The Rundown: The ‘Bluey’ Fart Episode Fiasco, Explained

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

Background first, because facts are important. Bluey is a sweet little Australian children’s cartoon about a sweet little blue puppy named Bluey who lives with her family. Bluey has a dad named Bandit and a mom named Chilli and a younger sister named Bingo who goes on little adventures with her. It’s an adorable piece of business and the show has made its way to America via Disney Plus and has become a mini-phenomenon among children and parents who flip it on and escape to a happier place for a few minutes here and there. It’s nice.

But.

There is now controversy.

Fart controversy.

The short version goes something like this: When the most recent season made its way across the Pacific to America, it was missing an episode titled “Family Meeting.” Which is strange. Why would an episode of a show for children be nixed like this What kind of troubling message did it send to young and impressionable minds Is this another case of overzealous parents banging pots and pans together over some hot-button cultural issue

Well… no.

The Family Meeting episode from series three of the hit children’s show features a faux trial with mum Chilli as the judge to determine whether Bandit did “fluffy” or “make a brownie” on Bluey’s face.

The episode opens with the six-year-old blue heeler pup saying “Dad blew off right in my face” and Bandit denying it. Later he admits: “Her face is at bum level – it’s hard not to.”

First of all… hilarious. Good. I love it. I am a fully-grown adult man and now I want to watch the fart trial. Make a whole spinoff about fart lawyers. Make two. See what I care.

Anyway, this gets even better. A Disney fansite called Pirates and Princesses realized that the episode was missing and reached out to Disney about it and got an actual comment on the whole thing. I encourage you to read the whole post to grasp the history at play here, but this is the comment an official Disney person passed along.

“Family Meeting” will roll out on U.S. platforms soon. Some of the “Bluey” content did not meet Disney Junior broadcast S&P in place at the time the series was acquired. Now that it is rolling out on other platforms, it is a great opportunity to reevaluate which is what we plan to do.

I do not think I can explain to you — with words only, at least — how delightful I find all of this. You should see my face as I’m typing this. I am beaming. Every moving part of it is a little better than the last. An Australian show for toddlers made an episode about a fart trial and it set in motion a series of events that included:

Just a perfect little news story from beginning to end, complete with a happy resolution. If Bluey was smart and/or devious about all of this, they’d make a second episode about the fart fiasco. Get meta as hell about it. Give me a full-length documentary about it all. Interview everyone involved. I would pay good money for a two-hour movie where a series of embarrassed executives attempt to use a slew of fancy business language to dance around the thing where they censored and then uncensored an episode of television about a flatulent cartoon canine.

This is the good stuff, people. Savor this one.

The good news here is that Fast X is now filming. Jason Momoa is there in full peacock mode, which is something that should not have taken this long to unlock. He should have been in these movies years ago. I’m glad we are rectifying it now, I guess, in a Better Late Than Never situation, but someone should be fired or at least be put on unpaid leave for making us wait this long. Everyone was too focused on giving Charlize Theron braids and bowl cuts. I get it. But still.

There’s a big article over at the Los Angeles Times about the filming, and about some collateral damage for the real people who live near Dominic Toretto’s fictional house. I must insist that you read it. It’s a fascinating sociological document. Here, look.

Ever since it premiered in 2001, “Fast and the Furious” fans have made a beeline to Angelino Heights to gawk at Bob’s Market, the store owned by the family of the film’s Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and the character’s quaint Victorian house.

But unlike the nearby house where The WB series “Charmed” was shot, Bob’s Market and Dominic’s house have become a destination for more than just snapping selfies. Nearly every night, car enthusiasts spin out doing donuts at high speeds in front of the store in addition to racing and doing street takeovers throughout the area just west of Downtown.

Two conflicting thoughts here: One, it sounds like hell for the people who live in this neighborhood and I really do feel bad for them; two, it is incredibly funny to me that street racers are making pilgrimages to the Toretto house to race their cars in tribute to Vin Diesel the way Catholics travel to the Vatican.

I will be thinking about this a lot.

Hellen Kim and Robert Howard, a married couple that live close by Bob’s Market, say that the open area in front of the store draws street racers who practice donuts and ramp up their engines, creating noise and smoke. Although the city erected some bollards in the area, many of the drivers simply moved to a nearby street or continue to drive around the barriers. And when they do so, because some of the cars don’t have mufflers, the noise tends to be extremely disruptive, with screeching tires throughout the night.

If I understand the world of the Fast & Furious movies correctly, and I think I do at this point, then there is only one way to put an end to this street-racing nonsense: They must identify the leader and challenge him to a quarter-mile race right in front of the house and whoever loses can’t show their face in California ever again.

Rules are rules.

This is the trailer for the next season of Chef’s Table on Netflix, which is about pizza. You probably guessed that from the big picture of a pizza that’s right up there in that YouTube link. Maybe not. Either way, it’s true. There are so many more shots of pizza once you hit play. And, one presumes, even more shots of pizza in the series itself. This is good. Pizza is good. The trailer made me very hungry when I first saw it earlier this week and it’s making me hungry again now. If I don’t get pizza in the next 48 hours I might end up on the news. Not in a good way. In the Pizza-Crazed Local Man Arrested After Blocking Traffic On The Highway For Six Hours way. You know what I mean.

Entertainment Weekly has a bunch of details on the whole thing, from the pizza chefs that will be featured to, well, this quote, which is from an executive producer who seems like he enjoys his job a lot. Good for him.

“The idea of being able to go deep into pizza and to explore all these amazing people that have made pizza their lives, it’s almost like exploring how our lives could have turned out in a dream scenario where we were making pizza every day,” exec producer Brian McGinn says. “That’s no. 1. No. 2 is: pizza is sort of the ultimate canvas. You roll out some dough and then whatever you put on top and how you make it, that can be a perfect way of expressing who you are. And in a lot of ways, that’s what Chef’s Table is about — people finding their voices, finding a way to express themselves, to express their cultures. It was exciting for us to take this seemingly simple food item that we eat all the time that everyone loves and to really go deeper into it and to get into the emotion of it and what it means to amazing artisans all over the world.”

A few things jump out at me here. The first is that I am suddenly furious at all of my high school and college advisors who did not inform me that “famous pizza artisan” would be a viable career option in the future. The second is that there should be a whole cable channel dedicated to pizza.

Think about this. We have so many channels, some of them almost comically specific. There are channels dedicated to tennis and golf. There can be a pizza channel. People cooking pizza, people going to famous pizza restaurants to watch other people make pizza, documentaries about the history of pizza, pizza cookoff reality shows, all of it. Hell, make sitcoms and crappy movies about pizza, too. Think like a Syfy or Lifetime original but it’s about a pizza chef who falls in love and/or has to go on a rampage to protect his family’s secret pizza recipe. John Wick but with pizza instead of dogs and the budget is like $600,000 total. I would watch it tonight.

I lied earlier. About the 48 hours thing. It’s 24, tops. More shows about pizza, please, at the very least. Writing these last few paragraphs did not help.