Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is the ugliest show

March 2026

Before I numerically prove to you that this show is ugly, let’s talk about how to turn colors into numbers. For this discussion, I’m going to represent colors in HSL format, where the letters stand for hue, saturation, and lightness.

• Hue is a number that represents the shade of the color, for example, orange is 28, blue is 202, and purple is 280.
• Saturation is a number that represents how vivid the color is; for example, changing the saturation of blue from 0% to 100% will take it all the way from grey to bright blue
• Lightness is a number that represents how light or dark the color is; for example, changing the lightness of blue from 0% to 100% will take it all the way from black to white

If you want more examples, you can play around with the HSL format here.

So given that, let’s take Bluey, a show made by people with souls, for people with souls. This is a screenshot of Bluey characters at home. (For consistency, all screenshots in this post will be of characters at “home”.)

I had my computer sample 8,000 random pixels from that image and get their colors in HSL format. Below is a plot of the Saturation and Lightness values.

See that U-shape? Bluey has almost no colors in the zone of medium-lightness and high-saturation.

You know why? Because that is the zone of ugliness. This is what medium-lightness and high-saturation colors look like: . Ugly! For comparison, this is what that same color palette would look like with different lightness and saturation values:

Unlike Bluey, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is a show made by Satan to punish humanity.

This is what the same Saturation and Lightness graph looks like for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse:

There’s a party happening in that zone of ugliness! And it’s not just the sheer number of pixels in that zone that’s bad, but also the number of colors those pixels represent. For a contrast, take PJ Masks, another show with a lot of pixels in the zone of ugliness, but which looks much better because all the ugly pixels are at least in the same color.

The fact that the zone of ugliness only has similar colors genuinely makes this show much easier to look at.

Paw Patrol and Spidey and his Amazing Friends don’t strike me as particularly artistic shows, but they also do a good job of mostly staying out of the zone of ugliness. (Many of Spidey's dots in the zone belong to Spidey's costume, and it makes sense that it is bright.)

And, surprisingly to me, Gabby’s Dollhouse, despite being both very colorful and very cashgrabby, achieves almost Bluey-levels of color discipline in staying out of the zone of ugliness.

None of these other shows are high art, but none of them are quite as ugly as Mickey Mouse Clubhouse either. I’m not sure why Disney botched its flagship intellectual property like this. Making their show easier on the eyes would not mean they have to come up with better plots or sell less merchandise or really, change anything except turn the colors down a bit. Like this —

See? Instantly, the show is bearable.