Aisle 3: Imagination

NARRATOR (GEORGE):
The Toy Museum KNOWS how to roar.
It has dragons that eat cars,
tiny metal racers that dare gravity,
and shelves of toys that glow and beep and shout.

But sometimes,
the museum does something much quieter.

It turns the dullest errands of adult life
into a stage for children.
  
Tonight, the Night Watchman
has wandered away from speeding cars
and plastic teeth,
into a corner of the museum
that feels… suspiciously like a grocery store.
[Footsteps slow. A trolley rattle, very small.]

All right, that’s tonight’s story.I’ll make my roundsand see who’s ready to talk tomorrow.
In this place,there’s always one more toywith something to say.
NIGHT WATCHMAN:
Let me guess.
Next stop: frozen peas?

NARRATOR:
Not quite.
In front of him, on a low platform,
is a play set laid out like a tiny supermarket.
There’s a checkout counter with a little conveyor belt,
a scanner,
a beeping register,
plastic fruits and vegetables,
milk cartons the size of his thumb,
and a trolley just big enough
for two small blue heelers to fight over.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity and Conversations with Toys. This episode is about the Bluey supermarket playset and is called “Aisle 3: Imagination”

And as usual, let me get the disclaimer out-of-the-way.

This podcast is a dramatization that blends historical research with fiction, satire, and imagined conversations between people, toys, and other objects. It is not a documentary and not professional advice of any kind. No character, toy, product, or brand depicted in this podcast is authorized by, endorsed by, or officially affiliated with any company, manufacturer, museum, or organization; references to specific names are for storytelling only and do not imply sponsorship or approval.

I’m George Bartley… now let’s have some fun.

Aquarium [MUSIC: Fade out.]

NARRATOR (GEORGE):
The Toy Museum KNOWS how to roar.
It has dragons that eat cars,
tiny metal racers that dare gravity,
and shelves of toys that glow and beep and shout.

But sometimes,
the museum does something much quieter.

It turns the dullest errands of adult life
into a stage for children.
  
Tonight, the Night Watchman
has wandered away from speeding cars
and plastic teeth,
into a corner of the museum
that feels… suspiciously like a grocery store.
[Footsteps slow. A trolley rattle, very small.]

All right, that’s tonight’s story.
I’ll make my rounds
and see who’s ready to talk tomorrow.
In this place,
there’s always one more toy
with something to say.
NIGHT WATCHMAN:
Let me guess.
Next stop: frozen peas?

NARRATOR:
Not quite.
In front of him, on a low platform,
is a play set laid out like a tiny supermarket.
There’s a checkout counter with a little conveyor belt,
a scanner,
a beeping register,
plastic fruits and vegetables,
milk cartons the size of his thumb,
and a trolley just big enough
for two small blue heelers to fight over.

NIGHT WATCHMAN (squinting):
Oh.
Bluey.
I’ve seen you, you know—
in clips on the internet,
on the TVs in waiting rooms,
on lunchboxes.
You weren’t around when I was little.
Back then, if a cartoon dog talked,
it usually sold breakfast cereal.
But you…
I hear you’re kind of a big deal.

(pauses, half-smiling)
Funny thing is, when I think of you,
I don’t just think of the show.
I think of grocery stores.

You know the kind I mean—
bright as noon no matter what time it really is outside,
floors so shiny you can see the wobble of the shopping carts,
and that faint, chilly air that smells like oranges,
plastic wrap, and bakery bread
all at the same time.

Rows and rows of boxes and bottles,
colors shouting at you from every shelf—
cartoons on cereal,
superheroes on  snacks,
little mascots promising “more fun”
if you just put them in the cart.

And somewhere down the aisle,
   parent is negotiating with a kid:
“You can choose one thing with a picture on it.
Just one. Make it count.”

You’d fit right in there, you know.
I can almost see you and Bingo on a cereal box,
parked right between the marshmallow stars
and the whole-grain flakes,
smiling like you’ve personally guaranteed
that breakfast will be an adventure.

Or maybe it’s the toy aisle.
That’s its own little universe.
Shelves humming with buzzers and buttons,
tiny grocery carts, miniature cash registers,
plastic fruits and vegetables
in colors that never quite exist in real life.
Kids pushing toy trolleys
like they’re running the whole supermarket…
and, in a way, they are.

And over by the real checkout lanes—
that’s a show all its own.
Beep… beep… beep…
scanners singing as everything slides past,
conveyor belts rolling like slow, patient rivers
of cereal, apples, macaroni,
and the occasional emergency chocolate bar.
There’s always a kid riding in the front of the cart,
kicking their feet,
staring up at the candy rack,
making deals in their head
about how good they’ll be
if they can just have that one lollipop.

