It didn’t matter that every second of every song was pitched with the sort of relentless unblinking surface-level joy that appeared to overcompensate for some deep-set irreparable psychological trauma. It didn’t matter that many of the songs followed the same fractured dream logic of a David Lynch movie. It didn’t matter that the characters floated around weightlessly, as if they’d been shot in the rear with a tranquilliser dart. Between the ages of one and three, my children absolutely wolfed this stuff down. And YouTube is where I first came to know Cocomelon. The Cocomelon you see on Netflix is actually an edited highlights reel of its YouTube channel the second most viewed channel on Earth, with 82bn views and a $120m annual ad revenue. If you’re a preschool child, though, this stuff is like crack. Some songs – like Father and Sons Day, where the toddler does sit-ups with a sort of formaldehyde Rob Lowe figure – are genuinely unbearable to endure. It’s cloying and simplistic and repetitive and, unless you happen to be suffering from a very specific type of hangover, not designed to be watched by adults at all. Look, Cocomelon is not the sort of thing that holds up to scrutiny well. His family prepares him by endlessly drilling him on what he needs to take, what he needs to do and the precise level of emotion he should be experiencing. Over a melody pitched nebulously between Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and This Old Man He Played One, a CGI toddler (think Pixar by way of a debilitating radiation leak) expresses nerves about starting school. The first episode – Cocomelon Sing-Alongs: Playdate With JJ – begins with a song called First Day at School.
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In fact, Cocomelon is a just series of three hour-long nursery rhyme compilations. And if anything that’s putting it loosely.