As the kids TV environment has splintered into 1,000 pieces, with content exploding on YouTube and legacy brands trying to catch up, getting buy-in from parents is essential. And as millennials become the dominant generation of parents to young children, Disney Jr. hit upon a savvy strategy to lure these 30somethings to their new Marvel shows: enlist pop-punk icons to craft unforgettable theme songs.
Disney’s animated preschool Marvel shows “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” and the soon-to-be launched “Iron Man and His Awesome Friends” (debuting Aug. 11) aren’t just drawing big viewing numbers (and moving tons of merch) for kids but are also crafting catchy tunes by Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump and Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus, enlisting the “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” and “What’s My Age Again?” hitmakers to write songs about what it’s like to be Spider-Man or Iron Man.
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The songs are so catchy they’ve spawned viral trends on TikTok with parents realizing their kid’s new favorite songs sound eerily similar to the tracks they grew up on in high school.
First launched in 2021, “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” – an animated series that follows the adventures of kid Spider-People Peter Parker, Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales – has amassed over 1 billion hours watched across linear and streaming in the U.S. and has been the No. 2 streaming series for kids and boys 2-5 for seven straight months, according to Nielsen. It’s bright and colorful and a mega merchandising hit with toys flooding the aisles at Target and Wal-Mart, ranking in the top 5-selling overall preschool toy licenses globally, according to the latest Circana data.
It is also, crucially, a hit with millennial parents thanks to a theme song and original score by Stump, the 41-year-old singer-songwriter and musician behind Fall Out Boy’s decades-spanning Billboard charting hits. And Disney is taking a similar approach to the new series “Iron Man and His Awesome Friends” with a SoCal-rockin’ theme song by Blink-182 singer-songwriter and bassist Mark Hoppus.
The move expands a lucrative Marvel preschool franchise while also appealing to parents by adding a “cool” factor that makes it that much easier to let Disney+ roll right into the next episode. And as the kids TV space gets ever-noisier with the dominance of YouTube, building brand loyalty with millennial parents is more than a clever marketing ploy – it’s an investment in long-term success.
“I’m very passionate about creating music that serves the entire family and does become a shared experience between a child and their caregivers,” Jay Stutler, SVP of Music for Disney Television Animation told TheWrap, noting that in hiring Stump and Hoppus he wanted to create a specific connection between the brand and parents.
“[Patrick’s] musical aesthetic is known around the world, so when you as a parent hear a song from ‘Spidey’ it’s like, ‘Oh wait, that connects with me. That’s what I grew up with. I can’t wait to share this with my own kid,’” he added.
As Common Sense Networks co-founder Eric Berger put it when he spoke with TheWrap previously, “If you want to build a big franchise, you’ve got to get to the millennial parents.”
Stump, who’s been serving as the composer on “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” since its inception, said the success of the show has intersected with the popularity of Fall Out Boy, culminating in him performing an acoustic version of the “Spidey” theme at Madison Square Garden last fall as part of the band’s set.
“It was impromptu,” Stump recalled. “I looked out at everybody and I was like, ‘I’m going to do ‘Spidey’ and see what happens,’ and people sang along and people knew the words. And actually, for the next few shows after that, people were bringing Spidey signs that said, ‘Sing Spidey!’ and stuff.”
And Stump’s success with the show made Hoppus an easy “yes” when Stutler reached out to see if he’d be interested in writing the theme song for a new “Iron Man” series.
“I like writing theme songs, and I think in theme songs — I write commercial jingles in my head all day long and just dumb stuff,” Hoppus told TheWrap, adding that he was creatively enticed by the new challenge. “The cool thing about it was they said they wanted it to be me and my sound. It wasn’t like, ‘We want you to write a song that sounds like this.’ It’s like, ‘Go do your thing for this idea.’”
That idea was a SoCal-infused theme song to accompany the adventures of a young Tony Stark, and Hoppus was just given the prompt that the song should include the phrase ‘Iron Up!’ and that it will be about three friends (Tony, Riri Williams/Ironheart and Amadeus Cho/Iron Hulk).
The first thing that popped into Hoppus’ head was Tony in his garage building something. “I wanted it to start off with this hammer and anvil sound and then it builds into the beat,” he said. “So I built this kind of pop punk narrative around the idea of Tony building something in his garage, and his friends coming together and them going out and doing good in the world.”
The line that felt like he cracked the code?
“It’s totally awesome/When I’m with my best friends/It’s better than chocolate/It’s better than weekends.”
“I’m really proud of that line,” Hoppus said with a big smile.
The musician, whose band Blink-182 broke out in the late 1990s with hits like “All the Small Things” and is still going strong with a new tour kicking off this month in support of their ninth album (with work on a 10th coming after, Hoppus teased), said he was also drawn to working on “Iron Man” because the theme songs for kids shows when his son was growing up were “not the music that I would listen to.” Similarly, Stump noted there was a “vacuum” of listenable kids music over the last couple of decades.
Indeed, for both Stump and Hoppus, the experience of jumping into kids TV has been a welcome and fresh creative outlet. Stump pitched Stutler and the Disney/Marvel team to land the “Spidey” gig, winning them over with a demo for the theme song that he put together in a matter of hours. A self-professed Marvel comics fan, Stump counts Spider-Man as his favorite character, and he relished the opportunity to stretch into scoring for kids TV – even if the sound for “Spidey” isn’t too different from his work with Fall Out Boy.
“It’s got a lot of rock elements and even Fall Out Boy-isms, and that is very much one of those things that I think could only happen because of the show that it is,” the singer-songwriter explained of the score, which takes its rock cues right from the playful nature of the show’s heroes.
Stump and Hoppus are also both eager to keep going. Stump still aims to one day score a live-action Marvel project (he pitched hard for “Moon Knight” but didn’t land the gig) and Hoppus hopes to have time to write more songs for “Iron Man” in the future.
For Stutler, the success of these shows is the foundation for greater expansion in the Walt Disney Company, from theme parks to cruises to live touring (yes there’s a traveling “Spidey” stage show). And affection for the Marvel brand at a young age fits with Disney’s decades-long strategy of fostering relationships young that then expand across their verticals as those kids grow up. It’s no coincidence that Spider-Man and Iron Man, the stars of these preschool shows, are two of the most popular characters in the live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The line from watching “Spidey” growing up to buying a ticket to “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in theaters is a short one.
The post How Disney’s Marvel Kids Shows Are Luring Millennial Parents With Catchy New Tunes by Pop-Punk Icons appeared first on TheWrap.
The post How Disney’s Marvel Kids Shows Are Luring Millennial Parents With Catchy New Tunes by Pop-Punk Icons appeared first on The Wrap.
