Rubble and Crew (Paw Patrol)

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  Sweet Deals

  April 26, 2025 at 7:10 pm

  Rubble and Crew is a spin-off of the popular and long-running Paw Patrol series. Rubble the construction dog now has a whole family of construction dogs; his Grandpa Gravel, his Aunt Crane, and his four cousins Charger, Mix, Wheeler, and Motor. They all work together to build all sorts of amazing new structures in the town of Builder Cove, which is just across the way from Adventure Bay.

  For a Paw Patrol series, it’s par for the course. You’ve got talking dogs who speak in rhyming catchphrases and sing songs while they work, drive big rigs and use robotic tools to construct impossibly cool buildings and structures in a matter of minutes which in the real world might take weeks or months, in a town where all of the humans act like over-excited little kids, including the adults. Paw Patrol is incredibly popular, but Rubble and Crew is so saccharine that binge-watching it is like reaching into a box of Lucky Charms and getting nothing but artificially colored marshmallows that dissolve in milk. It’s so sweet that it’s giving me the mental equivalent of a sugar shock. Yup-a-roozie!

  Let’s cut to the chase [“is on the case!”]. Rubble and Crew introduces a new human character named River. Basically, what happened is that the showrunners got a non-binary fan to write a self-insert story with a non-binary skateboarder kid in it to check an inclusivity box. I’m very zero-tolerance about introducing queer things to children, and I’ve already disowned Nickelodeon more than once for making lame shows and hosting queer displays. However, in the handful of episodes when River appears, the character’s gender identity and pronouns are never mentioned on-screen. If behind-the-scenes interviews didn’t specify that River was supposed to be non-binary, no one watching would have ever guessed. I suspect that when it comes to queerness, groomers try to sneak it to children while their parents aren’t looking. Paw Patrol is a series which parents (lots of parents) traditionally watch with their children, so they probably didn’t want to risk trying to sneak it past them; not like Nickelodeon did airing a big-kid show like Transformers: Earthspark. Nickelodeon’s viewership has already cratered hard after too many parents had caught them in the act of queer grooming in earlier shows, and those same parents have actively prevented their kids from watching it afterward, so they may have gotten scared and pulled their punches this time around.

  Moving on from there, the first family that moves into Builder Cove is a mixed-race family. The father, Omar, is black and works as a mail carrier. The mother, Juniper, is East Asian and works as a crossing guard. Their kids, Lucas and Lily, actually do resemble their parents. They’re a very adorable young family.

  A woman named Camilla works as a delivery person. She’s responsible for bringing the all the materials that the builder crew needs. She drives trucks, works as a train engineer and is also a pilot who flies a plane, depending on the episode.

  There’s also another woman regularly seen around town who wears a pink hijab. In the second season, she gains a name, Karima, and a job as both a fitness instructor and a sports announcer.

  In one episode, the builder crew’s construction yard is briefly inspected by a woman named Inez. This is the only time she appears.

  The local park ranger, Rose, is a woman who uses a rugged all-terrain wheelchair when she goes out on nature hikes. Rose can climb trees and enter tree houses using only a rope as a pulley to pull herself up.

  One of the dogs on the builder team, Charger, has a “tuna fish sandwich!” Just kidding, he has a prosthetic hind leg. His leg works in the same manner that all the dogs have robotic arms built into their vests that they can operate like extensions of their bodies. This doesn’t stop Charger from working, running or dancing, especially because Charger is highly energetic and is always getting the zoom-zoom-zoomies.

  And finally, Santa Claus, while very jolly, is also surprisingly dark-skinned for someone who lives at the North Pole.

  All the little things mentioned above are “inclusive” box-checking, but they’re relatively harmless. The need to put women in male-dominated jobs and make grown men flounce around comically like preteen girls is like adding a heaping handful of brightly-colored sprinkles on top of a cartoon that’s already a sugar bomb, when you factor in the tendency toward instant gratification and the near-constant glee. That being said, I did smile and laugh quite a lot while watching the fun-loving talking dogs operate their big rigs. Now, I’m going to wiggle and wag to get some of the sugar shakes out.

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