The Voices of Bluey w/ Uncle Stripe

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you're listening to 20 000 hertz i'm dallas taylor

In our last episode, we explored the sound of Bluey with the show's sound designer and mixer, Dan Brum.

To craft the show's organic sound, Dan uses all kinds of techniques, from recording birds, creeks, and playgrounds all over Brisbane, to applying a low-pass filter to the sound effects to give them a more warm, rounded tone.

Now, my three daughters are all huge Bluey fans, and my eight-year-old had a question about how they record the actors.

It's about all the people who do like talking and stuff.

How do they do that?

Because like, we can't just press on a video that's already done and there's already sound on it.

Because they have to draw it first.

Or they might do the sound first and then draw it.

They do?

Isn't that cool?

Yeah.

In Bluey, like in most cartoons, the actors record their lines before it gets animated.

This gives the actors much more freedom in their delivery.

And after they record, the editors can use all those takes to build the most natural and impactful impactful dialogue edit.

Bluey might be a cartoon about a family of dogs, but the dynamic between these actors always feels believable and human.

Here's a clip of the family playing a board game called Pop-Up Croc.

It looks a bit like Jenga, but with a spring-loaded piece that pops out when you mess up.

How good's Pop-Up Crock?

Again!

No, upstairs for bedtime.

Watching these scenes, it feels like these actors must be recording together so they can bounce off of each other's energy.

But it turns out...

In every single case, every actor is recorded individually.

In different booths, different cities sometimes.

G'day, I'm Dan Brum.

I'm the sound designer for Bluey.

While the actors record, they're guided by the director, which is one of two people.

The first is Joe Brum, the series creator, and Dan's older brother.

He's a really good line reader.

He reads you the line.

You do your own takes of it, and he'll kind of rein you in.

The second is Richard Jeffrey, the series director for 2 and 3.

This arrangement means that the cast members rarely interact in person.

Feels like we have.

The show's so warm and natural, but you just, you don't interact.

In 2023, Jimmy Fallon interviewed the actors who voiced the parents on Bluey.

That's Dave McCormack, who plays Bandit, and Melanie Zanetti, who plays Bandit's wife, Chili.

Keep in mind, this is five years after Bluey started.

Here's Jimmy Fallon.

You were telling me backstage you just met each other a few days ago?

A few days ago.

The first time.

So we record separately.

We live in different cities and I travel a lot for work.

So this was the first time.

Even Dan, who's been with the show from the beginning, still hasn't met some of the actors face to face.

I've never actually met Dave McCormack.

He records all these parts down in Sydney.

Again, Dave McCormack plays the dad, Bandit.

But it turns out, Dan and his brother Joe have been fans of Dave since long before Bluey started.

Dave, I mean, he's from this band that we loved as kids, Custard.

Michael Brisbane's sort of pop-punk band who had a bit of fame around the world.

Dave McCormack is Custard's lead singer.

Girls like that.

Here's one of their classics.

Girls like like that don't go for guys like us.

I still want to see.

And me and my brothers grew up.

I think it might have been the first concert I ever went to.

I jumped the fence into this festival and they were playing.

You know, I loved them.

Before Blue E, Dave had never done any voice acting, as he told Jimmy Fallon.

I was walking out of a lift.

Someone I knew was walking into the lift and they said, I know someone who's making a show about a cartoon dog family.

Maybe you'd want to be the dad voice.

And I was like, I can't act.

I can't do that.

And he said, can you read?

I said, well,

I can read a bit.

And as soon as you heard his voice, it's perfect.

Oh, good morning, everybody.

Say good morning, everyone.

What up, party people?

As you can hear, Dave's speaking voice is virtually the same as his bandit voice.

And that sometimes throws kids off.

Parents say, come and meet my kid, like they love the show.

I'm like, oh, don't.

