
“We basically gave him the lyrics and told him to set it to the catchiest nonadvertising type music he could,” said Mescall. It’s my favorite,” he said.Īustralian musician Ollie McGill from the band The Cat Empire wrote the music. “It then took a few weeks of finessing,” he said, “getting rid of a few lines that weren’t funny enough and replacing them with new ones.” The line “Sell both your kidneys on the Internet” was a late inclusion. The Song: The song begins, “Set fire to your hair/Poke a stick at a grizzly bear/Eat medicine that’s out of date/Use your private parts as piranha bait,” before the chorus repeats the two lines, “Dumb ways to die/So many dumb ways to die.” Mescall wrote most of the lyrics in one night at the agency. “So we thought about what the complete opposite of a serious safety message would be and came to the conclusion it was an insanely happy and cute song.” With more than 30 million YouTube views, it seems happy, cute and grisly was the way to go. “ The idea for a song started from a very simple premise: What if we disguised a worthy safety message inside something that didn’t feel at all like a safety message?” said McCann executive creative director John Mescall. The dumbest way to die, the ad suggests at the end, is by being careless around trains. The three-minute music video shows adorable blobs making the stupidest decisions ever-messing with animals, sticking forks in toasters, eating superglue, etc.-leading to all sorts of gruesome, fatal accidents. McCann Australia managed just such an evolution of the genre with “Dumb Ways to Die” its animated train-safety spot for the Melbourne Metro. The Idea: Safety PSAs are gloomy and tedious and largely ignored by young people hardwired to resist them-except when they’re irresistibly fun and impossible not to share with friends.

The video and iTunes single are accessible online at, with animated gifs being released on Tumblr, on radio, in posters on small and large space outdoor and throughout the Metro Trains network, with the lyrics to the song on the art work. The campaign is centred around a three-minute animated music video, highlighting the many dumb ways there are to die, with being hit by a train – a very preventable death – among them. “Dumb Ways to Die”, is an integrated advertising campaign designed to curb the number of train-related deaths in Victoria. The original Dumb Ways to Die video has reached now more than 214 million views.McCann Australia for Metro Trains Melbourne – Is “Dumb Ways To Die” the new “Chipotle”? Posted: Decem| Author: fra30774 | Filed under: Animation, Australia, Case History, Copywriting, Design, Digital, Graphic, Graphic Design, Illustration, Press/Outdoor, Social, Viral | Tags: Animation, be safe around trains, Case History, Chipotle, Digital, Dumb Ways to Die, Edward Gorey, funny, Is "Dumb Ways To Die" the new "Chipotle"?, John Mescall, Julian Frost, McCann Australia, Melbourne Metro, metro trains, Ollie McGill, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Viral | Leave a comment.
Dumb ways to die song lyrics full#
The YouTube channel now has more than 900,000 subscribers and is full of various (more and less popular) videos which keep referring to the topic of staying safe on the streets.November 2014 – releasing Dumb Ways to Die 2 as another mobile game app refreshed the interest of the users.The game has now more than 50 million downloads and more than 500,000 reviews on Google Play (mostly positive). The creators used their video's success to their advantage and came up with a mobile game of the same title.December 2013 – the phrase "dumb ways to die" scored its peak regarding YouTube search (according to Google Trends).By July 2013 it had sold about 100,000 copies to the users. The video's song itself quickly became one of the Top 10 on iTunes.

November 2012 – the video quickly went viral and in two weeks time it got 28 million views (and it kept increasing).15th November 2012 – the video with the same title as the channel name gets published on YouTube as the first material published on this channel.31st October 2012 – the YouTube channel Dumb Ways to Die is created by a small group of Melbournians, who constituted a part of a bigger train network operation team, Metro Trains Melbourne.
