The secret of ‘Baby Shark’, a children’s anthem of recent years

Anyone who has lived with an infant in the last three years will have a happy, catchy tune etched into their memory player just by reading these two words: Baby Shark.

Extra points if you sang automatically ‘dududuruduru’ or joined hands to imitate the movement of the little shark, champion of childhood and of the competitive view race of YouTube.

You are probably part of the crowd that contributed to this video reaching the 10 billion views, thus becoming the most popular of the giant audiovisual platform, above bombshells like Slowly (Luis Fonsi), which at the moment is going for 7,000 million. It is that children are a demanding public, and when they like something, they do not let it go easily.

In this case, they fell in love with the video in which two Asian children do the Baby Shark Dance (baby shark dance) as an animated shark and his family try to hunt down the little humans. However, after the scare, the children escape and celebrate.

The creators, who uploaded the song in 2016 to their children’s content channel Pinkfong, celebrated on their social networks, with many declaring themselves fans, others expressing frustration that YouTube has disabled the ‘I don’t like’ button, and some more declaring their disbelief at the number of views. But it is enough to have a little one at home to know that it is not a miracle.

Although the children lose interest in the baby shark when they cross the border of 5 or 6 years and enter the school, the little shark has nothing to fear, because new lines of preschoolers are ready to line up behind him.

If you think about it, we did it too, rewatching episodes of The Chavo of 8 Y The Flintstones.

The nursery rhyme that could save a native language

Is Baby Shark yet another on the list of brightly colored dancing creatures or does he have something of educational value between his sharp teeth? The pedagogue Marta de Ycaza says yes. Good rhythm, colorful drawings and funny one funny story in which the members of the family are listed (Baby Shark has a dad, a mom, a grandfather, a grandmother…), and a repetitive structure that invites children to invent their own verses to include their relatives.

The graduate in Educational Sciences Rossmary Acuria rescues, first, the playful part. “They (preschoolers) have so much fun.” In his work he has incorporated puppets and pictures with the members of the shark family, while the children strive to do the choreography that corresponds to each one: the pretty mama shark, the strong daddy shark, the frail grandparents, the speedy baby, and meanwhile, They value the role of each one in the family.

the song has versions in 19 languages, including English, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, German, Arabic, Malay, Spanish, and, as of January 2020, in the Navaho language. This at the request of the directors of the Museum of the Navajo Nation (Arizona), who in their campaign to preserve their culture, also seek to reach children who are learning to speak, and what better than Baby Shark? Other projects of this type are the dubbing of Star Wars Episodio IV, Finding Nemo and the classic western For a bunch of dollars.

In Acuria’s class, meanwhile, children between the ages of 1 and 3 transition easily from English to Spanish, helped by the two versions of Baby Shark, they learn to set the rhythm and anticipate the choreography. “It transports them to fun. It is a sum of facial and body expression, color, rhythm and emotions.” Well, it also helps them to work on the different types of feelings: at one moment the children swim happily, the next they are all scared because the waters are disturbed.

Pinkfong’s ‘hit’ and the girls who made it famous

Baby Shark arrived at top from YouTube on November 2, 2020 (bye, Slowly). It was devised by the educational company Pinkfong and performed by Korean-American singer Hope Marie Segoine (16). It debuted on June 17, 2016 and was a viral hit in Asia, but only since 2019 has it conquered children in the United States and the world. Soon the TV channel Nickelodeon gave him his own animated series.

The company told CNN Bin Jeong, the young founder and CEO of Pinkfong in the United States, I hadn’t expected the clip to go off like that. “The (videos) that succeed, do it on their own merit.” Perhaps I am being modest, since she was the one who created and has overseen the operations of Pinkfong on YouTube, creating growth strategies based on analysis of performance metrics.

Pinkfong is a subsidiary of SmartStudy, a studio dedicated to developing creative and animated content to provide fun learning experiences for children. Their base of operations is in Los Angeles, with Jeong, but they also have offices in Shanghai and Seoul. It started in 2019, and its iconic character isn’t the shark but a pink fox (named Pinkfong) who loves to sing and dance, whether it’s about numbers, the alphabet, or animals.

Do you want content in Spanish? No problem, Pinkfong brings it to you. Is your child hooked on the song I am a cup The to my donkey? They are also there. Do you need help so that they do not fight when brushing their teeth? The channel has it. “We are a production company focused on songs and animated stories, but also on mobile applications; we create quality content, educational but also entertaining,” Jeong said in a 2017 interview with the virtual channel BeFast.TV. His biggest traffic on YouTube comes from the United States and South Korea. “You have to know your user and know what they really like (study the data, study the public), instead of assuming what they want. We experimented a lot in the beginning, and eventually we found out that our users like short songs and we stuck with that.”

Far from going out of style, the original video is still available and racking up views, with its upbeat melody and choreography as clean as the comments section, closed for being a children’s channel, in an attempt to protect that unexpected pocket of innocence. (I)