Papa Joel’s English YouTube Channel has the Cutest Zombies Around!
by Brandilyn Mitchell
My daughter closes her workbook and sets her marker down. “Mama, can we watch Papa’s zombies?” “Let me check your homework real quick. If it’s done then yes you can.” I answer.
She was practicing her numbers.
The 5 looks like a warped 3, and the 6, 9 and 1 have little squiggles on the ends, so they look like curving ivy branches. “You’re so creative. I love how you made your numbers look like little pieces of art.” She’s five. This isn’t rocket science. She is allowed to have fun when she learns how to write. Squiggles are still fine motor skills. “Perfect numbers” will come with repetition and practice.
I turn on the computer and go to YouTube. I type “Papa Joel zombies are coming” into the search bar. “Why is this not in my favorites yet?” I ask myself, as I click the star to bookmark it. She watches this video every day right now. There is a pretty steady rotation of Bluey, Rob the Robot, Super Mario Bros, Blue’s Clues, Stinky & Dirty, Spooky Hamster mazes, any of Tim Burton’s delectable claymations, and Papa Joel in this house. Papa Joel is the most recent addition-we found his channel by accident about a month ago-but it’s filled with all the spooky G-rated goodness that five-year-olds enjoy. I always vet new videos and once I’ve approved them, she has free reign to choose from any approved video during her screen time. Free. Reign. But these days, it’s “Papa’s zombies”.
She starts singing. She jogs in place and I smile because really folks, it’s these little things in life, these little moments that matter most. I love that my kid loves spooky things, because so do I, and I know as she grows up, the things we like will crossover less and less. That venn diagram is going to get smaller and smaller. I hold onto these precious moments, because before my next blink, she will be driving and moving away to college.
I digress.
Papa Joel.
Silly spooky monsters, catchy songs, music and lyrics that make your kids get up, move and shake-this channel has been a godsend. I dance with her because honestly, I can use more exercise. 
After a particularly exciting dance-filled viewing of “zombies”, long after our bath and bedtime routine, I find myself browsing his channel alone in the living room. Why? Why is she drawn to this silly channel about worms and monsters, where the guy uses a broom to row his boat? Why is that so funny to her? What is the DRAW that sucks my kid in; mind, body and dare I say soul?
Yep, it’s a broom.
“That’s it, I’m googling this guy.” Sure enough, he has a facebook page and an instagram. And what is that I spy on a recent post? “A mummy plush?! What is this spooky goodness!? I hope he sells those.” What is the video in the post about? Car safety. Helmets. Safety first. Some of his other videos are alphabet songs, phonics, and oh yeah, kids, don’t answer the door! All things that littles need to know in this day and age as they get ready for kindy. 
Poor Mummy needs to keep his body safe!
I go to his website. “Ug, no plushies. I can download a bunch of free, cool stuff though.” And I do. We can do simple puzzles and pattern recognition. Great math-awareness skills. We can even feed Herman the Worm and Finny the…um….fish? The rabid baby narwhal? Whatever the heck Finny is. *shrugs* 
Def going with rabid baby narwhal.
The print-outs even include scissor and glue practice, yay! A parent’s dream come true! Well Joel just made tomorrow’s craft lesson EASY-PEASY. And she loved them, which is the most important part.
I hit “print” and decide I need to go back to the webstore. “Oh, he has shirts? And backpacks?! And proceeds go to Connect Me, the national FREE tutoring program?! Oh, this is so cool.”
What is Connect Me, you ask? “Connect Me Tutoring is a nonprofit organization completely started by and run by high school and college students.” says Celine Samaan, spokesperson for Connect Me. “We originally started during the pandemic and provided free, online tutoring to underprivileged students across the country that were heavily affected by the impacts of COVID-19. Since then, we’ve opened our tutoring services to any student that needs it, and we’ve tutored over 1000 students in 33+ states and 8 countries. We mostly tutor K-8 students but we try to never turn down any high school students that need help! Students are able to sign up to get tutored through an application on our website and can get between 1-5 tutoring sessions per week!” Wow, I’m keeping that knowledge in my back pocket! I’m a pretty smart cookie, but as my little grows up she might need some help that I can’t give her.
