A deep dive into the dark madness at the heart of Disney+'s Firebuds
And now, Emily and Libby discuss their new favorite show*, Disney+'s Firebuds.
*-Stockholm Syndrome may have come into play here.
Emily: When I became a parent, I had all these ideas about how I would regulate my child's screentime. I knew that there was no way we would be able to keep them from all screentime, given what we do, but I thought we would find a way to only expose them to high-quality TV and film. To be honest, I think we've done a pretty solid job of this! Our kid's favorite show is Bluey, and their favorite movie is probably How to Train Your Dragon. Both excellent choices!
But the older they get, the less ability we have to, say, tell them that we don't get the channel for Cocomelon at our house (even though this is technically true, since we don't subscribe to Netflix). And if we happen to scroll past something that looks interesting to them, we'd better have a good reason they can't check it out. So, we come to Firebuds, the Disney+ show the child has become obsessed with.
Firebuds is set in a world that is basically His Dark Materials, but the daemons are all cars. Every character in the show is paired with a "vroom-mate," which means that if you are a human person, you have a vehicle that you hang out with all the time. Apparently, vehicles have human-like lifespans, so all of the child characters on the show are friends with... child vehicles? It's all just a little creepy and disconcerting because it does feel a little like this show could be called Cars: Before the Fall, but...
Libby, I think we need to get this out of the way right away. If the preceding paragraph didn't make it clear, the world-building on this show is profoundly strange! I always feel like I'm watching a spinoff of something I've never heard of and, thus, don't know all the lore and/or rules.
Libby: I already regret suggesting this crosstalk because I struggle to put into words how utterly flabbergasted I am by the mythology (or lack thereof) in this show.
Emily, you often talk about how desperate you are to get your hands on the mythical 100-page show bible for Cocomelon, an urge I never really understood until being introduced to Firebuds, a series so confusing I'm not sure how to explain how batshit it is.
You might think you've done a great job intro-ing how strange the show is, but you've completely failed. Let me try to give an example of the show's swirling chaos. One of main characters is a human named Violet. Violet's vroom-mate is a young ambulance named Axl. Violet and Axl's families live and work together. Violet has two human moms. Axl has two vehicle dads.
Pretty straightforward, right? First of all, no. Why are these families living together? Why are they bonded? How did they become bonded? Do vroom-mates have any say in the matter? Have Violet's moms and Axl's dads been vroom-mates forever? Are vroom-mates assigned at birth? I do not understand how anything in this universe works and I gotta be honest: It freaks me out.
I don't remember getting this worked up over Teletubbies. Why does Firebuds get under my skin so?
Emily: First of all, you got so worked up about Teletubbies that you used to tell me I was Noo-Noo and should have a little light on my butt, and second of all, you really need to see 28 Years Later already.
Emily St. James
Actually, the mention of Teletubbies is a good reminder to all of us that the deliberately half sketched-out worlds of kids TV shows often provide fertile ground for adolescent and adult imaginations to run wild. The most popular fan theories about Teletubbies are all fundamentally dystopian in nature, many suggesting that the Tubbies are the last remnants of humanity after some sort of apocalypse. The show itself provides no real evidence for these theories, but that's the point. The strange half-world the series takes place in all but invites active imaginations to fill in the blanks.
It's easy to forget now in the era of shows like Adventure Time or Bluey, shows with rich, persistent worlds that change and grow alongside their characters, but for the vast majority of kids TV history, the worlds of series were often paper thin. When I was a child, I loved a show called The Wuzzles, whose premise was that every single character was a hybrid of two different animals. How did these hybrids come to be? It didn't fucking matter. Stop asking questions.
In theory, Firebuds hearkens back to this era of kids TV. Why do all of the characters have vehicular companions? What is the social structure of this world? How are vroom-mates chosen? Stop asking questions!!! And if this were the case, it would simply be an example of a show that our kid will someday be, like, "Remember Firebuds?" to their college improv troupe. (God, I hope they don't get into improv.)
