“Smiling eggs on a farm change color, break and change shape. Learn these six colors: black, brown, pink, white, red, blue. Happy viewing,” says the description by ‘Miroshka TV’. Comments have been disabled. Yet the video already has a staggering 3.5 BILLION views!
The short digital animation holds the record as one of the most watched YouTube videos of 2019. Its view count nearly reaches that of the most popular episode of ‘Masha and the Bear’ - the smash-hit Russian cartoon. There’s a twist though: the egg animation is downright terrifying - and yet, no one can pinpoint exactly why (maybe you can let us know in the comments), it simply creates a sense of dread and unease in the viewer.
Other platforms the video has been published on have grownups and parents commenting with words like “Psychedelic” or “Creepy, at the end my brain started to weep”. But they also admit to children going crazy over it in the positive sense of the word: “My nephew watched it all the time when he was 3, I have no idea what the secret is,” one user wrote.
It seems the “hypnotizing” element is the melody - which goes round and round - and the “entrancing” imagery. Parents refer to such videos as ‘kid switches’: “a lot of parents sit their kids in front of educational videos with colors, language, object recognition and so on, and leave them to their own devices,” another user comments, adding that it works like a charm when you put the video on repeat. (DISCLAIMER: Do this at your own risk!)
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