If you are a high schooler or know a high schooler who might want to tutor, spread the word. Fill out the application here. “Being a tutor at Connect Me comes with benefits: volunteer hours and experience for their resume, many tutors are able to secure leadership positions with us as time passes on (committee members up to executive board). We also offer many helpful webinars about college applications and finding internships that our members love to attend!” Celine adds.
Wholesome content, original silly songs, a partnership with a really cool non-profit? Well, this guy wins the internet for the day. So I shoot off an email to thank him for his channel and tell him he needs to sell mummy plushies. And zombie plushies. And Finny plushies. Ok, ok, all his monsters need a plush! Readers, what are the chances the man behind Papa Joel emails me back? No one emails back anymore. You get scripted replies, “Thanks for your message! Don’t forget to subscribe!” Nothing makes you feel less important, less valued than a scripted reply. Yuck.
Joel Dewald himself emails me back. We schedule a zoom so I can get the absolute scoop on everything Finny, Herman, Yeti, and baby zombie related.
Joel and son Albert run from the zombies
MV: I am hoping to get a little bit of your background. Are you a teacher or maybe you were a teacher?
JD: Sure. I’m a certified teacher in the state of Virginia. And when I got out of college, I wanted to teach history. When I was doing all these practicums in the classrooms, I noticed that the biggest struggle I was seeing was not really about making history and engaging students. It was just the kids understanding the textbooks because I was teaching a lot of ESL learners and struggling readers. I learned all these facts about world history or whatever I was going to teach, but I didn’t know how to help these kids with their academic struggle. And that was very eye-opening that this is actually a very large portion of the population in our schools, kids that are struggling readers or ESL, at least depending on your geographical location. In mine, it was.
MV: Oh, especially in Central California with our agriculture, we have a pretty high ESL population.
JD: So knowing that I did not know how to help these students was a motivator. So I went off to China and taught English there. I thought that would be a very helpful experience. And I’d also… I’d been a language learner in Spanish, and so I had some background from that aspect. I just wanted to see this whole process. How does someone at a more advanced level teach language…I was there in China teaching spoken English, and sometimes I would have a writing class. I was teaching at the university level. China ended up just preparing me for YouTube, really. I wasn’t expecting that. I just fell in love with living in China, and also fell in love with my wife, Hannah, who was in China. She’s Chinese. And so she took me in a different direction. She said, “I’m teaching kids, really young kids, preschool age, kindergarten age kids. You should help me because there is a market for learning English.” So I went in and I watched how she was having these kids sing songs. And these kids had better English than my university students. I’m like, “Whoa. How did that happen?” I wanted to know the secret. It was the power of song. They were singing songs and playing games. And they’re just so uninhibited. They would just sing, which it’s harder to get older kids to do. And that was just so wonderful because what my wife was doing in her classroom was so, so effective. You would see someone come in who didn’t speak any English, and six months later, they were playing with you and having conversations. That was so cool. So I did that for the next eight years. We ran what’s called an After-school Center for Learning English. And we focused on the preschool age, lower elementary school age. We had some advanced students who would stay with us for a long time. Those would be my upper elementary kids who would do essay writing and things. That was really useful. If I ever were to go back into a public school setting, they taught me how to do it. At least I then knew how to get them to write a paragraph that made sense. And especially during COVID, I started writing songs because I had to. I had to teach online, and I had to give them video resources to review. And so I created my own videos. I got in front of a green screen and I’m like, “This is an apple. Apples are red.” You can go back to the very beginning of my channel and see those terrible, terrible videos I made. But that was the start of my YouTube journey, because I found out when I wrote a song, it did way better than anything else I ever made. And then I figured out when I made a story, that also did really well. And so that set us on a new trajectory. I started making story songs for the kids in my classroom in China, and they also did really well on YouTube. So I thought, if I can get kids internationally, if I can just get English speakers to be interested in this, I’ll get my students interested in this too.
MV: That makes sense.
