The Five Spot: The Black Market For Bluey Coins Is Thriving

Also in this week’s edition: The House of the Dragon cliffhanger business; a good Broadway play; and a very funny Olympics TikTok

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go…

FIVE: Bluey Heist

There’s no easy way to say this so let’s just get it out there: Someone stole thousands of dollars of Bluey coins. Like, actual coins, worth actual Australian money that were printed up at the mint and everything. Here’s the press release from the announcement back in June, along with pictures of the one-dollar coins and how they were to be obtained through the proper channels. You will notice, I suspect, that none of those proper channels included “buying them at a 1000 percent markup from some guy who stole over half of the entire collection off of a truck at a warehouse they were in.” And yet, this is apparently how most people went ahead and obtained them.

The Guardian has a good little explainer on the coins and the alleged theft, as well as some background information about the whole process, which was helpful for me, a person who does not watch Bluey but enjoys silly crime news and could not figure out why every headline about this story contained the phrase “Oh, mah coins!” If you, like me, are wondering how and why that happened, this will help.

The colourful “dollarbucks” feature Bluey herself on one coin, with the Heeler family and the Grannies on two others. The Grannies version contains a reference to a popular episode in which “Oh, mah coins!” is said when one drops some money.

But while the release was intended to be a celebration of the incredibly popular TV show, they have also been the subject of an alleged heist.

And then there’s the description of the theft itself, which, as I mentioned in the intro of this section, really did just involve one dude in a warehouse allegedly figuring out what truck the coins were on and then walking off with over 60,000 of the 100,000 that were minted. This is, on the one hand, kind of funny, if only for the mental image of some guy slowly grabbing box after box of coins emblazoned with a cartoon dog and loading them all into a second truck to drive away. But, on the other hand, it is also really funny to pretend this was part of a complicated plan that involved a team of specialists and disguises and lasers and retina scans and maybe a helicopter and/or submarine. I cannot, in good faith, take that away from you if you choose to disregard reality and pretend that is what happened here.

Police will allege in court the 47-year-old was an employee at a warehouse where he located and stole the Australian Mint packages from the back of a truck on 23 June.

Police will also allege the man sold the coins online only hours after he allegedly stole them, with the coins currently being sold for 10 times their original value.

Okay, three quick notes before we move on:

— I know this is serious and this theft deprived a great number of fans of the opportunity to acquire a fun little collectible of their favorite cartoon, but “black market Bluey bucks” is going to make me giggle a little for a while.

— The authorities are not going after the buyers of the coins, most of whom purchased them through reputable collectors who ended up with stolen coins after they were filtered through a few layers of legitimizing.

— I can’t stop thinking about some underground art auction where the seller demands to be paid in Bluey coins because they’re untraceable.

Again, please do feel free to let your mind wander a bit on this one. It’s a good time.

Officers attached to Fairfield city police area command had initially responded to a report that a large amount of currency had been stolen, before the State Crime Command Robbery and Serious Crime Squad launched an investigation into the incident under the name Strike Force Bandit.

So what we have here is yet another situation where two things can be true at one time. The first thing is that there is a character on Bluey named Bandit and the authorities naming the investigation into this theft “Strike Force Bandit” is just them having a little fun playing around with words, which I’m going to go ahead and allow just because, like, why not, you know?

But then this brings us to the second thing that is undeniably true: “Strike Force Bandit,” stripped of its context, might be the coolest name for anything I’ve ever heard — imagine telling your buddies that you can’t make it to the barbecue because you’ve been added to a special investigation as a member of “Strike Force Bandit” — and I’m retroactively furious that it wasn’t the title of some god-awful low-budget action movie that went straight to DVD in like 2002 and starred Stone Cold Steve Austin.

I gotta say, I really did not expect that I would be mentioning Bluey and Stone Cold Steve Austin in the same breath back when this week started. But, to borrow a cliche from the world of sports, that’s why you play the game.

FOUR: More like House of the Drag On