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I'll admit it: My wife and I panicked when an extra long "Bluey" episode titled "The Sign appeared in our Disney+ feed. The titular sign - the one that sat in our cartoon heroes' front yard and read "For Sale" - felt like an existential threat.
Is this the end of Bluey? The series finale we didn't want, don't deserve and can't possibly have enough tissues in the house to cry through? For a kid's show that typically clocks a brisk 7-minute run time, 30 minutes felt indulgent - and foreboding.
April 14, it seemed, would go down as the day joy died on Disney+.
I know my family is not alone in our love for this cartoon about a family of Australian dogs. Created by writer Joe Brumm, the show is deceptively simple: Each episode tells a story about the antics of an anthropomorphized family of blue dogs, the aptly named Heelers. Our protagonist is 6-year-old Bluey, who - along with her 4-year-old sister Bingo, their parents, Bandit and Chilli, and a host of side characters - pulls viewers into a variety of imaginative, heartwarming and hilarious adventures depicting the highs and lows of family life.
But what makes "Bluey" so unique is that it works on multiple levels. Each episode is just as enjoyable to watch for parents as it is for kids - no easy feat to pull off. Any adult who has sat through a few episodes of "Pink-alicious," "Paw Patrol" or "Wishen-poof" knows what I'm talking about.
And so, none of us - not me, not my wife and certainly not my kids - were excited at the prospect that the show might be ending. Like most of the internet, we frantically turned to Google to put our minds at ease.
It was my wife who stumbled upon Sophie Gilbert's aptly named article in...