JD: Sometimes people don’t get it. They’ll wonder, “What English? Where? Where’s the writing and the grammar and stuff?” It was just properly spoken conversational English. For little kids. That was all. And that morphed into a calling, like my son saw me doing it and said, “Where’s me? Why am I not in that?” So he wanted to get in the videos.
MV: I was wondering how that came about. So it was his idea?
JD: Yeah, he saw me doing these green screen cartoon videos. He said, “Where’s me?” “You want to be in here?” “Yes!” To this day, if he doesn’t see himself on enough thumbnails, he’s like, “Where’s me, Dad?”
MV: Work on that. *laughs* Yeah, that’s awesome.
JD: So, yeah, that’s the whole backstory, compressed. In a few minutes.
MV: And you’re back in the States? And is YouTube what you do full-time?
JD: Yeah. In 2023, it just took off like a rocket. That tends to happen with… I think what happens on YouTube is you have to build slowly for a long period of time, and you get a large library of content. And then there comes this turning point, where those videos keep getting recommended, and then it’s just like a snowball effect. More videos keep recommending more videos, which keep recommending more videos. And that happened in June of 2023, and I was able to do this full-time.
MV: That’s incredible.
JD: It was pretty awesome. I’m so happy that happened.
MV: Yeah, living the dream! Can you tell me about your character development? And you mentioned that there was a particular reason that you wrote “Zombies are coming”. I’d love to hear that. That’s a favorite in our house.
JD: Okay, I do spooky stuff for kids. Not scary stuff, not horrible. You see, there’s a definite difference. Because spooky stuff is an adventure where you are safe, and the characters might actually be friendly. So at first, it was just that I noticed that certain topics, like “going on a monster hunt”, “going on a yeti hunt”, “going on a dragon hunt”, were really big, had a lot of interest. When I made those and they went really big- well my first video that ever took off was “going on a monster hunt”. Then I built a monster animated puppet. I can actually move it- I do an unusual way of animation. Then since I had a monster, I had to come up with the backstory of the monster and the personality. Even in the first video, he started having his personality. We decided on two big eyes, and he has this strange voice, gibberish. He’s a gibberish monster. I don’t know *laughs*. Whenever I introduce a character, they come along with their own personality. I don’t know why zombies went huge last year.
MV: All the parents were watching The Walking Dead. Or The Last of Us. Whatever was popular last year.
JD: That could be. I don’t even know. I don’t watch them. I just knew… People said, “My kid likes cute zombies.” I went, “Huh? Cute zombies? I’ve never heard of that before.”
MV: It’s a whole genre. It’s a whole thing. There’s a cutesy zombie movie “Warm Bodies”, where the main character turns back into human because he falls in love.
JD: Oh, I saw that movie.
MV: Yeah, it was so cute.
JD: I wanted to capture something like that because I was actually thinking of exactly that. What if instead of being atrocious unthinking cannibals, these were people with a medical condition. I introduced a zombie family that has zombiefication. I’ve never really explained that in a video because cartoons *laughs* it would just go over the heads of the kids. But I just approach it as that. It’s communicable by biting, but it’s curable within the first few days of getting bit with a zombie potion. I just ran with those rules. Then they’re trying to live a normal American life, but with additional zombie problems. I thought this has so many funny angles we could go into.
MV: Yeah, for Sure. On that note, we recently watched the zombie dance one, where you have to do the zombie dance to cure the zombieification.
JD: Oh, yeah. Yeah. But then I had this other backstory. There’s bad guys in these episodes. The bad guy is the vampire, and he owns this big company called Monster Corp.
MV: Oh, right. He’s in “The zombies are coming”.
JD: Yeah. They’re trying to tell monsters to do bad things. Like, “Be what people think you are. Be monsters.” But zombie dad teaches his kids to do good things. He’s going against the grain of that, of the bad guys in the show. I see a lot of parallels. I think a lot of corporate entities have way too much power, way too much. They can control who does business on any platform. I just conceptualized them as the catch-all for the big, bad, evil corporation that wants to control people instead of- um, I just needed a bad guy. I think a lot of people can identify with, “Oh yeah, those evil corporations.”