What's different, however, is that it's clear there's some sort of deeper world-building at play in Firebuds, but creator Craig Gerber and his team only sprinkle little bits of it over the top of various episodes. For instance, the closest thing the series has to a protagonist is young Bo, a rescue-happy boy whose vroom-mate is a firetruck named Flash. In one episode, Bo and Flash celebrate their shared birthday, and you might be, like, "Oh, that makes sense! Vroom-mates are born the same day and pair-bond for life!" But no. The show goes out of its way to have Bo and Flash sing a song about how unusual it is that they share a birthday. Why does it do this? Who can say! Evidently, there's something about this that we're supposed to glean as important, but it's never entirely clear.
All of this world-building intersects and overlaps with the series' deeply commendable commitment to diversity in strange ways. One of the characters has a little sister with spina bifida, which is not the sort of representation you're seeing anywhere else on TV, but her vroom-mate is a car-shaped wheelchair. For an episode centered on her, a famous dancer and her own wheelchair-ish vroom-mate turn up, and both are voiced by actors who use wheelchairs. Again, this commitment to casting people who can speak to the lived experience of these characters is commendable, but then you realize the show cast someone who uses a wheelchair as a wheelchair, and you're right back to wondering how exactly this cosmos is meant to work.
I mentioned Cars earlier, but the world-building headache of that franchise is a piece of cake compared to Firebuds! Libby, what are some other weird things that happen in this show? Ideally in a bullet-point list.
Libby: I'm so, so glad you asked.
- You mentioned Bo and Flash. Let's dive more into their family unit! Bo's parents are (humans) Bill and Beth Bayani. Flash's parents are (fire trucks) Faye and Floyd Fireson. Bill (voiced by Lou Diamond Phillips) and Faye (voiced by Yvette Nicole Brown) are vroom-mates and co-chiefs of the Gearbox Grove Fire Department. Beth (voiced by Melissa Rauch) is a therapist and Floyd (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson) is a carchitect. What is that? I don't know. What I do know is that Beth and Floyd are also vroom-mates for some godforsaken reason, most likely just to plague me. (Do you think that your vroom-mate has to fall in love with your spouse's vroom-mate? Is that how it works??)
- While making sure I had this family tree correct, I found that the Firebuds wiki has Bo listed as Faye's nephew and, I'm not gonna lie, it spun me out for like 20 minutes. Still not sure how to move forward so I'm just going to ignore it.
- The Season 2 premiere of the show introduces a character so overpowered (a helicopter) it has to be immediately sidelined lest it put all of the show's main characters out of commission. That said, the helicopter does make friends with a dirigible, a relationship I hope to see fully fleshed out into world domination in future seasons.
- Lisa Loeb also appears on the show as Laura, a traveling folk singer whose partner (vroom-mate?) Latch (voiced by Weird Al) has engine trouble and negative thought patterns and all of this is to say that the arc of their first episode ends with Laura telling Latch that they should perform the song she just wrote, "Stay." Why? Why, Firebuds? Who is this deep-cut Lisa Loeb joke for? Other than me, I mean?
- The dirigible is also in something called "Flight Club," and ha ha, I see what you did there.
So, clearly, I get flummoxed. But that's not to say the show doesn't have its charms. It's painstakingly decentralized from the white, male POV, despite being created by a white dude. There's even a non-binary character! They're vroom-mates with the aforementioned overpowered helicopter! I'm far from an expert, but Emily, wouldn't you say that the entire show SMACKS OF GENDER?
Emily: Yes! But also, frequently in ways where I'm, like, "Hmmmm..."
Occasionally, the show takes a stab at doing a story where one of the young cars wants to be a rescue vehicle, but they were born a car. Surely, they can't suddenly become an ambulance! And within the highly rigid caste system of the Firebuds' vehicular social strata, this is... sort of true? It always turns out that these little cars can help out with rescues and the like, which is meant to teach us that it's not what's on the outside that counts but, rather, on the inside. And yet! If you want to be an ambulance in the Firebuds universe, you must be born an ambulance. It's a kinda creepy detail that reeks of biological determinism and/or the desire to sell toys.
