YouTube stars Kim and Penn Holderness recently came across a Mother Goose book. “We started dying laughing when we saw how incredibly violent most of them were,” Penn exclusively tells Us Weekly. “When we tried to explain to Lola that these were sung to tiny little babies, she was pretty shocked.”
That was the inspiration behind their latest video published on July 16. In the five-minute clip, the Raleigh, North Carolina-based parents and their kids Lola, 10, and Penn Charles, 7, act out a series of morbid nursery rhymes including Three Blind Mice (it’s about torturing animals), Jack and Jill and Rock A-Bye Baby.
“I didn’t know it was that violent,” Lola exclaimed after listening to Penn sing Rock A-Bye Baby. His reply: “Yeah. It’s like a sweet song to go to sleep about a baby falling out of a tree.”
The comments poured in. “Original fairy tales were horrible. You don’t even want to know how Sleeping Beauty ended,” wrote one person. Another added: “Oh My Darling, Clementine was the one my dad sang to me. The girl drowns, happy.”
The Holderness family first skyrocketed to viral fame in December 2013 with their “XMAS Jammies” video, which has been viewed more than 17 million times. The 2014 back-to-school parody, “Baby Got Class,” has racked up more than 8 million views.
Penn tells Us that most of their videos take only minutes to shoot and now that his children are older they weigh in with ideas. “With the nursery rhyme video, Lola wanted a bloody head wound, which was my favorite part,” he says. “She’s developing a great sense of humor.”
