- Set fire to your hair
- Poke a stick at a grizzly bear
- Eat medicines that’s out of date
- Use your private parts as piranha bait
- Get your toast out with a fork
- Do your own electrical work
- Teach yourself how to fly
- Eat a two week old unrefrigerated pie
- Invite a psycho-killer inside
- Scratch your drug dealer’s brand new ride
- Take your helmet off in outer space
- Use your clothes dryer as a hiding placeerine-kitty-dumb-ways-to-die-lyrics.html ]
- Keep a rattlesnake as pet
- Sell both the kidneys on the internet
- Eat a tube of superglue
- Dress up like a moose during hunting season
- Disturb a nest of wasps for no good reason
- Stand on the edge of a train station platform
- Drive around the boom gates at a level crossing
- Run across the tracks between the platform
Dumb Ways to Die is a public service announcement campaign by Metro Trains in Melbourne, Australia to promote rail safety. The campaign went viral through sharing and social media starting in November 2012.
The campaign was devised by advertising agency McCann Melbourne. It appeared in newspapers, local radio, outdoor advertising, throughout the Metro Trains network and on Tumblr. John Mescall, executive creative director of McCann, said "The aim of this campaign is to engage an audience that really doesn’t want to hear any kind of safety message, and we think Dumb Ways To Die will." McCann estimated that within two weeks it had generated at least $50 million worth of global media value in addition to more than 700 media stories, for "a fraction of the cost of one TV ad". According to Metro Trains, the campaign contributed to a more than 30% reduction in "near-miss" accidents, from 13.29 near-misses per million kilometres in November 2011 – January 2012, to 9.17 near-misses per million kilometres in November 2012 – January 2013.
A video was developed by Pat Baron, animated by Julian Frost and produced by Cinnamon Darvall. It was uploaded to YouTube on 14 November 2012 and made public two days later. It used black comedy and featured "a variety of cute characters killing themselves in increasingly idiotic ways" culminating in three characters being killed by trains due to unsafe behaviour. It was viewed 2.7 million times within 48 hours and 4.7 million times within 72 hours. Within two weeks the video had been viewed 28 million times and spawned 85 parodies
