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Nursery rhyme giant Cocomelon has made six recent covers of Wheels on the Bus, all of which start and end with the same melody, which is well transitioned into the melody of the song, but yet doesn't resemble the rest of the song at all.

The first time I heard it, I knew it sounded familiar, and felt I'd heard it before somewhere long ago, but I have never heard anything like this attached to any other recording of Wheels on the Bus, even going back to what recordings I could find dating from my own childhood.

The tune sounds to me like a "making fun of you" melody, like something that might be played when someone loses in a video game. Two of their six takes on this song end with some of the kids being embarrassed at losing a race to someone younger than them, but I believe the traditional covers of the song are older. I looked through old video games as well, but didn't find anything particularly close.

When I heard the same familiar tune in a meme tonight, I thought maybe my original suspicion was correct all along, and that Cocomelon borrowed the tune from a video game I played once long ago but have long since forgotten, perhaps from the Game Over screen, since the meme was a prime example of "making fun of you". I can get the audio of the meme posted online if someone wants it, but I'll strip the video out to anonymize the people involved.

An alternate possibility is that the melody really does belong to Wheels on the Bus, assuming either that Cocomelon added it or that I just somehow missed it all this time, and that the meme got its melody from Cocomelon. However, it's only the melody that's the same ... the instruments are not the same, so my instinct tells me there's more to this.

edit: to clarify, Im talking about the intro that begins at about 10 seconds into each video, .... that is, the beginning of the music itself, not the Cocomelon jingle where the watermelon logo appears.

Thank you all for your time. I hope you can help me. The links to the six Cocomelon videos are below ... the first three are traditional takes on the song, and the other three use alternate lyrics but have the same melody. Let me know if you have any questions.

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From experience I know that Cocomelon is so flooded with customer service questions that they simply don't have time to answer questions like this. Neither was I present at a good time to ask the person who posted the meme where the music came from.

Best regards,
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well i wanted to follow up on my own post in case anyone else was wondering.... it turns out it's Entrance of the Gladiators, an 1897 classical music piece by Julius Fučík.

Yes, that's right, a 100+ year old military march is worked into Cocomelon's rendition of Wheels on the Bus. Today is a very happy day.

As for my video game reference .... I was probably just wrong, but it's possible that somewhere along the line a video game aimed at young kids also sampled this song and used it as the game over music.

edit: and yes..... that mystery's been solved for me now, too ... it was used in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. As an ordinary level theme, not a game-over theme, but it does kind of sound like one. Oh frabjous day.

edit again: it's also the game over music in Super Mario Kart. this might be all over the place, like the famous "womp womp" thing.