Blue’s Clues is my first baby. It premiered in September 1996 and is still going strong.  I spearheaded this project from start to finish.  I had no idea what I was getting into – I just knew that I wanted to teach a million kids at a time …and television was a way to do just that.  Blue’s Clues started out as a “game show for preschoolers”.  What that meant to me was that I could get kids playing the games and learning skills that they need for kindergarten.  We ask kids questions, through Steve, and then WAIT for them to answer us back.  Everyone thought we were crazy …. But it was the start of the entire “interactive preschool television” generation.

What is it About?:  Blue’s Clues is an interactive “game show” where live action host Steve (and later his pretend brother, Joe) live with a preschool animated puppy named Blue.  They play Blue’s Clues to figure out what Blue wants by finding three blue pawprints and sitting in the Thinking Chair when they find them to figure it out.  Along the way, Blue, Steve and the home viewers “help” their animated friends by playing thinking games based on skills preschoolers need to know to do well in Kindergarten.

Stats:  We created 165 episodes which air on Nick Jr in the States and on stations all around the world. Blue’s Big Musical Movie – full length feature – the movie is awesome and the songs are so good. Blue’s Clues books, 2 live shows which still travel and Blue’s Clues toys.

KIDS ARE LEARNING FROM BLUE’S CLUES!:  One of our biggest accomplishments with the show was the Blue Balloon in the Macys Day Parade (just kidding!) it was the research from Dr. Jennings Bryant from University of Alabama who proved that kids who watched Blue’s Clues scored better on standardized tests than kids who did not watch the show.  Kids were learning kindergarten readiness skills – colors, shapes, numbers, matching, sorting, letters, pre-reading skills, and critical thinking skills.  Kids did not just learn what was on the show, but the strategies we taught them were used to help them master concepts on their own.  Success!

We’re going to talk now about “big blue.” No, no, no, not the famous nickname for IBM, the famous — this is a famous kids’ character that many of you folks are going to know, the star of the very popular show on the Nickelodeon network, “Blue’s Clues.” Seven million children watch this show every week. It’s geared for pre-schoolers, we understand.

And Angela Santomero is a child psychologist and co-executive producer of that show, and they’re taking this show to the street, so to speak, now. “Blue’s Clues Live!” is now a theatrical production.

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*An excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point

Copyright 2000, 2002 by Malcolm Gladwell

Once upon a time there were two women who worked in the television industry. One was named Angela and one was named Alice.

Angela worked for Nickelodeon and Alice worked for Children’s Television Workshop. Each of them wanted to create educational television programming for children that would be the best programming around. So they came to Teachers College to learn about how children develop and how they learn. As fate would have it, Angela and Alice took the same class at the same time-“TV and the Development of Youth”-with former Assistant Professor Rosemarie Truglio. Thus began a collaboration to research and to create one of the most popular educational children’s television shows: Blue’s Clues.

Blue’s Clues stars a tri-colored blue hound named Blue. The show appears twice a day on the Nickelodeon network as one of the main features of their Nick Jr. programming for preschoolers.

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