I'm cuckoo for Blue's Clues Blue Foods
Posted by brilokuloj on Oct 24, 2020
I really loved Blue’s Clues. Did you ever watch that one? The kids show with the blue cartoon dog?
I loved Blue’s Clues well past the point where most children would have moved on to other shows. I loved Blue’s Clues to the point of accidentally isolating myself from my peers. I was still watching it when I was 8, and even once I lost interest when they kicked Steve off for Joe, I kept watching it with my sibling well into my preteen years.
I had a Blue stuffed toy. I had the Handy Dandy Notebook, with the giant crayons. I wanted the Thinking Chair very badly, and would randomly declare any particularly comfortable chair or even sofa to be the Thinking Chair. I had a Mailbox I would put random crap in. I had several figurines that would regularly get lost and stepped on. I had the Humongous Entertainment PC games, which were very good. My dog was named Blue.
Above anything else, I loved the Blue’s Clues food. I already loved neon-colored food, something that I know many 90s kids can sympathize with, and in my case I especially loved neon Blue Food. I can’t say for certain if my love of the Blue’s Clues Blue Food was because of the show itself, or if I started to love the show more because it was a consistent source of serotonin-inducing Blue Food. I think solving that mystery might be even harder than the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum.
Would you like to see my collection of favorite Blue’s Clues Blue Foods? Come on into my article! Blue skidoo, you can too.
Blue Bunny Blue’s Clues ice cream
The image you see above is the only image I have ever found of this product.
Blue Bunny is an ice cream brand owned by Wells Enterprises, the second-largest ice cream producers in the United States. They also make Bomb Pops and a bunch of other stuff, but I associate them with 3 things: the giant family-size tubs of vanilla ice cream that you can reuse to keep sewing supplies in; their amazing birthday cake ice cream; and, of course, the Blue’s Clues ice cream.
The Blue’s Clues ice cream is described promotionally as “a yummy blue vanilla ice cream dotted with Blue’s Clues paw print sugar cookies”, and indeed, the ice cream base was just Blue Bunny’s standard vanilla ice cream with blue food coloring mixed in. But devotees swear the simplicity of its components elevated it to something far greater than the sum of its parts.
I am one of those devotees. I don’t care what the ingredients list or the promotional material or even the carton says. That blue vanilla was different. Even the sugar cookie pieces were nothing like anything I’ve had in ice cream since then.
The Blue’s Clues ice cream was available from the start of 2003, and then I think must have been discontinued in 2004. I associate it most intimately with the Fall of 2003, where I stood in my uncle’s kitchen and ate it out of a bowl next to the freezer, but it was a steady feature in all of my fondest memories of that year.
From the moment I had enough money to waste on this, I have been trying and failing to recreate the Blue’s Clues ice cream. My earliest attempts were at home with an ice cream maker. For the sugar cookie pieces I used golden Oreos, which didn’t even come close - even with time to soften they were just too crunchy. At some point I think I used Nilla wafers which was even worse.
I’ve turned to trying to find it in ice cream parlors. Back in February this year, Cold Stone Creamery came out with a frosted animal cracker flavor and matching mix-ins; I tried that combo first, and then I put the animal cracker mix-ins into their Cotton Candy flavor hoping the neon blue would at least trigger the memory. Neither of them came remotely close.
The closest I have ever come is a ‘Cookie Monster’ flavor from a local creamery, which came with a light touch of blue food coloring and somehow-very-softened Oreo pieces. It was very, very close. But it was still clearly Oreos, not sugar cookies.
I am not the only one driven by this madness. There has been a Facebook page for fans since at least 2015, which has made several petitions. It makes the rounds on r/nostalgia every now and then, and if you scroll down far enough on pretty much any retro blog, you’re going to find that same low-resolution JPEG again eventually.
For some reason, discussion of Blue’s Clues ice cream often steers to biological functions. It was the first time many people learned that excess blue food coloring will turn your poop green, and it was also the star of a (probably staged) incident where someone ate way too much of it and puked blue on live television.
