If you’re a parent who’s somehow made it through the last few weeks without hearing about KPop Demon Hunters, you must be some kind of unicorn. An animated Sony production that dropped on Netflix late this summer, KPop Demon Hunters is a global juggernaut, rising seemingly out of nowhere to become the most-watched original title in the streamer’s history and topping the box office with its “one weekend only” sing-along theatrical debut. The musical’s songs, like “Golden,” “Takedown,” and “Soda Pop,” are in near-constant rotations in school carpools and preteen dance classes, and half the parents in America right now are getting arthritis trying to teach themselves how to do Rumi’s signature braid before Halloween rolls around.

In short: In kid world — and adult world, really — KPop Demon Hunters is a big, huge deal. (There’s a reason it’s getting a sequel.) Audiences are living for it, picking apart every little detail onscreen and off, a move that’s pretty gratifying for Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang, who co-wrote and directed the film.

Given that Kang and Appelhans are experts in children’s entertainment that can make even the gnarliest dad feel emotions and burst out in song, we wanted to see what they’re watching, listening to, and playing with their kids at home.

The Sound of Music

Maggie Kang: The Sound of Music is a big thing that we watch a lot in our house. I have an almost-9-year-old daughter, and she loves musicals. I don’t remember how it was introduced — I think I maybe just stumbled on it on Disney+ and put it on, because I grew up watching it with my parents and loving it, but I had kind of forgotten about it. When I put it on, my daughter was just glued to it, like she couldn’t stop watching. For a while she was just nonstop listening to the soundtrack in the car, singing along. I think she even sang it in front of our extended family at one point.

It’s interesting, because the first half of the movie is very fun and then you get into the more serious things in the second part of the movie. I had to sit down with her and talk through it. Because there’s an actual intermission in the movie, I’ll sometimes ask, “Do you want to watch the second part?” And she always wants to, even though it doesn’t have music and happiness. I think she likes the duality, because it’s both happy times and hard stuff. She even understands it, which was unexpected for me.

Chris Appelhans: My wife is taking our almost-5-year-old son to The Sound of Music sing-along at the Hollywood Bowl. She watched it something like 200 times as a kid and apparently had a VHS of it growing up that her dad accidentally taped over with his own golf swing, and it became the biggest fight the two ever had. The fallout went on for months. But that’s why I think there’s this desire to play it for our son. And I don’t know what it is about the songs, because there’s something truly addictive about them, but they also have this nurturing quality where somehow kids really want to sing them. They want to learn them.

Bluey

M.K.: Even though my daughter is almost 9, she still watches Bluey sometimes. It’s such a great show. When your kid is 5 or 6, they just want to watch something over and over again, and when that became Bluey in our house, I thought, Oh, this is fine.

I love that one episode where the parent says, “You’re special, but you’re not special to everybody. You’re only special to us.”

C.A.: You know the episode where the dad takes the kids to the pool with no preparation? My wife puts that on intentionally and just stares at me across the room, like, “See?” But then I also watch it and have no regrets. Everyone gets sunburned, but really, everyone turns out fine.

The biggest thing that occurred to me watching Bluey is that they’re working so hard to make those characters entertaining and smart and real, and that’s way harder than phoning in a more rote, simple show. Maggie and I were brought up in the Dreamworks 2000s era of, like, “It is your responsibility to make your characters irresistible and to make every second of your screen time worth something.” And so when you see other creators doing that, you just know it was hard. You know they took many passes at that episode and many passes at the dialogue, and it’s just nice to see that level of passion put into something for kids.

Studio Ghibli Movies

C.A.: My Neighbor Totoro is No. 1 in my house. I think what’s cool about Totoro is that it came out in the late ’80s and when I was in college it was the niche thing that people who knew about Studio Ghibli would watch and think, This is amazing. But then once the distribution of that stuff became democratized, as far as I can tell literally every parent in my extended world has watched Totoro with their kids dozens of times. Even my friends who I grew up with and who still live in Idaho know about it and watch it and can tell you all the plot points.

That’s another thing where, I don’t think I fully understand what Miyazaki is doing, but I know when a kid sits down in front of that movie between 3 and 10, they become just completely wrapped up in it the whole time. He’s such an incredible storyteller, but there’s something about the point of view it takes and the little details that it catches and spends time on that is riveting for kids. I don’t know how it does that. I wish I did.

M.K.: Another Miyazaki that we watch a lot is Ponyo, which is apparently really big with all the kids in my daughter’s grade. It’s Miyazaki but it has a little bit more bite to it — like, the mom drinks a bunch of beer and gets drunk. There’s a little edge to it that’s intriguing for kids, but it’s also mixed with the cuteness of the character.

C.A.: The Tale Of Princess Kaguya, by the other Studio Ghibli director, Isao Takahata, is one of my favorite movies.

