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Blue's Clues is an American children's television show airing on the Nickelodeon family of channels. The show premiered on September 8, 1996 and airs on Nick Jr. and other channels, although production of new episodes ceased by 2006. Versions of the show have been produced in other countries, most notably in the United Kingdom. It was created by a "green team" of producers, Todd Kessler, Angela C. Santomero, and Traci Paige Johnson, who used concepts learned from child development and early-childhood education research to create a television show that would capture preschool children's attention and help them learn. They used the narrative format in their presentation of material, as opposed to the more traditional magazine format, and structured every episode the same way.

The result, Blue's Clues, has been called "one of the most successful, critically-acclaimed, and ground-breaking preschool television series of all time". Author Malcolm Gladwell called the show "perhaps the 'stickiest'—meaning the most irresistible and involving—television show ever". Its innovative use of research, technology, and interactive content has influenced its genre since its debut, including the "gold standard of preschool TV programs" that inspired it, Sesame Street. It became the highest-rated show for preschoolers on commercial television, and received nine Emmy awards. Its efficacy in teaching children using the medium of television has been documented in research studies.

Blue's Clues, shown in over sixty countries, was first hosted by Steven Burns, and later by Donovan Patton (whose character is named Joe). A spin-off called Blue's Room premiered in 2004.

History
200px|thumb|left|Toys made in Blue and Periwinkle's images Up until 1990, PBS was one of the only sources for children's educational television programming. According to writer Diane Tracy, "the state of children's television was pretty dismal". Congress passed the Children's Television Act that year, but the legislation had no power behind it because it did not specify how many hours of programming broadcasters had to air, it set no guidelines or criteria for educational programs, and there was no accountability within the act. There was a proliferation of children's shows on TV, but most of them were violent and created to sell toys. In 1997, the FCC ruled that the commercial networks had to air educational children's programs for a minimum of three hours per week. Although cable network Nickelodeon, which had been airing programs for 6-to-12 year olds, was not legally bound by this legislation, they complied with it anyway, beginning many years before the laws and regulations were passed.

In mid-1994, Nickelodeon assigned a team of producers to create a new television program in the US for young children, using research on early childhood education and the viewing habits of preschoolers. These producers, who consisted of the "green creative team" of Todd Kessler, Angela Santomero and Traci Paige Johnson, met at Nickelodeon Studios for a month to develop Blue's Clues. Kessler, Santomero, and Johnson, according to writer Diane Tracy, did not possess traditional backgrounds of most producers of children's programs, but "did possess an amazing combination of talents, backgrounds, and personal attributes". At first, the character Blue was a cat and the name of the show was "Blue's Prints." Blue became a dog because Nickelodeon was already producing a show about a cat. Kessler handled the production aspect of the show, Santomero research, and Johnson the animation and design. They were given $150,000 to produce a pilot, which Tracy called "a very modest sum as pilots go".

Blue's Clues premiered on September 8, 1996. It was a "smash hit," largely due to the intensive and extensive research its producers employed. Within eighteen months of its premiere, "virtually 100% of preschoolers' parents knew about Blue's Clues", an awareness comparable to "top-tier" shows like the 30-year-old Sesame Street. It became the highest-rated show for preschoolers on commercial television. By 2002, 13.7 million viewers tuned in each week, and it became "crucial" to Nickelodeon's growth.

A live production of Blue's Clues began to tour the U.S. starting in 1999, to positive reviews. As of 2002, over 2 million people had attended over 1,000 performances. The goal of the creators of the TV show, who were involved in all aspects of the live show, was to translate the TV show to the live stage, which included the bond between the audience and the cast, and to provide young audiences with their first theatrical experience. The TV show's creators chose Jonathan Hochwald to produce the show. They also chose Gip Hoppe to direct it and Dave Gallo as set designer, neither of whom had any previous experience in children's theater. Nick Balaban and Michael Rubin, who wrote the music for the TV show, also composed the live show's soundtrack. One of the producers' concerns was children's response to the host, a different actor than the host of the TV show (initially played by Tom Mizer), but the young audience enthusiastically accepted him. The actors were encouraged to improvise and respond to the audience, which resulted in the evolution and changes throughout the show's run. The show's script also included humor that both children and their parents could enjoy.

