Elijah Wood does the Yo Gabba Gabba! dance

Watching Yo Gabba Gabba! can be a disturbing experience. Is that really Elijah Wood doing a strange puppet- master dance? And that shaggy mad scientist teaching kids about art — could that be Mark Mothersbaugh, lead singer of Devo? And wait, what role does a human beatbox have in preschool kids’ TV? And why would hip-hop star Biz Markie be teaching it?

Indeed, with appearances from R&B singer Mya, the Shins, skateboard superstar Tony Hawk, Supernova, Sugarland, Low, the Salteens, the Roots, Jack McBrayer from 30 Rock, and the Mates of State, Yo Gabba Gabba! has more top music and Hollywood A-list names than Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. It’s on kids’ cable channel Nick Jr and yet it’s so hip that Jack Black’s wife actually e-mailed the show and begged them to let the fat funnyman on. And last week it was nominated for a Bafta Children’s Award.

It feels as if a couple of LA slackers with mates in the business have put the show together and asked their chums to come along. Which is pretty much what happened. The show is the brainchild of Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz, who’ve been playing in bands on the fringes of the city’s scene for years. Jacobs is a child actor turned front man for ska-punk outfit the Aquabats; Schultz is the singer with indie strummers Majestic. They came up with the idea after Jacobs’s child refused to eat his carrots. To persuade him that the other food he’d eaten was hosting a party in his stomach and that the carrots were missing out on the fun, he wrote the catchy There’s a Party in My Tummy. It’s a tight piece of pop techno with a call-and-response chorus: “Cheese! Yeah. In my tummy. Party, party. Yeah. There’s a party in my tummy. So yummy! So yummy!” It’s like the Beastie Boys doing Sesame Street.

“About the time we both had our first kids, we started to watch a lot of preschool entertainment,” Jacobs explains. “We remembered Sesame Street as being really cool from when we were kids, but it’s all changed now. I thought it had kind of lost its mojo. We started coming up with ideas, like, ‘What could be a really good music-based show, not just for our kids, but for us to enjoy with our kids?’ And in a way, Yo Gabba Gabba! is trying to get back to that 1970s, groovier Sesame Street in its spirit.”

The resulting show sees DJ Lance Rock hosting in Gabbaland like a cross between Snoop Dogg and Deee-Lite’s Groove Is in the Heart. In furry hat and red jump suit, he leads five toy monsters — Muno, Foofa, Brobee, Toodee and Plex — on their mission to, um, “edutain” the young. Everything is resolutely lo-fi, using pixelated graphics and simple animations, but with typical preschool teaching tunes. Hence, there’s a blend of songs about brushing your teeth or the unbearably catchy ska track Pick It Up about tidying your room, as well as Dancey Dance Time (where celebrities teach their best moves) and The Super Music Friends Show, where the likes of the Shins and Smoosh appear.

The new season begins on Nick Jr in the UK this weekend with a Hallowe’en special perfectly demonstrating the show’s hip schizophrenia. The Fall Song warbles about the changing seasons, Trick or Treat explains the door-to-door sweet-nabbing tradition, while Too Much Candy speaks out in favour of moderation, followed by Biz Markie with Biz’s Beat of the Day and alt-rock electronica outfit Shiny Toy Guns. It will breed the slickest generation ever.

Inevitably, the show has become a YouTube smash. More than 466 posts reference Party in My Tummy, spoof it, remix it or create their own videos for it. Almost every tune from the show has the same hit count — millions of computer-literate adults are clearly in thrall to Yo Gabba Gabba!

“I don’t really know why it’s such a huge hit,” Schultz shrugs. “Maybe it’s because there’s all these guys in bands having kids now and turning up on the show. It’s also ideal for the internet age. Half the people remixing our songs online are college kids.”

For the future, the duo would like to get Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz on the show, as well as Run DMC and Bill Murray. “I hope Bill can be persuaded to reprise his role as the middle-aged Hercules from Saturday Night Live. He had a routine where the king set up a re-creation of the labours of Hercules for the Colosseum crowd, but Bill would be, like, ‘No, I am sorry. I can’t lift a rock that large. Perhaps I could in my younger days; perhaps I could lift a smaller one,’ hoisting up a stone about the size of a paperweight. The crowd would golf-clap and roll their eyes. Now that would be a good dancey-dance.”

Yo Gabba Gabba! is on Nick Jr daily at 7.30am

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