Honestly, if there was an alien civilization and they were like, “Can you explain what’s going on with Earth?” I’d be like, “Just watch this movie.” It’s this basic summary of the human condition, our relationship to our worlds, all of our shortcomings, and all of the ways in which we can be kind of incredible, because it’s about this immortal character who gets put through the wringer with a lot of petty human things. It’s really beautiful. I’ve only watched it once with my son so far but I’m going to force him to watch it a lot until he absorbs it all.

“Hedgehog in the Fog”

C.A.: There’s a short film that I really loved that my son is pretty into called “Hedgehog in the Fog.” It’s an old Russian stop-motion film, and it’s literally just this little felt hedgehog moving through fog for 20 minutes. It’s a little suspenseful and a little scary, but really, it’s just a solo adventure. There’s a beautiful moment with a horse that appears, which is very dreamy, but there’s not a lot of plot. We love watching that one together.

Catan and Minecraft

M.K.: What’s been surprising to me recently is that I didn’t really realize how difficult a game a kid can handle. A year ago, my daughter started playing Catan with us, which is very complicated, and she loves it. She’s become very competitive with it, too. She’s even won a few games by outsmarting us.

As a parent, I think a lot of times I’m like, “Oh, that’s too complicated for you. I don’t think you’ll understand all the rules,” and at first, we did have to do this kind of layered teaching, but it was really cool to see a kid basically learn how to scam you.

Even with things like Minecraft, being able to build a full city is really incredible. It’s wild how quickly they can pick up things and run with it. And it always starts with “I don’t know how to do this” and then, a couple hours later, they know how to do everything. I feel like overall, we just underestimate how much kids can handle. We definitely do that a lot in entertainment, and we should stop.

Jon Klassen books, like I Want My Hat Back

C.A.: Jon Klassen is one of my best friends, and the amount of torture he puts himself through to write these, like, 32-page books … He’ll just be going on walks for three months trying to figure out the last line of dialogue, and the final result always ends up feeling pretty effortless.

Jon is never really thinking, like, I’m making a story for kids. He thinks, I’m making my weird, minimalist thing that is posing questions that I think are interesting, or I’m making moments that feel funny and understated to me. He said when he was touring with the books that it was really eye opening to him how out ahead the kids were as an audience. It’s just like a film audience. If you engage them correctly, if you can give them one and one and let them make three out of it, they will love your story more. We often err on the wrong side of that for kids, though.

I think his first book, I Want My Hat Back, is my favorite, because it cracks the code. We were all at DreamWorks when he was working on that, and he would always bring me his dummies and be like, “What do you think of this page and that page?” and I’d try to help him. And then he came to lunch one day, and he was so excited. He was like, “Guys, I figured it out! I just have to make the color of the text the same color as the character and then I don’t have to use any nouns or pronouns! I can just have them talking and we’ll know who’s talking!” It was like the Earth had changed overnight for him, and we were just like, “Cool, Jon. Do you want a panini?”

AC/DC, “Thunderstruck”

C.A.: I make my son Alexander listen to all my music, so he likes AC/DC and LCD Soundsystem and everything else. When music plays, he just completely forgets about everything and goes into this kind of weird faraway zone. He remembers the structure of every song right away, too; like, I caught him correcting a friend who was singing the songs from KPop Demon Hunters, like, “No, that part slows down and then you have to wait 1-2-3-4 and then the next part starts.” It’s like he’s got a little map in his head, so I just want to throw everything at him, musically, because it seems to tickle his brain. I was like that as a kid too. I just couldn’t get enough music.

M.K.: My daughter is almost a teenager, and she judges us for music choices in the car. She’s like, “Give me the phone,” and then she puts her music on. She loves K-pop, which I think is great. She liked Olivia Rodrigo and even Chappell Roan until we realized, Oh, these lyrics are not great. She doesn’t understand them, but that’s why I think it’s great that she’s gotten into K-pop, because nothing is really sexualized.

She went to the Blackpink concert, which was the first show she ever went to, and I think she was a little overwhelmed. She’s also taking guitar lessons now, so she’s getting into Nirvana because the teacher said “Let’s just play what you want to play.” She’s learning “Come As You Are” and some White Stripes.

The first thing she picked to learn, though, was “Thunderstruck.” She saw the video of Angus Young playing with one hand with his arm up, so that’s her goal: to be able to play that guitar with one hand with her eyes closed.

C.A.: “Thunderstruck” was one of my son’s favorites when he was 2. And because he memorizes any song right away, he’d know exactly when it really ended. So we would drive to his little preschool blasting “Thunderstruck,” but we’d get there with three minutes left in the song, and he’d say, “No, I want to finish the song.” So we’d sit in the preschool parking lot with all these parents walking by our car, just the two of us sitting with “Thunderstruck” going at about 40 decibels. I always felt like, “I’m sorry, everybody. This probably looks abusive, but he would just really like to finish this song.”

Related

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• What Tony Hale Watches (and Listens To) With His Daughter

 The whole world loves their movie, but Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans are raising their kids on classic Studio Ghibli.