Halle Stanford has spent almost 30 years at the Jim Henson Company — executive producing Fraggle Rock, creating Sid the Science Kid — and has just launched Wowsabout, a new puppet preschool special on PBS Kids about a guitar-playing hedgehog and a tree-loving pig out to see the wows of the world. It's the first preschool show built around the emotion of awe, and it's already outperforming existing PBS Kids IP on YouTube within two weeks of release.

The conversation covers how Wowsabout got made — and it wasn't through a conventional commissioning deal. Halle built a coalition of mission-aligned partners, leaned into the science behind awe in a way that opened unexpected doors, and had to be, as the Jim Henson Company calls her, the queen of pivot at every turn. There's also a robust defence of puppetry as a medium — Halle has thoughts on the "puppets don't travel" orthodoxy, and they're worth hearing.

Emily cornered Sydney Bright at Kids Screen after she got mobbed following her panel — dropped a card in the middle of the crowd, said "come on the podcast," and here we are. Sydney is Head of Global Animation at WEBTOON, the world's leading digital comics platform with 145 million monthly active users, and her job is to identify titles from the platform ripe for adaptation and take them through to screen.

It's a genuinely different development model — one where audience investment is baked in before a single frame of animation is made. Sydney explains how WEBTOON tracks not just read counts but comment engagement, retention, and emotional intensity of fan response as signals for adaptation potential. The conversation gets into what it actually takes to translate a webcomic into animation, how to honour a fanbase that feels genuine ownership of a property, and why that kind of proven, community-built IP is increasingly what streamers want to see walk through the door.

There's a lot of ground covered — Wattpad's role within the same parent company, the upcoming Lore Olympus series with Amazon Prime, the titles on Sydney's radar for the 6 to 16 demographic, and what her animation students at Loyola Marymount are watching right now, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful window into where the industry is heading next.

A viral YouTube video calling Bluey's deal with the ABC "the shittest deal ever" has set Australian media alight — and sent Andy, Emily, and Jo straight to the recording button. The claim: zero dollars from Bluey's global success ever made it back to Australia. The reality, as the trio unpick it, is considerably more complicated.

This is a bonus episode that uses the viral moment as a jumping-off point for a much more interesting conversation: about what the ABC could realistically have done differently, why BBC Studios was able to turn Bluey into a global phenomenon when a public service broadcaster structurally couldn't, and what the whole debate exposes about the impossible tension at the heart of PSB commissioning everywhere.

• The "zero dollars back to Australia" claim doesn't hold up — Moose Toys' Bluey toy deal alone drove an estimated $800 million into the Australian economy, and is itself a strong example of the entrepreneurial Aussie spirit the video claims is absent.
• Hindsight makes Bluey look like an obvious bet — it wasn't — the deal was struck during a period of internal ABC disarray, at a moment when Disney+ was an enormous and unproven gamble. Nobody knew this would work.
• The ABC keeping the rights wouldn't automatically have produced the same outcome — BBC Studios had a specific YouTube-first, global distribution strategy and the infrastructure to execute it. The ABC still geoblocks Bluey and doesn't have a meaningful franchise team.
• Public service broadcasters are structurally constrained from thinking globally — their local taxpayer remit is both their purpose and their commercial ceiling, and that tension isn't going away.
• You can't engineer a Bluey by trying to make a Bluey — the shelf space for behemoth kids IP is finite, cycles slowly, and the creators who break through are focused on making something good, not replicating something that already exists.