MV: Well, yeah but it introduces that idea to children in an easy to digest fashion. We can’t come right out and spew economics to five-year-olds. *laughs*
JD: Yeah, but there’s always redemption, right? We invite the vampire to do the right thing… He can take this zombie potion that will cure his problem, he can step into the daylight, but he refuses. Anyway, things like that go over my viewer’s heads. Yeah, there needs to be a story and there needs to be bad guys in the story.
MV: Every good story has good guys and bad guys. That’s just a fact.
JD: Yeah. So just try not to make them too bad. They can have redemption.
MV: Your bad guys are not that bad. And your good guys, they might be “bad” because they’re undead, but they’re so cute.
JD: That’s the framework I’m working on. There’s this whole backstory, and they all have personalities. Like the monster family, the dad loves motorcycles, and the zombie family, the mom and dad met in a band. They are musicians. That has never come into the storyline, but that’s in my head.
MV: Oh, got it. I was like, “I don’t think I’ve seen that video.” *laughs*. Is that difficult for you to jump in and start acting and creating all of these stories for your characters?
JD: Oh, that’s the most fun part. What do they talk like? What are their mannerisms? What is their story?
MV: You do most of the voices, right?
JD: Yes, except for Hannah. She does her own voice.
MV: What would you say your favorite part is of all that, then? Would it be coming up with characters or something else in the process?
JD: That’s a good question. Finding something that connects with my audience. That’s my favorite part. I remember….. I saw all this stuff, and I felt like I have the opportunity to take some of these trends I see on YouTube and put them in a positive light. Like, zombies biting people was a trend, but I don’t like that at all. So I made a video about… It’s one of my most popular ones actually, “Baby zombie, no biting.” It’s about a baby zombie who has a biting problem, but it’s like, also normal children sometimes have a biting problem. His parents are mortified about it.
MV: Oh, yeah. No, but it’s a very common thing for children to go through.
JD: Right. Parents have to model good teaching, which is what I did for my son. I said, “No biting. Biting hurts.” I made up the song. And then we would walk through, “Can you bite an apple?” “Yes.” “Can you bite your teacher?” “No.” But it didn’t happen right away. That behavior stops eventually. It took a process. You have to stay calm through the process.
MV: Oh, yes. It’s tough. It’s hard. And repetition, repetition, repetition.
JD: Yes. Repetition. I think that’s what made it connect so well, because it wasn’t just about the trend of zombies biting. It was about something at a deeper level that a lot of kids were dealing with. We sang it to our second kid too, “Baby zombie, no biting, biting hurts.” Anyway, that’s my favorite part when I can have some positive spin on something, a positive message that connects.
MV: Are you inspired much by your parenting moments? Will you be dealing with something and go, “Oh, man, it’d be so helpful to make a video that deals with this?”
JD: I’m mostly inspired by what I see out there, on the web. I made one about sibling jealousy because we happened to be dealing with that. It didn’t do very well (yet!), which did come from noticing my kids were fighting over toys and things. I would say I just reach into the reservoir. I see what’s working, what people are interested in online. Then I go into my reservoir of experience and then with our family. Then I’ll think about when I was a kid and try and pick out things. “Okay, how do we deal with this?” I think trends are simply audience interests. Letting audience interests inform how we tell a story is how we get inspired.
MV: Then it’s hard to really tell the direction you’re going, right? Because that’s all dependent on what you think is popular in that moment?
JD: Yeah…..Probably right now something about using cell phones properly would be good. We’re going through a moment of that. I see that trending. I have to wait until I see a topic coming. I can plan about two months out.
MV: Yeah, that makes sense. Because even if you’re riding the tail end of something, it’s still going to spark interest. Do you have a marketing background that helps you with that stuff, or did you just pick that up as you went?
