To actually enjoy one of these videos, to go about your day cheerfully mumbling lyrics like "lots of tiny pebbles, thousands of tiny pebbles" is a rare event, and it makes you wonder how an entire channel devoted to truck music videos came to exist at all. It's enough to make you dig out your kid's dinged-up Lightning McQueen and Mater microgliders, slap on a quick manicure, and start filming for cash-especially when you realize that you've watched enough tedious videos of industrial machinery to rival your peers' most intense Netflix series binges. Their tastes are completely alien, but they know what they like. Toddlers are the kinds of consumers who made Disne圜ollectorBR last year's top-earning YouTube account, earning the anonymous toy un-boxer an estimated $4.86 million in 2014. Some would be happy to watch a montage of Cars stills set to Ukrainian techno music on loop for an entire afternoon. Toddlers are notoriously undiscerning-as a friend and fellow parent recently pointed out on Facebook, three-year-olds are the types to call themselves car connoisseurs and then walk away from a car show extolling the marvelous design of the 2015 Toyota Camry. Others have undeniable homespun charm, like this cheerful tune with 3.9 million views, but it's refreshing and rare when you hit upon anything that stands up to a second, third, or five-thousandth viewing. A YouTube search for "garbage truck song" yields more than 54,000 results, and some of them are…well, you know, you might just have to go ahead and call them bad. It wasn't long before I found Twenty Trucks, the channel responsible not only for "Dump Truck," but such rousing hits as "Vacuum Truck" and "Feller Buncher." Later, I would become more specific when I hunted for truck videos-there are vast depths to plumb when you're searching for Internet truck videos, which occupy, apparently, a wildly popular niche. I recalled a fond memory of watching Labyrinth for the eight-hundredth time on my parents' living room floor, and then I searched "truck videos." We'd watch these videos together, both because it lessened my guilt and because I thought being able to identify every single part of a truck crane might be a cool parlor trick at dinner parties (the opportunity hasn't yet presented itself, so I might have to force it). I was bleary-eyed, and there were no real garbage trucks or cable repair trucks to be found on the pre-dawn streets to point at and observe. I discovered this strange alley on the toddler YouTube video map the same way every parent does: one morning at around 6 AM, my resolve to be the kind of parent who never hands his or her kid a screen to watch crumbled, bulldozed by my own exhaustion.
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