In January 2006, Blue's Clues was spun-off as Blue's Room, starring Donovan Patton and featuring puppets instead of its previous animation. The show celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2006 with a DVD compilation of its "milestone" episodes, including Burns' departure, and a 12-minute retrospective, which was produced by VH1's "Behind the Music" staff.

Casting
Another key to the success of Blue's Clues was casting. According to Traci Paige Johnson, she was cast as Blue's voice because out of the show's crew, she sounded the most like a dog. Nick Balaban, who, along with Michael Rubin, wrote the music for the show, was cast as the voice of Mr. Salt. (Balaban reported that Mr. Salt was not originally French; he spoke with a Brooklyn accent.) Rubin performed the voice of Mailbox.



The most important casting was that of the host, the only human character in the show, who had to translate and embody the vision of the show. He had to empower, challenge, and increase their viewers' self-esteem, and form through his gestures, pacing, and facial expressions, a strong connection with the audience. At first, the producers wanted a female host, but after over 1,000 auditions and months of research, the producers hired based upon the strength of his audition, actor/performer Steven Burns. In test with preschoolers, Burns received the strongest and most enthusiastic response. As Johnson said, "What made Burns a great children's host was that 'he didn't want to be a children's host ... He loved kids, but he didn't want to make a career out of it.'" Burns remained on Blue's Clues for seven years and was in over 100 episodes until he left to pursue a musical career in 2002. Burns himself stated, tongue-in-cheek, "I knew I wasn't gonna be doing children's television all my life, mostly because I refused to lose my hair on a kid's TV show, and it was happenin' — fast."

Burns' departure caused a resurface of the rumors that had circulated about him since 1998. As Burns said, "The rumor mill surrounding me has always been really strange." These "specious claims" included dying from a heroin overdose, going off to college, being run over by an automobile, and being replaced, like Paul McCartney of The Beatles, by a look-alike. Some viewers claimed that "clues" regarding Burns' demise were placed within the show. Burns made an appearance on The Rosie O'Donnell Show to dispute these rumors, and he and co-creator Angela Santomero appeared onToday to help parents assuage the fears of children who might have heard the rumors.

Accompanied by a “concentrated multiplatform promotional campaign" that included articles in Nickelodeon's magazine and on their webpage, and an arc of three episodes that introduced his replacement Donovan Patton, who played Steve's brother Joe. Patton was subjected to the same kind of scrutiny to earn the job, including thousands of auditions.  Patton had never seen Blue's Clues before he auditioned for the part, but like Burns, was also the favorite with preschool test audiences.  "We saw Steve Burns' retirement from the show as a chance to put Blue's Clues on a new course", Johnson said.

Format
In The Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell called the format of Blue's Cluesmade the show "sticky": Steve, the host, presents the audience with a puzzle involving Blue, the animated dog ... To help the audience unlock the puzzle, Blue leaves behind a series of clues, which are objects marked with one of her paw prints. In between the discovery of the clues, Steve plays a series of games—mini-puzzles—with the audience that are thematically related to the overall puzzle ... As the show unfolds, Steve and Blue move from one animated set to another, jumping through magical doorways, leading viewers on a journey of discovery, until, at the end of the story, Steve returns to the living room. There, at the climax of the show, he sits down in a comfortable chair to think—a chair known, of course, in the literal world of Blue's Clues, as the Thinking Chair. He puzzles over Blue's three clues and attempts to come up with the answer.