That’s what you remind me of, Bluey.
Not just a TV show,
but that whole noisy, ordinary, magical world
where a simple trip to the store
can turn into a full-blown adventure.

BLUEY (cheerful):
Heeey, Night Watchman!  thank you for your kind words!

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
And it talks.
Of course it does.

NARRATOR:
The figurine is small—
blue fur, darker patches,
big eyes, tiny paws on the handle of the toy trolley.

Next to her, another pup—Bingo—
is frozen in mid-step,
forever about to reach for a plastic banana.

BLUEY:
We don’t just talk.
We play.
This is our supermarket!
Well… our toy version of it.
Everything is smaller and less sticky.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
I remember supermarkets as a lot of fluorescent lights
and somebody telling me not to touch anything.

But tell me why, why do you feel that it was important to turn
grocery shopping into a toy?

BLUEY:
Because for kids,
grocery shopping is huge.
All those colors,
all those choices,
all those rules:
“Stay with the trolley.”
“Don’t run.”
“Put that back.”
“Okay, fine, just one treat.”
This play set lets you practice all of that
without anyone getting reprimanded or lost in Aisle 9.

And… it’s a great excuse
to play pretend with Mum and Dad.

NARRATOR:
The Night Watchman studies the set more closely.
Little price stickers are printed on signs.
The shelves are filled with tiny versions of real food:
cereal boxes, fruit, tins, maybe even a toy “beans” can
that looks suspiciously like the ones in his own cupboard.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
Explain something to me
I have had a conversation with Teddy.
I've had a conversation with Hot Wheels and dragons.
How did a supermarket—
the place adults drag their feet to after work—
end up as a fantasy setting?
A grocery store doesn't seem like a place of fantasy or make believe!

BLUEY:
Because kids don’t see “errand.”
We see adventure.
To you, this is
“milk, bread, eggs, don’t forget the list.”

To us, this is:

Can I push the trolley?
Can I put the cereal in?
Why are there eight hundred kinds of cheese?
What happens if we pretend the floor is lava?

Adult life is full of places
that feel boring to grownups
and enormous to kids.
The place that I come from
tries to show that
the “boring” bits
are actually where a lot of life happens.

This toy takes that idea
and puts it on the floor.

NARRATOR:
He can almost hear it:
A parent’s tired voice:
“Okay, we have to go shopping.”
A child’s bright reply:
“Can we play shopping?”

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
All right, walk me through this thing.
What can kids actually do with it?

NIGHT WATCHMAN 
You know, Bluey… let me approach this from a different angle
 you didn’t just pop out of a toy factory one day.
Somebody dreamed you up.

Far on the other side of the world… not in this grocery store, not even in this country… there was a tired dad in Brisbane, Australia.
He worked in cartoons—drawing, animating, making little characters move across a screen.
That was his day job.

But his real full-time job…
was being Dad.

[Very soft ambience: distant hum of the supermarket refrigerators.]

NIGHT WATCHMAN (warming up):
He had two little girls and a dog.
Not just any dog—
a real Blue Heeler, all paws and wiggles and big, curious eyes.
The kind of dog that doesn’t know the word “off-switch.”

Every day, when he’d get home, the house was a mess of games.
The couch wasn’t a couch—
it was a pirate ship.
The hallway was a hospital.
The backyard was a jungle.

And the kitchen?
The kitchen turned into a grocery store a lot like this one.
Cans and boxes lined up like precious treasure.
Fruit and cereal and milk all pretending to be something bigger in the child's imaginations.

He’d watch them—
sometimes join in, sometimes just lean on the counter with a cup of coffee—
and he realized something.

(leans closer to the figure)
Nobody ever told those children exactly how to play.
They just invented worlds.
They solved problems, argued, made up, took turns being the boss.
All of that… without a single worksheet or report card in sight.

(soft chuckle)
And that dad thought:
“This… this stuff right here—this is what childhood is really about.”

So he started to wonder…
“What if there were a show that was just about family and games?
No magical wands, no secret superhero headquarters…
Just kids and parents playing, and learning how to be human along the way?”

[Keys jingle faintly as he shifts his weight.]

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
Now, this dad already knew a thing or two about kids’ cartoons.
He’d worked on some pretty famous ones in another country.
He knew how bright the colors should be,
how long the episodes should last before tiny viewers wriggle off the couch,
all that technical stuff.

But this time…
he wanted it to feel like home.

