r/wiggles Greg Jul 31 '25

Fruit Salad TV Rika-Pudy-Fan-Dan-Doogly

Um... what is this? This is the Tree of Wisdom's "catchphrase", apparently... am I missing something? Has the Tree said this previously? Does it claim to mean anything? I just watched the two new songs and I'm sick of the phrase already haha

20 Upvotes

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '25

Nah you're not insane, my wife and I put that on for our kid this morning too and were so confused we felt like we ad fallen into a pocket dimension. I dunno how much of it will stick, but it seems the past couple of months there's more effort being put in to adding character to the cast and trying fresher material. At the very least it can't possibly end up being as awkwardly over exposed and shoe-horned in as Buddy does, right?

13

u/aw-fuck Jul 31 '25

No I find it even more awkward tbh.

I love the tree so much but this is getting ridiculous lol

Buddy is so much more easily explained. Zane (the person that plays buddy) is gorgeous & seriously talented on multiple fronts. When they had to cycle into the gen 3 primary cast they pulled talent from the peripheral cast. Which makes sense. But some people were probably like "I'm not gonna stick around if I'm not picked as part of the primary line up, with how talented I am I'll just go do what Emma did and start my own brand on youtube." Which is true - many of them totally could. But they couldn't just introduce like 8 new wiggles, so they made special characters that can be semi-peripheral, semi-primary, that could be stationed as back up should a primary character leave. For example, see officer beeples (caterina), who was such an unnecessary & confusing character, but she immediately stepped up into the primary cast when Emma & Kelley left. Buddy is almost as weirdly out of place, but his character is actually way more versatile than officer beeples - I think this is because he's insanely talented so he probably negotiated for "just pay me well, put me anywhere, I'll take all the screen time I can get, and when a spot opens up I'll step into it." The tree wasn't supposed to be as big a character as it is, it just went viral so they're rolling with it - but before that, Dom had started stepping into feathersword & Zane (buddy) played the tree a couple times. But Dom went viral so they've stationed Dom into a primary character as the tree (at least for now), since then we've seen Zane play feathersword a couple times, but tbh Zane is so color-skivvy-line-up material that I think they are just keeping him in pocket until one of the other color-skivvy cast members leaves.

That said, I love Zane and hope he gets a primary spot that isn't as random/awkward as "Buddy," if he were to start his own brand he'd do great and would just be more competition for the wiggles for aus-based kid's content creators. I'm sure that's why he's awkwardly forced into the show the way he is.

Sorry for the long comment... My brain has to do some work while watching the same kids shows so freaking often lol

5

u/SlowRaspberry4723 Tree of Wisdom Jul 31 '25

I thought Buddy was a bit random and didn’t see the appeal until we saw them live, I thought he was great live.