Nickelodeon researcher Daniel Anderson called the structure of Blue's Clues a "game" that presented its viewers with increasingly challenging and developmentally appropriate problems for to solve. Early episodes focused on basic subjects such as colors and numbers, but later ones focused on math, physics, anatomy, and astronomy. In order to succeed, viewers had to pay attention, something the producers wanted to capitalize on because they believed that comprehension and attention were strongly connected. They used content and production characteristics, such as pacing, which gave children time to respond, as well as "camera techniques, children's voices, musical cues, sound effects, clear transitions, repeatable dialogue, and visuals". Participation and the mastery of thinking skills were encouraged with the use of repetition within the structure of individual episodes and across several ones. At first, Nickelodeon aired the same episode daily for five days before showing the next one.

Production
The creators' and producers' goals were to "empower, challenge, and build the sell-esteem of preschoolers" while entertaining them. Kessler, Santomero and Johnson were influenced by the first children's television program to utilize a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum developed from research, Sesame Street. "We wanted to learn from Sesame Street and take it one step further," Santomero said. In addition to a curriculum that emphasized reasoning skills relevant to preschoolers' everyday lives, the producers wanted to include active audience participation, which Variety called its "call and response style", that encouraged mastery of the information presented, positive reinforcement, and prosocial messages. In their first brainstorming sessions in 1994, Santomero, Kessler, and Johnson decided to promote mastery rather than rote learning or memorization, make sure that their viewers knew the answers to the puzzles they were presented, and include surprise and play. Their goal was to have a "concrete, explicit, and literal" format". They wanted their setting to be the home, the most secure, safe, and familiar setting for preschoolers, but "look like no other show on television".  The music of Blue's Clues, produced by composer Michael Rubin and pianist Nick Balaban, was unlike the music in most other children's shows.  Instead of using synthesizers, the music was simple, had a natural sound, and exposed children to a wide variety of genres and instruments.  According to Tracy, the music empowered children and gave the show "a sense of playfulness, a sense of joy, and a sense of the fantastic".  Rubin and Balaban encouraged the musicians who performed for the show to improvise.

The production of Blue's Clues was based upon research that showed that television could be a "powerful educational agent" because for most American children, it was an accessible medium and a "powerful cultural artifact". Since television programs has tended to tell stories through pictures, the potential for episodic learning was high. Television had the potential to be an effective method of scientific education for young children because it could model behavior and learning, and using film techniques, present information from multiple perspectives in a variety of "real world" contexts (i.e., situations within the daily experiences of young children). The creators wanted to provide their viewers with more "authentic learning opportunities" by placing problem-solving tasks in the context of storytelling techniques, by slowly increasing the difficulty of these tasks, and by inviting their direct involvement. These learning opportunities included the use of mnemonics in the form of mantras and songs, and what Tracy called "metacognitve wrap-up", accomplished at the end of each episode by rehearsing and summarizing the lessons learned. The producers wanted to foster their audience's sense of empowerment, which they accomplished by eliciting their assistance of the show's host, and their identification with the character Blue, who served as a stand-in for the typical preschooler.

Sesame Street was originally designed based upon the prevailing view that preschoolers had short attention spans, in a magazine-like format in which each episode was made up of a variety of segments. Based on research of theorists such as Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts (who served as a consultant for Blue's Clues) conducted in the 30 years since Sesame Street, the producers of Blue's Clues set out to develop a show that took advantage of children being intellectually and behaviorally active when watching television. Until then, children's educational television programs presented their content in a one-way conversation, but Blue's Clues revolutionized the genre by inviting their viewers' involvement. Its creators believed that if children were more involved in the action of what they were viewing, they would attend to its content longer than previously expected, up to a half hour, and learn more. They also dropped the traditional magazine format for a narrative format. As Variety Magazine stated, "... The choice for Blue's Clues became to tell one story, beginning to end, camera moving left-to-right like reading a storybook, transitions from scene to scene as obvious as the turning of a page." Every episode of Blue's Clues was structured in this way. Its pace was deliberate and its material was presented clearly. Inspired by Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, one way this was done was in the use of pauses—"long enough to give the youngest time to think, short enough for the oldest not to get bored." Due the success of Blue's Clues, Variety reported that Sesame Street changed its format in 2002, adding more interactive segments similar to what Blue's Clues had done. Also unlike Sesame Street, Blue's Clues did not use humor or cultural references aimed at adults that could confuse preschoolers, but instead made the show literal, which the producers felt would better keep children's attention. The structure of each episode was also repetitive, designed to provide preschoolers with comfort and predictability.

