One of the things that has helped get me through these many months of quarantine are wonderful videos shot at aquariums. Whether it was seeing a dog visit his dolphin friend in an otherwise empty building, or watching penguins go on field trips, these clips have been rays of sunshine during some of the darkest days of the pandemic. Of course, we’re not out of the woods yet. Or rather, we’re not out of the kelp forest. We still have some quarantining to do, which means we need as many animal videos as we can get. And that’s exactly what the staff at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California has provided. To celebrate their own aquatic residents, they enlisted the help of a local choir for a fun (and funny) parody of The Sound of Music’s “Favorite Things.”
Last March, the good people of the Monterey Bay Aquarium didn’t expect to close their doors for so long. Like so many of us, they’ve spent the last year dealing with social distancing and Zoom calls. They’d rather be welcoming guests to see their many amazing animals. But instead of letting the year-long shutdown bring them down, they turned all of their frustration into what they call “motivocean.” The result is a fantastic parody of “Favorite Things.” (Which we first saw at Laughing Squid.)
Their version, “Aquarium Things” pays tribute to the staff’s favorite creatures and features found at the aquarium. That includes incredible fish and exhibits, as well as super long octopus poop that looks like a single lengthy noodle. (They already have an explanation handy for why it looks like that, since they knew we’d want to know.)
Monterey Bay Aquarium
They danced their way through the empty building like a dance troupe, but left the singing to the Hartnell College Choir. (Which they revealed at the very end of the video.)
Song parodies are really hard to pull off. It’s why we only have one Weird Al. But these lyrics are genuinely great, and this song is delightful. I already thought aquarium pandemic videos were the best. Now I want all of them to be musicals.