The Exhausted Dad: K-pop and modern kid viewing habits

It can be tough to predict what stories will connect with kids, particularly in a family with four extremely different-minded children.

As much as I want all my kids to still be excited about the latest Pixar movie, they don’t consume entertainment in the way I did as a movie-obsessed kid growing up. For one, with the cost of moviegoing these days, I can’t afford to take four of them to a new movie every week.

You can read my article about Pixar’s “Elio” elsewhere in this section, but, long story short, I’m bummed that a good Pixar movie can’t compete in a market against multiple sequels, reboots and reimaginings. I’m obviously part of the problem because I haven’t shelled out the $100-plus to take them all, either.

As all parents know, movies don’t carry the same excitement to this generation as other, often easier to consume video content. I can be the old person and gripe about attention span and all that business, but at least for my kids, it’s the interactable, hands-on content they find appealing. Sure, my “Minecraft”-obsessed oldest son saw and enjoyed “A Minecraft Movie” in the theater, but he’s spent 10 times more time and effort creating related content on the creative coding for kids site, Scratch. And thankfully, we’ve kept the “chicken jockey” nonsense out of our house completely.

The measure of success for movies aimed at kids and families seems to be changing anyway. With instant access to Netflix and other streaming sites, kids have a wide variety of choices that cater to more specific interests. They can click on something on streaming, give it a try for a few minutes and ultimately decide to move onto something else if it doesn’t connect.

To me, as an Old Millennial, it all seems like a recipe for the continued destruction of cinematic storytelling. Yet, every now and again, my kids show me how their methods sometimes lead them to pretty surprising and spectacular inspiration.

Case in point: I never would have thought to click on Netflix’s recent original release, “KPop Demon Hunters.” As much as I actually like K-pop music, the title alone sounds like something created exclusively for a streaming algorithm. Netflix is plenty guilty of spending infinite dollars on creatively-vacant content, and so I do the thing I complain about my kids doing — I scroll through quickly and refuse to give it a proper chance.

My kids turned on “KPop Demon Hunters,” and, luckily, within just a few minutes, it became obvious just how awesome something could be despite its terrible title. Brimming with a distinct animation style, well-drawn characters, kinetic action sequences and ridiculously addictive music, “KPop Demon Hunters” is everything I look for when I get excited about a new original Pixar project. It’s a stunningly executed celebration of what makes animation appealing to both children and the adults who see the form as something more than “kiddie fare.”

As much as I enjoyed watching it, my kids embraced it with even more enthusiasm. I learned from my oldest son and youngest daughter that the movie had already become a popular engine for coding inspiration on Scratch, and my kids started incorporating some of the music into their own projects. My daughters and I are perusing similar-sounding K-pop tracks, and we’re digging into it far beyond my own surface level appreciation (prior to “Demon Hunters,” my knowledge basically stopped at BTS and Blackpink).

As much as I’m disappointed that a couple of my kids like watching nonsense like “Mr. Beast,” I do take comfort in these occasional discoveries. And I like to think I’ve instilled in them some appreciation for quality storytelling. For example, all my kids are technically way too old for “Bluey,” but they still watch and re-watch episodes because, well, that show is objectively fantastic.

So give the whippersnappers some credit! It’s not all about unboxing videos and makeup reviews on TikTok and YouTube. Sometimes it’s about awesome K-pop groups that slice and dice demons to a ridiculously danceable beat.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 8-14. He is tired. He can be reached at [email protected].