They normally burst into tears.

like eaten bandit and his voice is

they don't understand it yeah

as for Melanie Zanetti Dan actually met her years ago how she came into the show is when we did the pilot episode Joe had a different voice actor play the mum and I think the ABC weren't quite into it I can't quite remember But I had Melanie come to my studio just to record some innocuous corporate video because we were with the same agency.

Apply now for 2017 and partner up with CQ University.

I'd only really just met her recently, but she had such a beautiful voice and I knew that she could act.

And so we did the voiceover and I said, oh, look, we're just working on this cartoon.

And he said, my brother's creating this animation.

You've got a great voice.

Do you want to whack some voiceovers down?

And I showed her a bit of it and her eyes just lit up and she's like, yes, this show is beautiful.

I'd already seen The Pilot and I had fallen in love.

Like the most cute, like my heart hurts.

This is so cute show.

And so she just threw down a demo.

I sent it to Joe and he really liked it.

And then they did their due diligence and auditioned for like three months and then came back and said, no, you were right.

And then the rest is history.

Yoohoo!

Hi, I'm your wife.

My wife.

Yes.

And if you want me to stay your wife, you'll learn about dishwashers.

Bluey's explosion in popularity has made Dave and Melanie into celebrities.

But from the beginning, the identities of the child actors have been kept a secret.

That includes Bluey, Bingo, their cousins, and all of their friends.

And that's very purposeful.

There's just no reason to have a kid's name revealed.

Probably most of the kids aren't actors.

They're just kids of cast, crew, friends kind of thing.

They're doing this adult thing, which is making an animated series.

But just let them be kids and have their own lives.

And I think it's a really, really wonderful decision the production company made.

Yeah, I don't even reveal the names of my children on my podcast, which is much smaller.

And that's entirely the same reason.

Yeah, there's absolutely no reason anyone needs to know.

It's just enjoy the show for what it is and just let them be kids.

In virtually every cartoon out there, the child characters are actually voiced by adults.

This is true in everything from rugrats

and play nice.

To Powerpuff Girls.

Well, Professor, thanks.

Yeah,

hey, this is a quarter.

To Bob's Burgers.

These ears mean a lot to you, Logan.

So how about you keep them?

But for Bluey, Joe Brum always knew that he wanted these characters voiced by real kids.

I think this is what's unique about Bluey is that the way my brother writes for kids, he writes the kids' lines, the way the kids actually speak.

There's a leaf bug in the way.

Aww, she's so cute.

You have to be more careful, Lyphicus.

You're lucky we didn't squash you.

When Joe and Richard record these kids, they already have a good idea of how they want the lines to sound.

They will say the line and the kid will copy them as best they can.

And we've been very lucky to get kids that have these great musical ears that can pick up on all the nuances of the director's read and kind of match it musically.

The toilet's got a ribbon?

Maybe it won a prize.

Yeah, the best toilet in the world.

But often they kind of go off script a little and sort of hit a weird key or a weird intonation or something like that.

Isn't anyone going to mention the salads?

And it ends up funnier than the director could have planned himself.

And that line invariably is the one that ends up getting used.

I love falsetto too!

That sincere, childish delivery really shines through in Bingo and Bluey's squeaky giggles.

They're so good.

They're the best laughs in in all of animated ever.

Yeah, I think they are.

You know, they're sincere.

You don't just ask a kid to laugh.

You tickle them or you do some silly face and it's this real laughter.

Bingo, calm it down a bit, mate.

And I think that's why they end up sounding so genuine and so funny.

Ooh, banana.

What's your favorite sound on Bluey?

It's Bingo's voice.

That's my youngest daughter.

What is it about Bingo's voice that you like so much?

Um,

yes, she talks kind of like me.

Yes, mate?

Just leaves the door open this much.

So belief can come in.

One of the most heartwarming things about this show is how many of these voices come from Bluey's crew and their families.

For example, there's The Busker, a musician dog whose signature line is, Who likes to dance?

He's voiced by the show's composer, Joff Bush.

Thanks, Matey.

That deserves another song!