The show's creators understood that the show's look and visual design would be integral to the attachment children would have to the show. Johnson expanded upon the "cutout" style she created during her college years. According to Tracy, "Blue's Clues was the first cutout animation series for preschoolers", which utilized simple cut-out construction-paper shapes of familiar objects with a wide variety of colors and textures that resembled a storybook. Johnson also used simple, primary colors and organized each room of the home setting into groups. The green-striped shirt worn by the show's first host Steve was inspired by Fruit Stripe gum. The goals were to make the show look natural and simplistic, as Tracy put it, "freshly cut and glued together with a vivid array of textures, colors, and shadows" similar to picture book illustrations. The show's digital design department created three-dimensional objects, took pictures of them, and then cut them out and placed them into the background, making the objects look more real and adding perspective and depth. Johnson hired artist Dave Palmer to develop what was at that time a new technology—creating the animation from simple materials like fabric, paper or pipe-cleaners and then scanning them into a computer so that they could be animated without repeatedly re-drawing them like in traditional animation. The result was something that looked different from anything else on television at the time, and they were able to animate their shows in less time compared to traditional methods, eight weeks for two episodes as opposed to sixteen weeks for one. Each episode was filmed with the host performing in front of a "blue screen"; the animation was added later.

Another innovative aspect of the production process of Blue's Clues was the producers' use of formative research. By 2001, the show's research team consisted of head researcher Alice Wilder (who joined the team shortly after its debut), Alison Sherman, Karen Leavitt, and Koshi Dhingra. Unlike Sesame Street, which tested a third of its episodes, the Blue's Clues research team field tested every episode three times with children aged 2 to 6 years old in preschool environments such as Head Start programs, public schools, and private daycare centers. There were three phases of their testing: content evaluation, video evaluations, and content analysis. In their tests of the pilot, conducted at day-care centers, preschools, and Headstart programs throughout the New York City area and with over 100 three-to-five years olds, the show was "immediately successful." They found that as the pilot progressed, not only were children's attention captured and sustained, they became excited and actively participated with what they saw, to the point that they stood up to get closer to the television and spoke back to the host. The producers and researchers also consulted outside advisers, who were chosen based upon their expertise and the needs of each script. As Anderson stated, the formative research team served "as a liaison between the feedback provided by the preschoolers and outside advisers and the production team, including writers, talent, producers, directors, element artists, and animators".

Reception
According to Tracy, Blue's Clues was the first commercial television show for preschoolers that was both educational and profitable. In 1998, Blue's Clues had sold almost 40 million units of its 45 VHS and DVD titles, and in 2000, generated over $1 billion in licensing products. More than ten million Blue's Clues books were in print by 2001, and over three million copies of six CD-ROM titles based on the show were sold. Seven Blue's Clues titles sold at least 1 million copies each. The show's first direct to video production Blue's Big Musical Movie (2000), which featured Ray Charles and The Persuasions, received mostly positive reviews, and sold over 3 million copies since 2006. The launch of Blue's Clues products at FAO Schwartz's flagship store in New York City was the most successful product launch in the store's history, and was attended by over 7,000 people. By 2002, Blue's Clues has received several awards for "excellence in children's programming, educational software, and licensing", and had been nominated for nine Emmys.



Other countries have produced their own versions of the show, with their own hosts. For example, it was a run-away hit in the U.K., and has become part of pop culture in Korea. It has been syndicated in 120 countries and has been translated into 15 languages. After 2000, it was one of the first preschool shows to incorporate American Sign Language into its content. Five-to-ten signs were used consistently in each episode.

