On This Day - Steve QUITS BLues Clues

"Steve is going to college!
Steve is going to college!"

On this day 20 YEARS AGO, one of the saddest moments of children's television history. After 6 years and nearly 100 episodes of Blue's Clues in the can, Steven Burns quit the show and the torch was passed to Donovan Patton as Joe who would later go on to voice Bot on Nick Jr's math series Team Umizoomi.

Although Burns' departure was sad, the press releases went really crazy that day. As it was announced that Burns would be quitting the show in April 2002, a whole slew of terrifying internet rumors were flying here and there. Many of these had the terrible rumor hoax thinking that Steve died after his time on the show came to an end, which was NOT true. According to the 2006 documentary short film Behind the Clues: 10 Years with Blue, Burns unleashed the whole truth of he actually leaving the show due to his rapid hair loss and that he wanted to look good when doing a kids television show.

In 2007, Burns returned to the kiddie market when he and The Flaming Lips guitarist Steven Drozd released "I Hog the Ground" for Noggin's Jack's Big Music Show. 10 years later, Burns released his first children's album with Drozd, entitled ForEverywhere which included the hit single "Tue Unicorn and Princess Rainbow"

Since 2019, Burns and Patton have both returned to the new variation of the franchise Blue's Clues & You! with the show now hosted by Asian-Fillipino Joshua Dela Cruz and his grandma Carolyn Fe which recently got renewed for a season 5 of 26 episodes with a feature-length Big City Adventure movie ripoff of Disney-Mattel's SpiderMan scheduled to release on Paramount+ in November and a live stage Broadway musical kicking off its national North American tour this fall with tickets going on sale in July.

Watch more of all three Blue's Clues series every day on Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., Noggin, Paramount+, Pluto TV and Paramount+ live channel Preschool Corner.

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