People of a certain age might’ve never thought they’d see the day Snoop Dogg, once the figurehead of West Coast rap influenced by gang culture, would be rapping to kids about kindness and being in touch with their feelings. But the Snoop of 2024 is a way different from the one we met 30 years ago, and now, among the many ventures keeping the Olympics correspondent and football coach busy is his job as a kids’ TV star. 

Yup, you read that right: Mr. Drop It Like It's Hot has dropped the bandanas and low-riders and traded thug life for soft life, teaching kids vital life lessons and emotional intelligence in the animated series "Doggyland." Created alongside creative partner Claude Brooks, "Doggyland" is an adorable, family-friendly series about a colorful cast of dogs who sing, rap, and dance to bops that promote social-emotional and cognitive development in little ones ages 2 to 8. Now racking up a staggering 1.5 million views per day across varying platforms (including YouTube Kids, HappyKids.tv, and Kidoodle), "Doggyland" is not only part of the rapper’s evolution but a testament to the power of hip-hop and Brook’s vision of promoting healing through music and entertainment. 

“Learning how to understand your own feelings, that your feelings matter and but more importantly, so does everybody else's around you is important,” Brooks tells BET.com “Saying please and thank you, that we don't want to be rude…as adults we can something like with a kind of nursery rhyme kind of beat to it, the hip hop underneath it, all of a sudden you're just singing this stuff, and you don't realize, ‘Oh, this is becoming part of how I should do things.’” 

The creatives go way back, first connecting more than a decade ago when Brooks, a former child actor who then formed a production company, C To The B Productions, went on to executive produce and create hundreds of episodes of television, including the MTV sketch series "The Lyricist Lounge Show." Though their paths diverged a bit since -- with Brooks going on to create the Emmy-nominated children's series "Hip Hop Harry" -- he and the D-O-double G reconnected two years ago to form Doggyland Media and the "Doggyland" series. Snoop, long known for his work with kids, including the hilariously bawdy flick The Underdoggs, and Brooks saw an opportunity to merge meaningful material for kids with rap swag, and Doggyland was born.  “We knew using song would be a great way to reinforce things that we're trying to teach,” Brooks says––referring to the gamut of topics "Doggyland" teaches, from properly brushing teeth to showing respect to people unlike ourselves.

Snoop himself voices the main character, Bow Wizzle, the grown-up mentor to the squad; Wags, the group’s hype man; Chow Wow, the sensitive one; high energy Yap Yap; and Barks-A-Locks, the adventurous explorer. With some 70 episodes up so far, "Doggyland" is just hitting its stride but already a huge success: one "Doggyland" song, "Affirmations," was the #1 kids song across all digital streaming platforms in 2023. Brooks says Snoop is a workaholic who’ll have Brooks over at Snoop’s compound to bang out a batch of dialogue and songs, after which point their high-quality, labor-intensive animation is labored over for months before hitting screens. But with such a massive, overwhelmingly positive response so far, Doggyland has higher heights to climb––and big expansion plans. 

“We're getting teachers and parents reach out to us, parents of kids who are on the spectrum, and they're saying that they're really responding to what we do,” says Brooks. “Kids are dancing along to the choreography [and saying], like, ‘I believe I in myself.’ Snoop and I want to normalize this kind of conversation.” 

New episodes of "Doggyland" drop on Tuesdays.