If you’re not a parent, congratulations: The odds are good that you’ve never heard the dastardly earworm known as “Baby Shark,” a YouTube video made by the folks at Pinkfong!, who apparently hate your sanity and want to shred it into tiny pieces. But soon, anyone foolish enough to go flipping channels and stumble upon Nickelodeon’s latest venture will find themselves caught in the maw of this brain-consuming melody.
Deadline reports the kid-centric channel is developing an animated series, targeted at preschoolers, based on the viral video—currently at 2.8 billion views and climbing. Yes, a video that consists almost entirely of kids singing “doo doo doo doo doo doo” in front of bargain-bin animation of sharks swimming by in the background is now going to be a TV show. Nickelodeon’s executive VP of animation sure sounds psyched about it: “At the heart of any popular piece of content is a terrific character, and we have a great opportunity to further explore the world of Baby Shark and follow this family through some great animated adventures on Nickelodeon.” A terrific character like “Baby Shark” doesn’t just fall into your laps every day, you see. It requires someone to poorly render an animated shark, then make a song that says “baby shark,” then do nothing else. In the meantime, why not let “Baby Shark” burrow further into your consciousness, slowly overwhelming all else?
There’s no other details yet about how soon we could see the results of this latest project, though it comes just one day after Nick renewed four of its most popular preschool-aimed cartoons: PAW Patrol, Bubble Guppies, Abby Hatcher, and Butterbean’s Café. We have never seen a single frame of any of those, but based on the titles alone, Bubble Guppies seems like the cartoon most likely to steal Abby Hatcher’s lunch money and shove it in a locker.