True Tunes

Eight rewritten rhymes and a fall toy aisle

The 2019 Netflix listing for True Tunes is not a music-history series. It is eight short music videos from True and the Rainbow Kingdom, the Guru Studio preschool show that already had Michela Luci as True. Animation Magazine posted a first look on July 8 and dated the drop to July 12. latestnetflix.com's take is that the tracks include "The Wheels on the Rainbow Bus" and "Zee Zee My Playmate."

Guru treated the drop as a catalog beat, not a prestige event. It followed True: Mushroom Town in the spring and the Valentine special True: Happy Hearts Day. More shorts and seasonal specials were promised through 2019 and 2020. The same week, the studio talked up a North American product wave for fall. Plush. Halloween costumes. Storybooks. Toy State was named master toy partner. Chouette was named master publishing partner. The Toy Book ran the same calendar and framed True Tunes as another SKU in a year when Guru was pushing original IP with Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Junior deals.,

Pharrell Williams' name is on the parent show, which is why the music-video dump exists at all. Animation Magazine credits True and the Rainbow Kingdom as a Netflix Original produced by Guru Studio, based on FriendsWithYou artwork, with Home Plate Entertainment and Pharrell Williams' i am OTHER. Wikipedia lists Williams among the executive producers, with Mary Bredin, Frank Falcone, and Bill Schultz. The franchise already sold color, songs, and toys. True Tunes is the sing-along pack. TMDB files it as an eight-episode 2019 season under tv/91089, created by Frank Falcone, Arturo Sandoval III, Mary Bredin, Jeff Borkin, Samuel Borkson, and Bill Schultz.,

Common Sense Media called the set a collection of music videos written to nursery-rhyme melodies, rated it for age 3+, and named the voices parents already know. Luci is True. Jamie Watson is Bartleby. Nicolas Aqui is Zee. Emily Ashby wrote that the rewrites of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Hush Little Baby" are inventive enough that parents may stay in the room. She also flagged Glummy Glooma as the one character who enjoys ruining the fun. Rotten Tomatoes lists the eight titles as a single July 12, 2019 season, including "Mila Found a Little Blubb," "Bartleby Finnegan," "The Day the Wishing Tree Sneezed," "Two Little Critters," "Gloom Gloom Ain't It Great to Be Gloomy," and "Hush Little Frookie." Netflix's own page still describes True and her friends dropping silly beats over classic nursery songs.,

Wikipedia puts True Tunes on July 12 with eight new tracks, then the series finale Wild Yetis on August 30, 2019. That is the whole window. There was no secret reboot, no missing director, and no vanished interview circuit. The gossip is how a Pharrell-adjacent preschool brand turned eight rewritten rhymes into a merch week, then let the videos sit on Netflix as their own tiny season.,