The other day, Dan’s two-and-a-half-year-old discovered this video on YouTube. Click the link and skip ahead to the 1:47 point and watch the Lion song. It’s less than a minute.
Do it now then come back to this post. We’ll wait.
…
…
Welcome back. Cool video, huh? Dan’s kid is going bananas for it right now. Did you notice that the song doesn’t rhyme? If so, did it bother you?
Interesting point if you did, in fact, notice it and it did, in fact, bother you: it’s supposed to.
Our brains are hardwired to be pleased by predictable patterns and shy away from unpredictable chaos. It’s the basis for your body’s natural circadian rhythm that gets happy when the sun rises in the morning. It’s how you learned to identify bad food by taste or smell. And it’s why we included this sentence — because even in reading, there’s a predictable pattern called the Rule of Three, where examples, or support points, are written in groups of three.
But that’s not why it bothered us.
It bothered us because they spent all that energy writing the tune and all that money into what seems to be a robust digital marketing plan and some pretty amazing animation. But they didn’t make it rhyme. And it’s all we can notice, like an out-of-tune piano.
Fortunately, this is an easy especially since the animated characters aren’t animated enough to mouth anything specifcially. In other words, we can change what’s being said without affecting what it looks like.
Like this:
The Lion is King of the Savanna,
Look at his teeth and jaw.
When the animals see his face,
They know he’s the law.
The Lion is King of the Savanna
Look at his tail and mane
When he roams in the Savannah
He further cements his reign.
Pink Fong: Feel free to use these lyrics. They’re our gift to you for giving our kids something to watch on the toilet. Seriously, we’re using your videos as currency for pooing. Please don’t judge.