Eleven years ago, Emily Lubitz, singer with the indie-folk band Tinpan Orange, spent about one hour in a Melbourne studio recording vocals for a public safety jingle for Metro Trains. It was a quick and easy gig; a favour to her mate, Ollie McGill of The Cat Empire, who wrote the music and asked her to get involved the day before the record.
Today that song, Dumb Ways to Die, has been played more than 250 million times on YouTube, has spawned a growing franchise of digital gaming content that Melbourne’s rail network recently sold for more than $2 million, and is right now trending globally on TikTok alongside videos of young people accidentally injuring themselves.
“Reading the lyrics in the studio, I didn’t think much of it,” Lubitz says, laughing. “I thought ‘this is kind of strange’.”
In line with her policy around all advertising work, she initially chose to remain anonymous. The song was attributed to a fake band named Tangerine Kitty – a hat tip to the musicians’ respective groups.
“But when I saw [the song] with the animation, it all kind of clicked,” Lubitz goes on. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is funny and kooky, and I can see how that’s going to tickle people’.”
The cartoon that accompanied the song, released in 2012, featured colourful, blobby characters doing the “dumb” activities featured in the lyrics – things like setting fire to their hair, eating tubes of superglue and using their “private parts as piranha bait”.
This tickled people so much it amassed more than 28 million views within its first couple of weeks on YouTube (an especially impressive feat in the early 2010s). The song reached #1 on the iTunes charts in more than 28 countries, and the following year Metro released a hugely successful mobile game based on the same characters and premise – the first of many – which is currently at the top of local and international app store charts above titles like Roblox, Call of Duty and Mario Kart.
On TikTok, the song is being used to soundtrack videos of people hurting themselves in particularly “dumb” ways – whether backflipping directly onto their head on a trampoline or somehow getting their neck stuck in a car headrest. It’s also being used for socially or emotionally “dumb” situations, like a man complaining about being tired, to his pregnant partner.
Dumb Ways to Die, as a whole, is still considered one of the most successful Australian advertising campaigns in history. Although John Mescall, who created the concept for Metro with advertising agency McCann Australia, isn’t so sure everyone sharing the song on social media over the past few weeks knows about its origins.
“TikTok uses and abuses all sorts of cultural content and artefacts,” he says. “It’s three seconds of a song loop that probably 95 per cent of people have no idea what it is … But there are so many different levels of experience [with the franchise too].
“Some people are like, ‘oh my god, I grew up on that game’ … Some people remember singing the song at school or liking the video. And some people are like, ‘what the f— is this?’”
In fact, in the past week, the original YouTube video has been flooded with young people from all around the world saying variations of the above. “Words can’t describe how nostalgic this song is,” one comment reads; “10 years later and I’m still safe around trains,” says another.
“It’s so fun to see it evolving and living,” Mescall says. He also adds that, though the campaign was designed with Melbourne train safety in mind, “we gave it every chance to blow up globally”.
Many animals mentioned, for instance, are not native to Australia; the animated characters are deliberately without gender or ethnicity; and fans were encouraged to “mess with it” via covers and parodies from the get-go.
“This was probably the most pure project I’ve ever worked on in my life.”
“The best way to get a 10-year-old Australian to be interested in something is to make it blow up around the world,” Mescall says.
With it blowing up all over again, however, the original creators of the franchise aren’t the ones seeing any financial benefit.
The ad agency – including Mescall who came up with the idea and wrote the song lyrics – was paid an initial flat fee for the project including all copyright.
Lubitz – who Mescall describes as “hugely important” to the song’s success – was paid a simple session fee for one day’s work.
Emily Lubitz from Tinpan Orange, performing at the Port Fairy Folk Festival in 2016.Credit:Vicky Hughson
Even Metro is no longer getting a cut. In 2021, the rail network sold all Dumb Ways to Die assets and copyright to Melbourne game developers PlaySide Studios for a reported $2.25 million. At the time, PlaySide called it a “strategic mobile franchise acquisition” and spoke about growing the brand. Since then, the official Dumb Ways to Die TikTok account – which boasts 2.7 million followers – has been very active in engaging with old and new fans, and PlaySide has started selling a line of NFTs based on the game characters.
Lubitz says that the studio – which she speaks highly of – has approached her to sing more, but she’s yet to sign on.
Neither she nor Mescall have any resentment about the way things have played out, though.
“It’s been a funny thing in my life,” Lubitz says. “I love this little weird song … It was very spontaneous, but it led to a lot. It gave my career a few different little pathways that I didn’t expect. [When it first came out], some advertising agency in America got in touch, trawled through my band’s songs, and we got a sync on a Samsung ad. It was more money than I’d ever made.”
And Mescall, who now works as global executive creative director in McCann’s New York office, says he’s ultimately happy that the safety message is still resonating with people today.
“A lot of people think about advertising as a bullshit factory, but usually things are most interesting when you find the truth of a situation … and the truth is: if you get hit by a train, you’re an idiot.
“This was probably the most pure project I’ve ever worked on in my life.”
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