Blue's Clues, "Prehistoric Blue"

Steve, Blue, and their dinosaur friend

Today's topic: dinosaurs.  Specifically, how does "Blue's Clues" portray dinosaurs?

It all starts when Shovel and Pail find dinosaur footprints in the backyard.  Shovel gets scared that they are dinosaurs roaming around the backyard and Pail explains that they are all extinct, meaning none are alive anymore.  She explains that dinosaurs must have walked there millions and millions of years ago and now the footprints have stayed and turned to stone.  Shovel acts so scared of dinosaurs, which is a confusing preconception to me.  Why would we want to teach kids to be scared of something that they haven't even really learned about yet?

Hopefully you're familiar with the basic premise of "Blue's Clues:" the episodes follow a man named Steve as he tries to solve a question by piecing together clues left by his puppy, Blue.  However, the actual clue game isn't important for this critique.  In case you were wondering, the answer is chameleon.  It wasn't hard to figure out.

First, one important piece is the mail-time segment, which shows a video of kids in the Museum of Natural History.  It lets kids see the real bones of dinosaurs.  Even if they do not fully understand the ideas of prehistory or the existence of dinosaurs, then at least maybe they can appreciate the sheer scale of the reconstructed dinosaurs.  They're ginormous.

Next, Steve and Blue travel millions of years back in time into a dinosaur diorama.  Here, there is a pretty barren landscape except for volcanoes, prehistoric plants, and a water source.  The first dino we meet is an Apatosaurus, a very friendly leaf eater, and a huge contrast from whatever imaginary creature Shovel was scared of in the beginning of the episode.  Next, we encounter a baby Stegosaurus and his mama.  A mean Allosaurus comes along and Mama Stego has to use her tail spikes to scare him away and protect her baby.  This dino on dino action still isn't scary because Blue's Clues's animation makes everything cute and friendly looking, as is appropriate with such a young audience.  Finally, we happen upon an Archaeopteryx, a birdlike dinosaur.  Kids probably wouldn't realize it, but this name contains the same root word (meaning ancient) as archaeology.

The episode ends off by relating modern animals back to their dinosaur relatives, thereby making dinosaurs relevant to kids' lives, rather than just having them exist as a sort of imaginary creature.

All in all, it was a nice little episode and I enjoyed the cute dinosaurs, but now that I'm older, Steve comes off as kind of creepy.  Weigh those two things against each other in your decision to watch Prehistoric Blue.

As a final note, I watched this episode on Netflix and couldn't find it on YouTube.  If you have a Netflix subscription, you can watch it here.

What's Right?
Explaning extinction, Museum of Natural History segment, names of dinosaurs, relating dinosaurs to modern animals.
What's Wrong?
Conflicting portrayals of dinosaurs as mean and nice. 
Grade: A-