Then there's Bluey and Bingo's grandmother, Chris Healer.

Hi, girls!

She's voiced by and named after Joe and Dan's mother, Chris Brum.

Oh, yes, Bingo!

I floss every night!

Joe also named the grandfather, Bob Healer, after their dad, Bob Brum.

On the show, real life Bob actually doesn't voice Grandpa Bob, but he did do the voice for one of the gray nomads in the episode Road Trip.

Would you like a big peanut sticker?

I've got a spare one.

Oh, yes, please.

And as it turns out, there's one more close relative who has a key role on the show.

A bit of a backstory is that I have this bizarre greying stripe down the middle of my head.

And so my older brother calls me Stripe.

And amongst all the cousins, I'm Uncle Stripe.

And then I saw a script which was Horsey Ride come across my desk, and there was a character in it called Uncle Stripe.

I thought, great.

I think that character might be written for me.

There was no heads up.

Dan's brother Joe just knew that he would get the message.

I think I first found out just from the script there and thought, oh, okay, I'm gonna give this a red-hot crack as an audition.

In Bluey, Uncle Stripe is Bandit's brother.

He's got stubble on his face and a light blue stripe around his abdomen.

And obviously I was auditioned and I had to be able to do the role.

Fortunately, along with being a sound designer, Dan also had years of experience as a voiceover artist.

When living and working around here, it's all about taking pride in what you do, about being part of a community.

For Dan, the role of Uncle Stripe felt especially natural.

Hey kids, how you going?

Hey brother.

He's just me.

Like people ask you to do the Stripe voice.

It's like, well, it's just me.

What are you talking about?

Nothing happens when you press my nose.

But that doesn't mean that Stripe is always low-key.

He sort of yells a lot, Stripe, and you just scream like from the belly and you just really give it your all.

And the animators love that because they've got this just full-range

wild line that they can kind of animate however they'd like to.

And it ends up just funnier on screen.

Let's get on it!

Not only does Joe like to cast his friends and family on the show, he also draws from his real life experiences with these people to write these stories.

In fact, some of the funniest and most poignant moments on the show came from real life.

I think that's why it's so funny because it was a real line that a kid did say.

That's coming up after the break.

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Congratulations to Thomas Rogsock for getting last episode's mystery sound right.

That sound comes from an Aeolian harp, also known as a wind harp.

It's a stringed instrument that's designed specifically to be played by the wind blowing across it.

Now, typically, when you pluck a stringed instrument, you mainly hear what's called the fundamental tone, with some soft overtones on top of it.

But with a wind harp, the air moving over the strings only produces overtones, giving the sound an eerie, ethereal quality.

And here's this episode's mystery sound.

Am I repeating myself?

Would you stand me on my head?

If you recognize that sound, tell us at the web address mystery.20k.org.

Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win one of our super soft 20,000Hz t-shirts.

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In many ways, Bluey is a family affair.

The series was created by Joe Brum.

His brother Dan sound designs and mixes the show and also voices Uncle Stripe.

Their parents, Bob and Chris, have both voiced characters, and the kids in the show are voiced by the children of cast, crew, and friends.

When writing the show, Joe draws on on all of these connections to make Bluey feel relatable, like the episode Squash, where Bandit and Stripe face off in a squash game.

Big brothers always beat little brothers.

That's just the way it goes.

I've got two brothers, Joe and my older brother Adam, and we played a lot of squash, sort of in our 20s and 30s.

Squash is a high-speed game played in a small, enclosed court.

Squash with your brothers is different to squash with friends because it's combat squash.

You're just swinging, you're running, it's wild and it's dangerous.

From a sound design point of view it was so much fun because you can't fake a game of squash.

It's such a specific sound.

So I went down to a squash court and I recorded myself hitting squash balls, bouncing against walls, hitting the glass.

You know, and the cheats of like the squeak of the shoe.