All of this, and yet nobody has a decent photo of what the damn ice cream looked like.
Wells Enterprises, please bring back the Blue’s Clues ice cream. Please?
Blue Bunny Blue’s Clues Cool Tubes
I can’t even find a picture online of these, so I’ve composed my best mock-up based on how I remember them. Please bask in my art skills.
Cool Tubes, if you haven’t guessed, are just Blue Bunny’s version of Push-Ups, which you’ve probably had in Flintstones orange flavor. If you’ve never had one of these, it’s a popsicle in a paper wrapper with a little piece of plastic you can push on to make the popsicle go up. If you hate mess, this is the tube for you, but otherwise it’s just a regular ol’ frozen treat with a gimmick to justify a price markup.
I am certain I’ve had these, because they were released the same year as the Blue’s Clues ice cream, but I have no recollection of them. Promotional material says they were blue raspberry flavored, which sounds about right.
Mott’s Blue’s Clues Berry applesauce
Once again, images of these products are few and far in-between. Why did Internet historians not care about the Blue’s Clues food? Mercifully, we have 4 seconds of video footage.
Yes, the Blue’s Clues applesauce doesn’t even get its own commercial, but rather exists very briefly at the end of a commercial for the Rugrats applesauce.
Mott’s is one of the main brands producing the specific product of ‘applesauce in disposable cups’, a popular treat for children in public school. Sure, you can buy applesauce in the big jar and get your own disposable cups, but … I’m not a parent, I can’t claim to understand the convenience.
I could have sworn that Blue’s Clues Berry was just a recolor of Mott’s Mixed Berry flavor, but the ingredients lists I’ve seen online suggest it might have had even less natural flavors than that. Mixed Berry actually has raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries; Blue’s Clues Berry has an ominous threat of “natural flavor” and nothing else.
I still loved this stuff, even though it was pretty sickly. Applesauce is still kind of weird and gross for me even to this day, but I would probably eat broccoli if it was blue raspberry-colored.
Mott’s recycled the blue applesauce thing for Scooby Doo applesauce, and some other brands still make it. I probably won’t buy it because I can buy applesauce in the big jar and eat it all by myself, but I’m kinda glad it still exists.
Oral-B Blue’s Clues Blue’s Berry Bubble toothpaste
No, this isn’t food. Don’t eat toothpaste. It still counts as a Blue Food because I said so.
Anyway, I hate mint toothpaste. I reluctantly tolerate cinnamon. Oral-B’s Berry Bubble is the best flavor of toothpaste. It is not sour, it is not punishing, it does not leave a residue in your mouth to ruin your breakfast. It is mildly grossly bubblegum-flavored, and then it is done. You rinse and go do anything else.
I have had years to formulate this opinion, because Blue’s Clues is not the only branded toothpaste by Oral-B to feature this flavor. It’s starred in many others, including a Winnie the Pooh toothpaste I was especially fond of, and arguably I think their Sesame Street bubblegum one was indistinguishable but it’s been over a decade so don’t quote me on that.
Blue’s Berry Bubble was special, though, because it had a paw print-shaped squeeze hole. I wish I had been told as a kid that you only need a pea-sized amount, because I’d think it’s actually perfect for that application, especially since kids need even less. Just squeeze out a little paw shape on your bristles and go!
Nobody has a photo of the toothpaste either. Seriously? Did nobody in the mid-2000s just take photos of things?
These are all of the Blue’s Clues Blue Foods I personally remember experiencing, but I know there’s many more, especially in the post-Joe merch. If you have any of your own stories to share, please feel free to comment below!
And if you have a photo of the Blue’s Clues ice cream, please send it to me, along with as many details you can remember about how it tasted and what the sugar cookie pieces were like, and I will make a blog post all about you and how great you are. Thanks.
Tagged: 1999 2003 applesauce blue's clues ice cream popsicles toothpaste