Middletown Students Have Blast Filming 'Gangnam Style' Video

You may not know what it is, but your kids surely do, it's the viral video of this summer — Gangnam Style! The mid-July dance hit by Korean pop singer Park Jae Sung, bettern known as PSY, is surely the techo-pop geekiest music video I've seen in a while — entirely in Korean.

Well here in Middletown, the kids of Macdonough Elementary School's Northern Middlesex YMCA Kids Korner after-school care, who are, like all tweens by their very nature, on the front lines of what's cool in pop culture, decided to produce their own rendition.

Site Director Chaelyn Lombardo explains.

"It came about because of the popularity of the Gangnam Style video on YouTube. Our children were singing the song and doing the silly dance from the video. One morning, a child came up to me and asked, 'Do you know Gangnam Style?' and Melanie (my boss) jokingly said, 'She knows Macdonough Style.'"

"That started a joking conversation about changing the song lyrics to be about Macdonough. (We had made a video three years ago called, Welcome to Kids' Korner that was based on 'Welcome to the Jungle'). So I rewrote Gangnam Style and asked my friend Alicia (who sang the Welcome to Kids' Korner song) if she wouldn't mind singing it again. She did so and altered her voice using her computer.

"Once we had the song, we started filming some scenes for the video...but while filming, we realized we had a lot of unused footage from the children's Videography Club with Dan Nocera.

"So, we complied all of the old and new footage and my boyfriend edited it together to make the video. The video features 42 children from our program as well as Kids' Korner staff, Macdonough teachers, parents, families, and even the principal, Mr. Romeo."

What's not to love? There's the infectious beat, that hook you can't get out of you mind and — the horse dance. They even get Jon Romeo in on the action, lip-synching and — yes — dancing.

Introducing "Macdonough Style!"

Now you can compare it against Psy's original here, which has 718,570,945 hits and counting.