Now a dog's foot wouldn't make make that sound, but if you're watching a rally of squash and you don't have that high-pitched, reverberant squeak of a shoe, it's just not going to sound and feel like a game of squash.

Dan actually has a co-writing credit on this episode.

It was his idea to make Bluey and Bingo control Bandit and Stripe like video game characters.

Okay, one more point and we win, Bluey.

Make it happen.

Okay.

Just do your best, Bingo.

I've tried, but my control isn't working properly.

No matter how hard he tries, Stripe just can't seem to beat Bandit.

Why do you keep losing?

Because big brothers always beat little brothers.

The genesis of that story of big brothers always beat little brothers is kind of true because Joe just would always win.

No matter how hard you tried, he just had that edge.

But this episode differs from real life a bit.

Uncle Stripe ends up winning after some inspiring words from Bingo.

You'll probably have a better chance

No, I want us to win.

Oh, really?

That, I fixed you.

Yeah, Bingo.

You did.

Even some of the dialogue in Bluey comes from real life, like when Bingo trips on a can of baked beans.

Often the three of our brothers will get together and you just kind of laugh about various things that your kids have said.

And that was my little, she would have been two and a half at the time.

She was eating a bowl of baked beans and she dropped the bowl of baked beans and then she literally slipped on them and like, she went, ah, I slipped on my beans.

And so I would have told that to my brother and next minute I see that it's ended up in Granny's and it's this immortalized line.

I slipped on my beans.

I think that's why it's so funny because it was a real line that a kid did say.

While Joe brings his real life experiences into the writing of Bluey, Dan often does the same thing with the sound.

I was actually watching back on the episode Wagon Ride from season one, and I really liked it because, again, the sound design is about capturing the feeling of what the story is trying to convey.

And that episode is set in an early morning.

The kids have woken up Ben and he's got to take him for a walk.

Ugh, chilly.

Asleep.

All right, let's do this.

Hey!

As parents know, this kind of thing happens a lot.

There's early mornings and then there's early mornings of when your kid wakes up.

My oldest daughter, she would wake up at four o'clock every morning and I would have to take her out of the house and take her for a big walk so that my wife and our baby could keep sleeping.

And the sound out in the world at four in the morning is very different from six o'clock in the morning.

It's different from five o'clock in the morning.

That first hour, it's just whole different birds.

Okay, let's go!

Seatbelts!

Dad,

there are no seatbelts!

Oh yeah!

Off we go!

Yeah!

And then, as you go for the walk, by the time you finish the walk, more and more birds have woken up.

Come on, bingo, let's roll!

Coming!

Jasmine, I've bought some birthday furs.

And I think I did a pretty good good job in that episode.

It just, it feels beautiful and lush and lovely.

You ladies are certainly up early.

Oh yes, it's got to be done.

Throughout the episode, Bandit pulls the kids around in a red wagon.

You won't get up today, Green Strong!

Yeah, Green Strong will beat some of the kids.

The show is obviously very much based on my brother's experience raising his kids.

and so that's what he used to do.

He used to take his kids in the wagon.

So the first thing I did as a sound designer is I borrowed that wagon off him and I recorded myself pushing and pulling that around my street in the area.

But I needed the weight of having two kids in it so I put my two kids in it and I wheeled them around and that got that lovely really nice weighted metal cart sound.

And you can hear between the takes I've used my kids laughing and squealing because they're having so much fun.

Their dad was pushing them around in this trolley at five in the morning.

And so now they're frozen in time at two and four, and they're eight and ten now.

It's this beautiful little time capsule, which only I know about.

I have a question,

Daddy!

Daddy, that's a question.

Jake keeps laughing.

It's all right.

Bluey is inspired by the family lives of the people who make it.

And in turn, these stories give families like mine our own special moments.

At one point, my daughter started saying this phrase that my wife and I just couldn't figure out.

For the longest time, I had two different daughters who said the same thing.

They were just like, I want to play Passel Passel.

Passo Passel.

