traditional conservative head-of-house man/dog), has just agreed to a full make-over, including fingernail painting and face make-up, with eyeliner — to be performed by his 6 and 4-year-old daughters and 3-year-old niece — so that the girls will happily relocate their nail salon and allow Bandit and his friends to remove a tree stump.
He censors himself from engaging in full imaginative play when under the gaze of other men.
Ahh, you’re talking about when he stops making loud whale noises during Pirates (Season 1, Episode 27). Where he helps friend-of-the-show Missy overcome her fears, and by strange coincidence overcomes his own fears of public speaking (whale noises) at the very same time.
That being said, the idea that Bandit is too embarrassed to play in front of other is rather disproved by, eg, when he is flattened by Bingo’s wand in front of Pat (“Featherwand”, Season 2, Episode 3), or where he happily role-plays a cafe customer in front of, and with, Fido (“Cafe”, Season 2, Episode 35)or where he pretends to be a child in a shopping centre in front of Rocko (“Kids”, Season 1, Episode 45).
He teases his wife on the pains of pregnancy and labour.
He does indeed (“Dad Baby, Season 2, Episode 13). He then wears Bingo around in a Baby Bjorn while she pretends to be a foetus, complete with kicking. He then makes Pat deliver the baby (more classic conservative gender-rolling). And then he cringes when Bluey says “my turn!” because he realises he’ll have to go through it all a second time. This episode is about Bandit developing a new appreciation for what Chilli went through, while at the same time engaging in imaginative play with his children. (I know that viewers, including children, understand this. I’m including this explanation for the article authors).
Conclusion: it was a bad article and the authors are bad people for writing it
Everything in this article is spectacularly off-base. It prompts one to ask why someone would make arguments that could be easily rebutted by any of the children who watch the show. I’m going to guess it comes down to a need for attention — the authors needed some publishing credits, so they threw together a classic “your fave is problematic” shitpiece. I doubt they’ve ever watched the show, and they made no real attempt to seriously grapple with anything — they just tossed it out and expected their credentials to lend weight to their assertions. I’d suggest the opposite is true — their assertions subtract weight from their credentials.
So why do I call them bad people? It’s because Bandit is an unambiguously awesome father. If there’s any negative in the show, it’s the way it makes us mere mortals feel guilty for not taking the time to engage as authentically and wholesomely with our kid’s playtime as Bandit and Chilli do. But merely setting examples to aspire to is not an attack on anyone. What is an attack is the way that, in a time where fatherhood is in an ill-defined place, these authors take the most positive example of it and shit on it for clout. Either they don’t believe any of this but they say it anyway, which is bad, or they believe all of it, which would be far worse.
But which is it? Perhaps the clue can be found in this snippet in the final sentence of the article:
His continued popularity, despite his personal shortcomings
Maybe this tells us everything we need to know about the type of people the authors are.
