"PINK FLUFFY UNICORNS DANCING ON RAINBOWS"
Original Post Date: November 10, 2010
Runtime: 1:33
Genre: Children's
Compilation Album: Corduroys, with Tassles
Prompt Summary: literally, just the title of the song, with a little extra punctuation
Wait just a dang second! This song is from Songs to Wear Pants To‽ What‽
Yes! It's true! Viral sensation "Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows," that song that your seven-year-old child has blasted on a loop for hours on end* is an Andrew Huang original, through and through, and it's the reason that his YouTube subscriber count multiplied by some power of ten (from an already hefty 3,000) in a matter of weeks. Heck, you probably knew about this song and about Andrew's YouTube channel before you'd ever heard of Songs to Wear Pants To. But the truth is, without Songs to Wear Pants To, this song probably would never have happened.
So how did it happen? According to Andrew's retrospective making-of video, this STWPT prompt wasn't so much as an intentional song request emailed to him, as it was some random comment someone left on one of his YouTube videos—okay, foreshadowing. Shortly after posting the video a day after posting the song on STWPT.com, the song apparently made it to the front page of Reddit(!), where the fandom of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic—a fandom known for its pony-themed music videos—ate. it. up. Soon, cartoon pony music videos and amateur covers eclipsed Andrew's original in popularity, to the point where Andrew was being accused of ripping off himself, a magic trick so impressive that, were it true, it could have earned Andrew an honorary doctorate from the Interwebs School of Witchcraft and Intellectual Property Magicks.
"But Eden, I don't have kids or spend time on the internet, and now I feel old for not knowing that this song existed." Fair enough, although the real reason you feel old is that Soul Train is over half a century old and Friends is 28, and that's just as of the date I originally wrote this.
"Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows," referred to by Andrew—and, starting right now, yours truly—as "PFUDOR," is an upbeat, kid-friendly song that's exactly as cute as the title would suggest. A bright ukelele serves as the rhythm section for a bright xylophone and a bright flute. It's a very bright-sounding song, as you can imagine. Perhaps blindingly so.
Lyrically (and technically musically, too), "FPUDOR" follows an ABA structure. The "A" section consists of the song's title, sung repeatedly to the melody. The "B" section is my personal favorite part: a pop-quiz break about "what we've learned so far." The questions concern facts one can glean from the title, while the Andrew-voiced chorus answers them with absolute glee. The funniest part is the last question and answer, which I won't spoil but will just say that the comedic timing is legendary and should have been the only reason this song went viral.
While I shake my head that this is the STWPT that went truly viral—it's totally a good entry and fits snugly with the rest of the STWPT oeuvre, but…"Shoot the Zombies"? "Celtic Techno Burrito"? "Don't Feel Bad"? All meme-worthy songs—at least Andrew has finally found the internet fame he has deserved all along. It just boggles my mind that it didn't happen until the final year or so of the STWPT project.
*Hey. Hey. It's not "Baby Shark." So remember: it could always be worse.
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