If anybody in your life is under the age of three or four, chances are you fielded some requests for cocoa melon.

If not, let me fill you in.

Cocoa melon is an animated series with a friendly cast of somewhat generic multiracial

characters inhabiting a world where, aside from some pretty insipid songs being sung,

nothing truly bad ever happens.

Well, so it goes with kids' shows, right?

But this one is rumored to employ a secret weapon in its development. It's called

the distractatron. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. A distractatron is a second

screen played right beside cocoa melon content for a test audience of toddlers, say cocoa

melon on the right, adults going about

everyday business on the left. If enough very tiny test viewers happen to look left during

an episode, it is sent back to the drawing board to be made more irresistible, quicker cuts,

brighter colors, whatever it takes. That formula might disturb you, but there's no question it is working.

The show exists in 25 languages, and for each of the last three years, Cocoa Mellon was

streamed on Netflix for a mind-blowing half a billion hours. Gia Tolentino wanted to understand

why. She's a parent and a staff writer at The New Yorker,

where you can read her Cocoa Mellon article, Screen Grab. Gia, welcome back to think.

Thank you for having me.

So you write about this one particular video, which is a song about bath time that runs a little under three minutes and has been streamed almost seven billion times on YouTube alone.

I jump in the bathtub. It's time to get all clean. I'll be the cleanest kid you've ever seen. The soap and the bubbles are filling up the tub so I'll jump in the water and scrub scrub

scrub scrub I take it you know that video quite well well you know honestly I know, I have watched cocoa melon, right?

Like any parent with a child that has been in diapers recently, like you cannot avoid it.

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