TikTok Has Discovered Melbourne Trains’ Banger ‘Dumb Ways To Die’
It’s been 10 years since I finally got it out of my head.
Over ten years ago, Melbourne Trains dropped the banger of the decade with their railway safety PSA ‘Dumb Ways To Die’. And thanks to TikTok, it’s haunting me all over again.
Originally created as part of a rail safety campaign for Metro Trains in Melbourne, the video was published on YouTube back in November 2012. Right now, it’s sitting at over 253M views. Two hundred million views! For a train safety video from Melbourne! You gotta hand it to the advertising agency though. It’s the perfect execution of the ‘creepy cute’ aesthetic, artfully sentencing a bunch of corporate-friendly animated beans to some rather grisly deaths to the tune of a catchy folk song.
The song took on a life of its own and eventually became its own brand, complete with four beloved characters: Numpty, Hapless, Pillock, and Dippy. In 2013, clever Melbourne Metro repurposed the four clumsy beans to the lucrative world of mobile gaming. Then in 2021, it absconded from the Melbourne train system altogether and was bought by Playside studios as a franchise in its own right. A true rags to riches story for these ill-fated beans.
And what is modern success without TikTok? The song has now entered its TikTok era and is being used in the ever-popular genre of home videos of people getting hurt. People are pairing the catchy tune with their best attempt at winning the Darwin Award, paired with a perfectly timed freeze frame and mismatched text.
This person, for example, grabbed a stonefish. A stonefish, the most venomous fish in the world that’s both lethal and incredibly painful to humans. So basically, they nailed it.
Maybe in another 10 years, I’ll finally get this song out of my head.