So he made the family a family of dogs—
not perfect, fancy dogs,
but regular, slightly goofy Blue Heelers,
just like the ones that trot down real Australian streets.
He gave them a house that looked like the kind you’d actually see in Brisbane—
piled-up toys, laundry, dishes, all of it.

And then he did something a little risky.
He didn’t build the show around teaching letters or numbers.
He built it around play.
Around Bandit and Chilli getting down on the floor with their kids.
Around games that start simple and spiral into something wild:
a bus ride that turns into an opera,
a quick trip to the store that turns into a full-scale adventure.

(soft smile in his voice)
He made a short little sample episode—
barely a few minutes long—
with you in it,
running and laughing and making up the rules as you went.
He showed it to some people who could say “yes” or “no,”
and for a while, it wasn’t clear which way it would go.

Because let’s be honest…
“a show about a family that plays games together”
doesn’t sound very flashy on paper.
No dragons, no laser beams, no giant robots.

But the folks watching it noticed something.
They laughed.
They saw their own kids in those games—
and even more dangerously…
they saw themselves as parents.

They saw how the dad in the cartoon tried…
and sometimes got tired…
and still came back to the game.
They saw a mum who went to work and came home and still found a way to connect.

And so the answer turned into “yes.”
Green lights.
More episodes.
A whole world.

NIGHT WATCHMAN (very gently):
And that’s how you arrived here, kiddo.
A little blue dog from a sun-bright house in Brisbane…
born because one dad decided that the silly, ordinary, everyday games
were actually worth celebrating.

(looks around the toy aisle)
So now here you are,
standing between the cereal boxes and the canned soup,
on a shelf in a grocery store play set.

But I kind of like knowing…
that behind this tiny plastic you—
there’s a real family on the other side of the planet,
still playing games on their living-room floor.

(soft laugh)
And somewhere out there,
a very tired dad is probably stepping on a toy in his bare feet
and thinking up the next episode.

[He reaches out and gently straightens the Bluey figure on the shelf.]

NIGHT WATCHMAN (quietly):
Not bad for a little blue heeler who started as a dad’s daydream, huh?

BLUEY:
They can be everyone.
They can be me or Bingo,
pushing the trolley,
arguing over which cereal to buy.
They can be Mum or Dad,
saying “No, we already have that at home,”
or sneaking a chocolate into the cart
when no one’s looking.
See this checkout?

NARRATOR:
The tiny plastic scanner glints under the museum lights.

BLUEY:
Kids can beep the food through—
“BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!”—
pretend to pay,
bag everything up.

They can put stickers on things,
line up the groceries just so,
make up their own rules.
You don’t need batteries
to imagine a line of customers
getting bored and wandering off.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
So it’s…
rehearsal.

BLUEY:
Exactly!

Practice for real life,
but with less chance of anyone
having a meltdown in the frozen section.

NARRATOR:
He watches Bluey push the trolley a centimetre forward,
tiny wheels clicking on the painted floor.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
I suppose there’s more going on here
than just tiny plastic fruit.

BLUEY:
Sure there is.

Kids learn:
How to choose things.
“How many apples?
Which cereal?
Do we have enough pretend money
for both the biscuits and the ice cream?”

How to wait their turn.
“How about Bingo goes first this time?
You can be the cashier next round.”
How to deal with “no.”
“That’s not on the list.”
“We’re just buying what we need today.”
“We can get that next time.”

Those little frustrations,
those little negotiations—
they’re all practice
for bigger ones later.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
So when a kid stands here with you
and insists,
“I need the marshmallow cookies,”
they’re really…
doing philosophy?

BLUEY (giggles):
Kid philosophy, yeah.
“What is a need?”
“Why can’t we have everything?”
“Why do grownups say ‘no’
when there’s clearly enough on the shelf?”
The toy lets them replay that
over and over,
maybe with a different ending each time.
In one game,
the answer is no.
In the next,    
everyone gets ice cream.     Yay sound

NARRATOR:
You may have heard about Bluey—
the way the show turns simple games
into stories about patience, empathy,
and the ridiculousness of grownups.
Looking at this play set,
Here is the same philosophy in plastic.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
I’ve seen clips of you lot
turning a backyard
into a whole magical kingdom,
or a waiting room into drama.
Does this little supermarket
do the same thing?

BLUEY:
Yep.
The whole point is:
You don’t need a fantasy castle
to have a huge story.
You need a place,
some rules,
and people who agree to play.
The supermarket is perfect
because grownups always say,
“Come on, we have to go.”
We say,
“If we have to,
we might as well turn it into a game.”