Influence
The show's extensive use of research in its development and production process inspired several research projects that have provided evidence for its efficacy as a learning tool. In field tests, the attention and comprehension of young viewers increased with each repeated viewing. In 1999, Anderson and a team of researchers, some of which included his colleagues at Nickelodeon, studied "the impact of episode repetition on visual attention, audience participation, and comprehension". They wanted to test if repeated viewings of the show resulted in mastery over the material presented, or if viewers would habituate or become bored. They discovered that for the first few viewings, audience participation was lower because children paid more attention to unfamiliar material, and that understanding and solving the problems presented were more cognitively demanding. After five viewings, more of the viewers' cognitive resources were available for interaction and participation, so they answered more questions. As the researchers stated, "...Episode repetition appears to foster empowerment, as revealed in children's enthusiastic efforts to 'help' solve problems". They also found that repetition, which they called "an inexpensive tool to maximize comprehension", improved comprehension, held children's attention, and increased audience participation. Children were not only tolerant of repetition, they were "positively enthusiastic" about it.

In 2000, another team of researchers that also included Anderson and his Nickelodeon colleagues studied if experienced viewers of Blue's Clues interacted more with the show than less-frequent viewers. They also studied if experience with Blue's Clues changed how children watch television; if regular viewers of the show interacted more with other shows than children who were not. They found that when the content of a program children watched was new and challenging, they paid more attention, and when it was familiar, either from previous viewings or a format they recognized, they interacted more. In short, they found that "interaction in Blue's Clues to some extent reflects mastery".

In a similar study also conducted in 2000 by many of the same team of researchers, they found that experienced Blue's Clues viewers interacted more with other educational programs than inexperienced viewers, proving that watching Blue's Clues changed the way children watch television. In 2001, researcher Jennings Bryant at the University of Alabama conducted a longitudinal study of the effects of Blue's Clues, for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not the show's curriculum goals were achieved. They found that they were, and that the show's "episode repetition strategy" improved children's comprehension while holding their attention and increasing their participation, suggesting that children's learning and social interactions benefited by watching Blue's Clues. As Anderson stated, "Given the program's large audience, it appears that the program is not only doing well, but it is also doing good".



In 2009, Erin Ryan and her colleagues studied the effect of the use of American Sign Language (ASL) into Blue's Clues episodes. They analyzed 16 episodes, some that featured Deaf actress Marlee Matlin, over a two-week period for the content and frequency of the signs used, which "revealed a high incidence of ASL usage by various characters", but little "consistent use of ASL". The researchers speculated that hearing children with no ASL exposure would familiarize them with ASL and Deaf people, thus reducing the stigma attached to being hearing-impaired. Based on other research about the positive effects of teaching ASL to hearing children, the researchers also speculated that it could lead to an increase of vocabulary skills and IQ, and improved interpersonal communication. They found a "lack of consistency between the utilization of spoken words and the signs that represent them", as well as the lack of explanation for the purpose of signed communication and a connection with ASL and the Deaf community. They surmised that Deaf children would feel more included and less isolated, and that they would view positive models of ASL and Deaf people.

David Gesler, professor at Murray State University used Blue's Clues to introduce research methods to undergraduate students, and to engage them in the research process. He developed an exercise for students, which he found "successful" and helped them become more comfortable with research and counter their negative conceptions of research. According to Variety, the show began "a revolution in kids' TV", beginning the trend of targeting preschool programs and merchandise to younger viewers.

Despite the positive results reported by Anderson and his colleagues, they found no evidence that watching Blue's Clues increased the expressive vocabularies of its viewers. In one of the few real criticisms of Blue's Clues, researcher Shalom M. Fisch stated that although the show attempted to be "participatory", it could not truly be so (unlike interactive computer games) because the viewers' responses could not change or influence what was occurring onscreen.