Now, I doubt that anybody in the process of making these episodes was, like, "Gosh, if we say that you cannot change your vehicle chassis, that might have some unfortunate metaphorical implications for trans folks, so let's lean the fuck in. Yeah!!" It's immensely clear from this show and everything else Gerber has made that he's woke as hell. The fact that the show's non-binary character is paired with a helicopter who transcends gravity suggests that trans people are the most powerful force on Earth, which is nice. And who knows? There's a third season of the show coming, which just might reveal that it's been a secret trans allegory all along. Still!
I can't say I'm "disappointed" in this lack of imagination because I just learned this show exists, and also, it feels silly to be, like, "The cars should be able to take hormones and become firetrucks," and also, that's maybe far too binary an exploration of the trans experience on a show aimed at children. But also?! Cars should be able to become firetrucks?! Fuck it up, Firebuds, you know?
All joking aside, I kind of love that Firebuds is incredibly, incredibly woke, even if it's clumsily so. It debuted in 2023, and it feels like one of the last vestiges of an era when kids TV was doing its level best to diversify every single show it put on the air. I wrote this article about the end of The Owl House roughly around when Firebuds debuted, and you could definitely feel the drumbeats of the anti-woke brigade on the horizon.
Yet Firebuds is just casually, like, "Yes, Bo is Filipino-American and Jewish," and it doesn't make a big deal out of things. The show thoughtfully represents people of color, queer people, disabled people, and a whole bunch of other intersections of identity in ways that rarely feel forced, at least if you don't spend all of your time trying to plumb the depths of its world-building. Yes, one of its characters is a police car, yet I spent several episodes being, like, "Is this meant to be a private security company and not the actual police?" before realizing otherwise, so Gerber et al., are trying to at least mute the copaganda inherent to, like, Paw Patrol.
We are in an era when Disney is so scared of its own shadow that it edited a trans character out of the Pixar show Win or Lose and also just sat there while Pixar de-queered Elio. Hell, the company subtly changed the closed captions on the Bluey episode "The Sign" so that one character talking about his "moms" became his "mom's." It made no fucking sense with how English works, but keep trying, Disney!
And then there's Firebuds, which if nothing else is doing the mid-2010s try-hard woke thing, like we're still living in a timeline where corporations go all out for Pride. I hate that it makes me nostalgic? And also I hate that it's wrapping up with season three, so Gerber can return to the more profitable Sofia the First/Elena of Avalor universe. Though those shows are woke too, so who knows!
Anyway, this feels like a good place to wrap up... except let's talk about why our kid loves this show so much, now that we've chased everybody away.
Libby: We watch so much Bluey in our house. So, so much. And it's really the perfect kids show except... its representation blows. Like, yes, they're dogs. I get it. The waters get muddy. But the Disney caption curtailing that Emily mentioned wouldn't be half as egregious if it wasn't the one time in the show's history that queer identities were acknowledged.
When I was younger, I didn't give much (see: any) thought to how a child I raised might perceive the world and their own place in it. Call it cisheteronormative folly. But by the time our child began truly consuming stories, I was in a panic. Families have mommies and daddies, and if you don't, well, here are some special stories for you.
Don't get me wrong! I love the special stories. They're beautiful and true and I cherish them and they are in constant rotation, but when my child sits between us and watches Violet on Firebuds hug her mom and her mami, then looks up at us knowingly and says, "two moms," well, fuck. I guess representation matters. A lot.
You got me, Firebuds. You're weird as shit, but, you got me.
Emily: sob emoji and I have no choice but to
A Good Song
(I get this song stuck in my head all the time, so now you have to get it stuck in your head.)
The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. Paid subscribers also have access to the weekly Monday Rundown. This newsletter is written by Emily St. James and Libby Hill. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).
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