Pink Fluffy Unicorns is a story floating around the Kars4Kids office. It seems that Lily was a camper in the TeenZone unit of the Kars4Kids summer camp, TheZone, last year. She came to camp dressed all in black, anger written all across her forehead. The girl read gruesome books and intimidated anyone who spoke to her.
Here’s how one staffer continued the story:
“Lily was what we call, ‘a tough nut to crack.’ No one could figure out how to get through to her and most people just kept their distance. She was challenging to say the least, and not a little daunting.
“Now every day the staff wakes up TeenZone with a wacky song. Sometimes the head staff chooses a song and sometimes the campers will offer suggestions. In any event, it’s a fun thing and gets everyone up with a smile.
“One night, Lily came over to me offering a folded up scrap of paper, asking if I’d play the song she’d chosen. I agreed with some trepidation, shoving the piece of paper into my sweatshirt pocket without looking at it.
Pink Fluffy Unicorns
“The next morning I unfolded the paper expecting some dark and crazy song. Instead, I found that Lily had written, ‘Pink Fluffy Unicorns.’
“I found the song and played it. When Lily heard it, she ran out of her room and starting dancing and singing at the top of her lungs. No one could believe this spectacle—the way Lily had morphed from a silent, moody creature to this electrified teen, totally alive and vibrant. I don’t think we’d ever seen her even smile before.
“From then on, we put that wacko song on in the dining room at every meal. It was worth it, because each time that tune kicked in, Lily would get up and begin dancing and singing. Before long, Pink Fluffy Unicorns was a camp favorite; most people did not even know the origin of the song or how Pink Fluffy Unicorns had become a camp favorite.
“This story taught me that all campers deep inside are really “Pink Fluffy Unicorns” no matter what they look like on the outside.”
It’s only natural that in telling this story, we’d want our readers to hear what this miracle song, Pink Fluffy Unicorns, sounds like. So we turned to Google and heard the most popular version of the song, which turned out to be a cover. We wanted to hear the original. A little more digging and we struck gold.
Even though we’d found the song, we wanted to know more about the origins of Pink Fluffy Unicorns. So we kept on digging and found a December 2016 clip from Andrew Huang, creator of the Pink Fluffy Unicorns song. In the clip, Huang talks about how the song Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows propelled him to YouTube star status.
The clip was released on November 11, 2010. At that time, Huang had just 3,000 YouTube subscribers. But PFUDOR, the acronym Huang uses to refer to the hit song, went absolutely viral. “It was the first thing that put my channel on the map in the YouTube world!”
Andrew Huang tells us how the number of subscribers he had grew slowly, but consistently. Today Huang has 671,249 subscribers. It was all due to that wacko song.
The song received “massive” views when it was new. Now that the initial newness has worn off, the song’s views have settled into a consistent pattern, getting three to five thousand views every single day. Even now in 2016, six years since Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows was released, the song is still getting its daily 3-5,000 shares. Andrew credits the song with helping him get his music in front of an audience. “For a completely independent musician it is a ridiculous, far-reaching piece of music. I’ve got a bunch of other videos that get shared around in their own right, but PFUDOR is still the biggest thing on my channel,” says Huang.
Andrew’s original video clip has by now amassed 8 million views, while covers by other artists of Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows have also gained millions of views. There’s one cover of the song (with 30 million views) that is so popular that people leave messages on Andrew’s version accusing him of ripping it off.
Every day people are releasing new covers of PFUDOR including one by Maddie Ziegler, a celebrity in her own right, the child who plays the young version of reclusive artist Sia in her music videos.
Somehow, Andrew Huang seems to have found a magic formula for happiness and fame with his simple little tune whose lyrics were pulled from a comment left by a subscriber. The tune took a little detour from its original form and became the one that lit up Lily, made Maddie Ziegler do a silly dance on Instagram, and catapulted Andrew Huang to fame. There’s just something about this song that lets us drop the façade and get a little silly, with no shame or blame. More to the point, the song teaches us that in every dark teenager, budding musician, or already out there dancer, there’s a Pink Fluffy Unicorn, just waiting to dance on a rainbow.
You’ve only got to believe, show a little patience, then sit back and let the music do its magic.
As it did for Andrew, Maddie, and well, Lily.
Have you got a teenager who all Goth and forbidding? Be patient. You’ll find the key to get past the anger to the laughing, dancing girl inside.
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About Varda Epstein
Varda Meyers Epstein serves as editor in chief of Kars4Kids Parenting. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Varda is the mother of 12 children and is also a grandmother of 12. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Learning Site, The eLearning Site, and Internet4Classrooms.