We have a toddler son and, to the shock of nobody, he's thoroughly obsessed with trucks. Construction equipment, emergency vehicles, tractors, pickups, whatever. Nearly every article of clothing he wears features vehicles of some sort. They're most of his toys too. Seeing certain things in person causes more excitement than others but he clearly believes the purpose of every trip out of the house is to see trucks. XKCD has a perfect comic about where we are right now.
A part of this is now songs about trucks.
For us it started with our son hating getting his hair washed. My wife usually does bath time and will play music for our son while he's in there. As I remember it, one day to get through hair washing time he requested a 'crane truck song' and to my wife's surprise it actually existed. So for more than six months this one random YouTube video, and the song in it, have been a part of our lives. He would sing it to himself all the time, including while pushing his mower around inside the house and riding in the car. For quite a while he basically knew 'truck crane' part of the chorus and the tune, which he loudly hummed to himself. It was both incredibly adorable and totally obnoxious.
One day, when I was giving him a bath, YouTube inadvertently autoplayed after the crane tuck song and another started. This one was about a bucket truck. For the first time I looked a little more closely and realized there were a whole bunch of these things, and the group that makes them is literally called Twenty Trucks (a fact I temporarily kept to myself).
For them, the story is familiar. The creator had little kids who loved seeing trucks and he set out to find videos featuring trucks to entertain them. What he found bored and disappointed them because it was more about people than the vehicles themselves. So he decided to make something himself, expressly for little kids. The result was Can You Name Twenty Trucks?, a video I hadn't watched until writing this. It's very similar to the game played by his children, calling out the trucks they'd see on the road and a very quick description.
Clearly, the work wasn't done. Since putting out that first video they've apparently been inundated with requests for more, often by kids with specific ideas. So they started making 'Truck Tunes,' with each release containing original songs about 10 different vehicles. As of now there are 5 volumes, making 50 trucks in total. All of these, as far as I know, are free on YouTube either as the set of 10 vehicles or individually (or you can actually buy them). One reason we like them are the length, as each truck's video is only 3-4 minutes long.
Many of the songs are really catchy too, and there's certainly some real creativity at work. The earliest songs, which contain a number at the start, spend too much time interrupting the music to explain how the trucks work. They seem to have learned this, as subsequent videos are just songs without a talking interlude. As we've seen more of them, it's obvious most or even all these songs are heavily inspired by other bands and existing music, which frequently gives me a weird and vague sense of familiarity. I'm not saying this to disparage them, because what they're doing is still impressive and original, it's just now I actively try to figure out where they started. For example, Beach Cleaner is straight out of the Beach Boys. Monster Truck is Cake. I really think Skid Steer came from Blink-182. People that know music better than me would undoubtedly recognize more.
It's probably fair to ask why, besides simply giving into our toddler's requests, we're watching so many of these videos. Well, despite my words above and recognition that Twenty Trucks is doing something relatively cool, I'm admittedly growing really sick of watching them all the time. We're stuck, however, using them as bribery since they're his favorite thing, probably in the world, at the moment. A couple months ago we were really struggling to get him down for bed at night. So we altered his bedtime routine, and once he's done with everything else (books, brush teeth, bathroom) then we watch one of these videos before he climbs into bed. And it's worked like a charm ever since. Then a few weeks ago we had nearly complete regression with potty training. All of a sudden he forgot how to use the toilet and we had wet pants several times a day. At wit's end I started offering another video if he successfully used the bathroom. It's gotten us through that rough patch, but now with every toilet trip we're still watching videos and I don't entirely know how we're going to ween him. We'll get there, hopefully with my sanity intact.
Well, I couldn't wrap this up without sharing a few of the better ones. Enjoy!
Flatbed
Cement Mixer (C'mon people, cement and concrete are not the same. Great song though.)
Bucket Truck
Duck Boat (They're getting more obscure.)
Maybe you'll get something stuck in your head like we do all the time, though without a small child around constantly singing them you'll likely avoid that fate.
'Then watch a truck video!'
Comments