“Chip Chilla,” the Bentkey show, copies the “Bluey” color scheme, animation style and premise — animal siblings with weirdly present parents — with a few key differences. One, the show is about chinchillas, not dogs. Two, the show is so lazy and pedantic, it feels like Wikipedia should get a co-writing credit. Three, the chinchilla children are home-schooled, and the father, Chum Chum, is their instructor. He crafts zany play-based history lessons using silly voices and creative household items. He is a highly involved father and unrelenting jokester who rarely seems to have to work. Basically the same guy.
“Why does it matter?” Jeremy Boreing, the co-founder of The Daily Wire, asked rhetorically when he teased “Chip Chilla” to a crowd of supporters last year. “It matters because kids go to school 40 hours a week and then they engage in pop culture for 40 more hours every week. That means for 80 hours of a child’s week, you are turning them over to the left.”
With “Chip Chilla,” conservative parents can fulfill a fantasy of their own, combating the perceived indoctrination of public school by screening home-school-themed content afterward, featuring lessons about dead white people and classic texts. In “Bluey,” the puppies lead the games, but in “Chip Chilla,” it is the dad who is in charge, directing his compliant kids to role-play “Moby-Dick” and the fall of the Roman Empire. I suspect that Bentkey made Chum Chum the schoolteacher not because it’s a modern choice, but because it puts male authority at the center of the show.
It’s a weird time for father figures. On Instagram and TikTok, I’m constantly being served memes and posts that mock dads for not knowing their kid’s birthday or for taking endless bathroom breaks to scroll through their phones. In one persistently circulating joke, the dad stands uselessly in the kitchen, right in front of the drawer that the mom needs to access. I don’t actually know any fathers like that; in real life, the fathers I know are much like the mothers I know, and we’re all competing for private toilet time.
This online character feels like a throwback to the lazy sitcom dad glued to the living room couch watching television, though on social media he inspires an intensified level of resentment. Dads who don’t pull their weight are shamed for it now. But dads who contribute still get praised.
The moms in “Bluey” and “Chip Chilla,” Chilli and Chinny, don’t get the classic Disney-movie treatment: They are allowed to live. They get to join in the fun, too, though Chilli is more levelheaded than her husband and Chinny is stern. Both mothers are granted supporting roles in their children’s imaginative worlds, though they are somewhat sidelined by their plots, often because of their work outside and within the home. In “Chip Chilla,” Chinny is the one stuck holding the laundry basket.
The “Bluey” family feels progressive, “Chip Chilla” traditional, but their vision of paternal whimsy is shared. It is harder to construct a fantasy mom that way. The perfect mother must be a lot of things, and few of them are very fun. The base line expectation of selfless devotion leaves little room for experimentation. This is why so many children’s stories must get her out of the way in order for the child to experience risk, adventure, failure and growth. Dad can hang around through all of that, though. And if he does, he can be a star.