CoComelon and Super Simple Songs Have Emerged as Covid's Parental Sanity Savers

Since we discovered the channel, my two-year-old regularly asks me when he can go to “baby school” like JJ (in September, fingers crossed), wants to make stuff in the blender, and has expressed a mild willingness to at least humor me by sitting on the potty. He still refuses to try new veggies, but all in a day's work.  

He does have a fondness for muffins, which I attribute to another popular children’s program that’s served as an entertainment life raft during the pandemic: Super Simple Songs. The Canadian company Super Simple, which has been run by Toronto-based creative studio Skyship Entertainment since 2015, has been around in one form or another for over a decade. It was an early YouTube adopter that focused mainly on, as the name suggests, super-simple songs as a means to teach English to children. It too has seen a boost in viewers, as parents even more so took on the role of teacher and searched for educational pastimes for their kids. 

“Around the time stay-at-home orders started to roll out globally, we definitely saw a shift in views,” Skyship cofounder Morghan Fortier tells me, adding that the company experienced a 40% increase in views on YouTube as well as a spike to the mobile Super Simple app, which grew to around 7,000 subscribers over the last year. “A small number compared to YouTube,” she says, “but we’re really proud of it and are looking forward to building on it.”

Unlike CoComelon, Super Simple Songs doesn’t follow a single set of characters but produces hundreds of short videos in various formats including basic 2D and 3D animation, stop-motion, and felt puppetry. The music includes adaptations or new arrangements of public domain content as well as original songs. 

I imagine every young fan has their favorite Super Simple videos, but I tell Fortier about those that have particular resonance in my house: a gray-haired mustachioed chef who asks kids whether they know the Muffin Man, which was literally the thing that got my son to eat muffins (with hidden vegetables, heh heh). We're also always watching a purple blob who croons renditions of “Down by the Bay” into a microphone like an amorphous lounge singer; kids singing about the joys of trick-or-treating; and an angular cat with giant eyes who plays peek-a-boo—an unintentional standout across the board. “That cat is kind of my spirit animal,” Fortier says when I tell her I recently got lost in a Reddit thread about parents discussing the cat and how their children go wild over it.