Benjamin Bergey says the three heroines at the heart of Netflix’s latest megahit, KPop Demon Hunters, are like allegorical music and peacebuilders.
“They use their singing to defeat the darkness, the evil,” said Bergey, associate professor of music at EMU and architect of its distinctive’s Music and Peacebuilding undergraduate major. “I thought, This is a big hit right now. What if we rewrote the lyrics and made a parody?”
That’s exactly what he did.
Late one night at the office during EMU’s Fall Break last month, Bergey sat down and, in a flurry of creative inspiration, started writing the lyrics to a parody of “Golden,” one of the hit songs from the popular animated film.
“I wrote something up and then thought, It would be even better if we had a video to go with it,” recalled Bergey. “I remembered that Isaac (Andreas) makes parody music videos. I sent him the audio and said, ‘This is a crazy idea, what do you think?’ And then he got to work.”
“He asked me if I would be interested, and of course I was. I was super excited,” said Andreas, who graduated from EMU in 2022 with computer science and mathematics degrees. “This is the kind of stuff I do for fun, for free, and he was going to pay me for it.”
Andreas, a computer programmer and videography hobbyist living in Harrisonburg, produced, filmed, and edited the video. Nearly all of the filming, other than some B-roll footage, was shot from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 6. He spent the following three days editing the video using a free tool called DaVinci Resolve. The video released on the EMU Music Department’s Facebook page and YouTube channel on Thursday, Dec. 11.
In addition to Bergey, who lends his singing chops, the video features EMU students and Chamber Singers members Elie Hoover, Ciela Acosta, and Samuel Castaneda in leading roles.
Some behind-the-scenes trivia
- The family seen at the start of the video is that of EMU Professor Daniel Showalter. “(His two daughters) were the first people to tell me about KPop Demon Hunters,” said Andreas. “They were like, ‘This is the hit of the summer.’”
- Bergey said his two children have been scared to watch KPop Demon Hunters but have been watching the parody music video “on repeat.”
- One of the scenes in the music video was filmed in the “rave room” of a house near campus. Andreas said his friends, who are renting out the property, let him film at the house for free.
KPop Demon Hunters is Netflix’s most-watched title of all time. It spent eight straight weeks at No. 1 in the Netflix Top 10. “That’s part of why we thought this would be a good idea,” Bergey said. “Many of our videos reach viewers older than college age, but to connect with prospective students, we need to reach younger viewers. This seemed like a fun way to get the algorithm to reach them.”
Watch the music video below:
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