JD: No, I learned from smart people. I learned from a guy named Nate Black. He runs a YouTube education channel. He was just very good at helping you understand different types of content and which type you wanted to be and the fit with your personality. He also taught me how to look at the trends in one specific area. For me, it was kids’ music. Then I learned from another really smart guy named Derral Eves of Channel Jumpstart. Anything that I do marketing-wise, like reading the market, I just had to learn from others while doing video.
MV: What about your music background? Obviously, you come up with your own jingles, but are you able to translate that into notes, or do you have someone that helps you with that?
JD: I’ve always been writing music. I’m a rocker. I was a rocker kid. I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up.
MV: Wow! Well, you’re there, kind of. A little, maybe. For kids at least. *laughs*
JD: Maybe.*laughs* I feel like I’m on the YouTube indie rock segment. There are other people doing the pop thing.
MV: There you go-I mean, spooky music is a niche deal anyways. I think you’ve got the market on that.
JD: Yeah. I loved super alt bands, like the Pixies. Anything weird, I loved it. And anything popular, I hated it.
MV: Oddly, me too. Yeah. And once it became popular, I was done. For me, I loved Modest Mouse until they became mainstream. And then I was like, “Guys, this just isn’t cool anymore. This is too much trumpet for me.” *laughs*
JD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that. So I think my tribe-hopefully- understands.
MV: Well, it’s not like you sold out, you kinda can’t sell out to YouTube. You’re making your own content. That’s perfect.
JD: That’s everybody’s dream. Yeah, and that’s super fun. And I don’t really… I would work with a brand if they were really on point, but…..like toys are way too expensive these days. I’ll be looking to buy toys for my kids, and everything on the shelf is 50 bucks. I don’t like that. That’s why I put out three printable toys in the box. (Editor’s note: he has free printables on his website.)
MV: Yeah! And kids will play with the toy for a day, maybe a week, and then the novelty is worn off because they have figured out all the different ways to play with that toy, and then they’re done with it. Yeah. So like, open-ended play is really where it’s at. Like maybe do Monster Sensory bins.
JD: Yeah. We love Montessori. Monster bins, I haven’t thought of that. But kids love locks and unlocks, and keys.
MV: For sure. Any goals that you want to talk about or maybe your partnership with Connect Me Go? Do you see that doing anything, and going anywhere?
JD: I’ve always wanted to help kids get an education, especially kids who are struggling. That’s why I became a teacher. When Connect Me talked to me, I just immediately fell in love with what they’re doing. Because when I was a high school student, I wanted to volunteer. I wanted to help out, but I didn’t know any way to do that. Then some high school kids came up with this really cool idea, and Connect Me was born. It allows high school kids to use their skills. Then on the flip side, I really could have used tutoring like that when I was a kid, especially in middle school, going through algebra. So bad at math.
MV: I’m in accounting for a living, and I can’t do that math! I’m like, “Geometry? Uh-uh. No, I’ll pay someone to build me something. I’m not doing it.”
JD: It’s so cool that there’s kids who are good at stuff who want to help out. Yeah. I think, especially because their goal is to close the learning gap caused by COVID-19. All right, high school kids are saving the world!
MV: Right? And they’re going to continue saving the world. Man, this generation is doing things, and it’s great.
JD: I want to be involved with stuff like that. Like I said, I don’t like the $50 toy model, I don’t want to promote a $50 toy, but I do like promoting a charity that helps kids. I would like to get into fan meetups and experiences, like a concert, someday. I’ve gone to some kids’ performances with my kids, and it’s just this memory that stays with you for life. That would be the long-term goal.
MV: Nice!
JD: And saving the world.
MV: Yeah, that’d be awesome. We’ll just do that at the same time. No big deal, saving the world. Just an average Tuesday, am I right? *laughs* Some of my best memories are doing things with my kid. The absolute best is seeing her happy and enjoying something. Thank you so much for taking the time to zoom with me today! What is one last thing you want to leave our readers with?
JD: A good dad joke. Why did the manatee cross the road?
MV: I don’t know. Why?
JD: There was a flood.
Check out PapaJoelsEnglish on YouTube and visit his website for some really cool stuff. And if your student needs tutoring or would love to tutor someone, check out Connect Me.
