Adorable, Yet Horrifying Metro Trains Safety Video Quietly Becomes A YouTube Sensation

Safety ads, especially government ones, tend to be solemn, sometime heavily emotional affairs in order to drive their message home as directly as possible. So, has anyone tried to deliver one of these warnings in a more upbeat tone? How would you even accomplish that?

Melbourne’s Metro Trains has had a crack — a crazy successful one — by taking a page out of the Happy Tree Friends book and mixing cute with horrifying. That… and it has one heck of a catchy tune.

At the time of writing, Metro’s “Dumb Ways To Die” clip has amassed over 1.75 million YouTube views and 42,500 likes and the accompanying song is sitting in the #6 position on iTunes’ global charts, as this Mumbrella story points out. The song is also available over at Soundcloud, along with a ringtone, if that’s your thing.

Australia’s attempts at more offbeat advertising have a tumultuous history, especially compared to New Zealand, our more inventive brethren across the Tasman. Take “Legend”, the drink driving ad that proved popular internationally (it currently has 2.3 million views) and made ghost chips an incorporeal comedy sensation… of sorts.

Both ads have managed to spread far and wide, but one has to wonder how effective they are. Unfortunately, it’s somewhat difficult to correlate accident statistics with YouTube views.

[YouTube, via Mumbrella]