All parents of Minecraft-obsessed children have learned a new song by heart this year. “LA-LA-LA-LAVA CHI-CHI-CHI-CHICKEN” booms Jack Black from the treacherous Alexa for the thirtieth time that day, and I quietly put my head in my hands and weep.
The 34-second earworm Lava Chicken is the shortest song ever to crack the Billboard top 100, and now it’s been adapted into the game itself. Minecraft’s 1.21.94 update adds the music disc Lava Chicken by Hyper Potions (spotted by Dexerto), a remixed version of the track that brings it in-line with the game’s audio style.
How do you get it? Mojang has gone double meme: you need to find and defeat a chicken jockey in the game, which is a baby zombie riding a chicken. These are pretty rare mobs: if there are no chickens around, a spawned zombie has a 0.25% chance of being a chicken jockey; if there are chickens around, this is bumped to 0.4875%.
Mojang has clearly decided to fully embrace the movie’s silliness, and this isn’t the first thing to make the leap from the big screen into the game. The addition of Happy Ghasts with harnesses and leashes, basically a flying mount, allowed players to recreate the airship seen in one of the movie’s big action scenes, where piglins chase the film’s heroes through the sky on Ghasts.
No doubt Jack Black is currently beavering away on the song’s successor: A Minecraft Movie looks to be the most successful videogame movie ever made, and the Warner Bros. suits have already confirmed a sequel.
Not a little of that success can be put down to Lava Chicken and the chicken jockey moment, which became something of an IRL viral meme: when the scene was playing in cinemas, kids would just scream “chicken jockey” back at the screen. It got so raucous on some occasions that the cops had to be called, though the prize surely goes to the guy who brought an actual chicken to watch the movie.