This toy says to the child:
“You can run the errand now.
You can be the one in charge.
You can decide what’s on the list.”
And you can decide when to leave.
It takes a grownup space
and shrinks it down
so kids can control it.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
When I think of my own childhood,
we didn’t have a “Supermarket Play Set.”

We had…
the actual supermarket,
where you weren’t allowed to touch anything
but maybe the cart.

Here, Going to the grocery store is like a active story.
Who sits in the trolley,
who gets to put the money in,
who helps carry the bags.
This play set lets your listeners’ grandkids
invite them into that story
on the living room floor.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
So if I sit down and play with this,
I’m not just “humoring a kid.”

BLUEY:
You’re helping them try on
what it’s like
to be you.

NARRATOR:
He imagines it:

A child standing behind the tiny checkout,
Dad or Grandma crouched on the carpet,
pushing the trolley up.
“Do you have your loyalty card?”
“Do you need a bag?”
“That will be fifteen imaginary dollars.”

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
When you put it like that,
this is…
big stuff.

BLUEY:
It is.
Kids love chances to be “in charge”
in a world where they’re usually smaller,
quieter,
strapped into car seats.
Behind this counter,
they decide:

Who goes first.
What things cost.
Who gets the treat.

They can make the prices ridiculous—
“This banana is a hundred dollars!”—
or very serious—
“We can’t afford that today.”
It’s not just play.
It’s trying on power and responsibility
in a safe, silly way.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
I notice something.
Teddy was all about the bedroom.
Hot Wheels was about the road.
You’re about…

BLUEY:
The place where dinner begins.
Supermarkets are where
a lot of family life starts.

Someone pushes a trolley.
Someone argues about snacks.
Someone sneaks something in the cart
and hopes no one will notice.
Kids overhear grownup talk
about money,
about time,
about “we can’t get that now
but we’ll see.”

This toy turns all that into a sound:

Beep.
Beep.
Beep.

Little plastic sounds
that say,
“We’re stocked up,
we’re together,
we’re going home.”

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
I intend to ask all the toys
what they “hold.”

Teddy said he holds our fears.
The dragon truck holds our urge to go too fast.
What do you hold?

BLUEY (thoughtful):
I hold the ordinary.
The moments most likely to be forgotten
if you don’t play them.
The Tuesday afternoons
when someone picks you up from school
and says, “We’ve got to stop at the shops.”

The little arguments,
the silly games in the pasta aisle,
the way your grownup sneaks a treat
into the trolley for you
when they think you’re not looking.

My supermarket holds
the idea
that those tiny, everyday times
are worth turning into stories.

If a kid grows up
and remembers anything about this toy,
I hope it’s the feeling of
“we did this together.”

Even if it was just
pretend groceries
on a carpet.

NARRATOR:
The Night Watchman looks around the tiny aisles:
The toy bananas and milk
stacked neatly,
the checkout ready for its next customer,
Bluey’s paws on the trolley
as if she’s about to race down the lane.

NIGHT WATCHMAN:
For a toy that fits in one box,
you carry a lot of…
life.

BLUEY (brightly):
That’s what we do.

We take the stuff grownups call “chores”
and turn it into games
so good
they make cartoons about them later.

NARRATOR:
He smiles,
just a little.

The supermarket lights dim.
The tiny scanner falls silent.
Bluey freezes back into her molded pose,
still ready for adventure.

The Night Watchman turns away,
heading down another aisle.

Ahead, he can see
a very different kind of shelf—
blocks and bricks,
pandas and bamboo
waiting to be built and rebuilt.

Here is a place where you can go with your parents for groceries and learn about choices and impulse buys at the market stalls -  important information to know! 

For now,
on a quiet platform that looks like Aisle 3,
a little blue heeler
and her miniature groceries
wait for morning
and the next child
who’s ready to turn “we have to go shopping”
into a game worth remembering.

[SFX: Footsteps fade. Soft “beep” from the toy scanner, then your outro music.]

Night watchmen
All right, that’s tonight’s story.
I’ll make my rounds
and see who’s ready to talk tomorrow.
In this place,
there’s always one more toy
with something to say..
Narrator
Tomorrow the night watchmen will encounter the famous Barbie. Thank you for listening to celebrate creativity.

Aquarium from Carnival of the Animals by composed by Camille Sans-Saen, Performed by the Seattle Youth Orchestra. Source: https://musopen.org/music/1454-the-carnival-of-the-animals/. License: Public Domain (composition) / Creative Commons (recording).