And I was like, Passel Passel?

It took us forever.

It took us like six weeks to figure out, like, what are you talking about?

Passel Passel, Passel, Passel.

Passo, Passel.

But then, my wife and I saw the episode of Bluey where the kids play this game that's apparently common in Australia.

It's like musical chairs, but instead of changing seats, you pass around a present.

The game, in my very American accent, is called Pass the Parcel.

Okay, ready for pass the parcel?

Yeah!

Pass the parcel.

Where they pass presents.

We realized that they were saying pass the parcel, but with an Australian accent.

It was so cute.

That's amazing.

You ready for past the parcel, kids?

Yeah!

I love past the parcel.

The reason why I say pass the parcel is because it's kind of hard for me to speak.

Pass the parcel isn't the only game we've gotten from Bluey.

I play Keepy Uppy at least once a week.

Yeah, nice.

I love it.

This aspect of the show isn't by accident.

The creators creators are very conscious of how these stories impact parents.

Some parents find it hard to play with their kids to have the imagination to come up with these games.

But what Bluey has given those parents is a bunch of games that they can just play.

And so the kids are then getting much more fun times with their parents.

And that's what you hear everywhere is that it's just encouraged dads and mums to play with their kids.

And there's no better outcome from a TV show, right, than bringing families together and playing these games.

The unfortunate thing is that those games aren't just a seven-minute game.

It's a game that the kid wants to play for five hours in a row when the cricket's on.

All right, girls, who wants to sit on the couch and watch cricket?

Not me!

No way!

That's my horsey ride!

Yay!

Well, we gave it a shot.

That's parenting for you.

More than any specific game, for me, the biggest takeaway from Bluey is just relatable stories about being a parent.

Like in one episode where Chili's cooking dinner, she has Bingo in one ear telling jokes that don't make sense while Bluey is in the other ear practicing her recorder.

Potato Who.

Potato drives the car to the potato shop and buys a potato.

That's a good one, Bingo.

Bluey!

Sorry!

When Bandit gets home, Chili tells him that she needs a break.

Right, dinner's in the slow cooker and they've had afternoon tea.

I need 20 minutes when no one comes near me.

What?

Oh, yep.

Okay.

Come on, kids.

Daddy daughter time.

But the girls don't understand and they think they've done something wrong.

I'm sorry for whatever I did to upset you.

You didn't do anything to upset me, sweetheart.

Then why don't you want to see us?

I do want to see you, but it can be hard work looking after kids.

Sometimes mums just need 20 minutes.

I don't understand.

You will one day, sweetheart.

Parenting is such a hard journey

and it's so lovely and it's so emotional but it's tiring and it's frustrating and it's every single emotion you can experience.

And then suddenly with Bluey These stories are so sincere.

It's so believable and so relatable in that all of us parents who are playing these games behind closed doors that no one sees,

suddenly it's like you see yourself up on screen

and you realize we're all going through it together.

And for me, that's the power of this show, and that's just this gift of the world that my brother has given.

How does Bluey, the show, make you feel about your family?

Um,

makes us feel more ordinary

for sure.

in the taylor household bluey is the one show that me my wife and our three girls can all enjoy together we can laugh we can cry we can learn a goofy new game to play and most importantly we can learn to understand each other just a little bit better

and i mean that's what this show is ever since it came out in 2018 i'd tell people that i work on it And their eyes would just light up and they'd just want to tell you how much this show means to them and their family.

family.

I'm very fortunate and very lucky to be able to play a role in a show like this, but it's a really nice feeling to know that something you work on is just creating so much happiness and so much joy around the world.

20,000 hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

Hear more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Nicholas Harder and Casey Emmerly with help from Grace East.

It was sound design and mixed by Jesus Ertiaga and Jade Dickey.

A huge thanks to sound designer Dan Brom.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.

All right, I'm about to hit stop.

Anybody else want to say anything to the microphone before I hit stop?

We love Louie.

Yay!