El antídoto del dragón: A Spanish Rock Opera for the Classroom
Published onMar 08, 2023 • • ViewMusic Videoblog posts
Over two years ago, Nate Niederkorn and I sat down to write a rock song about a princess who accidentally drank a glass of poison.
It came together relatively quickly, and before long we had a rough draft of a 13-minute rock opera.
But there was one big problem:
It was clearly never going to get made.
The completely impractical Spanish rock opera
The story was too big. The song was too long. And while our production budgets had grown quite a bit since the days when I was asking friends to film me moping down the street in Me duele, this was still beyond anything we could reasonably afford.
Still, we didn't give up.
I spent the early months of the Covid lockdown talking with every animation studio that would even take a meeting. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, after explaining what we wanted to make, we were laughed out of more than a few Zoom calls.
And then, right when I was getting close to giving up, I found two brothers in Bogotá, Colombia: Andrés and Sebastián Luna.
We found the people crazy enough to make it with us
Andrés and Sebastián heard the song and immediately understood what we were trying to make.
We geeked out over a shared love of fantasy, fairy tales, and traditional 2D animation. I hired them in January 2021.
For the next 26 months, Andrés, Sebastián, Juan Carlos Pinilla and I worked to bring this ridiculous thing to life.
The finished project became a genuinely international production: animated in Bogotá, performed by musicians in Chicago and Spain, and sung by vocalists from Chicago, Chile, and Argentina.
So what is El antídoto del dragón?
It starts simply enough: a princess accidentally drinks a glass of poison.
To survive, she has to find the missing ingredient for an antidote. That sends her on a journey involving a mysterious wizard, a fire-breathing dragon, skeletons, a volcano, and some butterflies that are definitely, absolutely, completely normal.
Musically, this thing is unapologetically rock. We even go a little metal.
It was also our first full-blown Wooly rock opera. At roughly 13 minutes, it plays less like one long song and more like four Wooly songs stitched together into a single story.
That's right. We made a 13-minute Spanish rock opera about a poisoned princess who needs dragon blood.
Useful Spanish Vocabulary and Grammar in El antídoto del dragón
For a 13-minute rock opera with dragons, poison, creepy butterflies, skeletons, and an alarming amount of discussion about blood, El antídoto del dragón contains a surprising amount of extremely useful Spanish.
Students hear dar again and again in meaningful context: dame tu sangre, no te la va a dar, se niega a darte su sangre.
They hear temer from different perspectives: temo morir, no nos temas, no temas a las mariposas, no te temo.
And negarse a + infinitive becomes part of the story itself. The princess refuses to die. The dragon refuses to give her his blood.
There's also repeated exposure to language like necesitas, le falta, depende de, voy a morir, vas a morir, and past-tense narration such as había, bebió, fue, and vivía.
And we didn't start with a grammar list
We didn't sit down and say, “Let's write a song that teaches object pronouns.”
We wrote about a princess who needed a dragon to give her his blood.
The useful language came out of what the characters needed to say to each other. That's why students encounter things like te la va a dar inside a story where understanding the phrase actually matters.
That's much closer to how I want language to work in Wooly: story first, language in service of the story.
Read more about the Wooly story-first philosophy →The project I disappeared into
Everything about Antídoto was impractical. It was too long. It was too expensive. It took more than two years to make.
But it was also the project we buried ourselves in while the world was locked down and seemed to be losing its mind.
I went pretty quiet during those years. Like a lot of people, I was dealing with some severe anxiety, and for reasons I still don't fully understand, I needed to get off social media and disappear for a while.
But I wasn't done making things.
We were meticulously creating the most challenging story of our careers. We made it for you. We made it for your students.
And technically, Antídoto existed before the video
Longtime Wooly readers may recognize the title. El antídoto del dragón is the book Lucía lends Víctor near the beginning of our graphic novel Me llamo Víctor.
And here’s the strange part: by the time Me llamo Víctor was published, we had already been working on the Antídoto music video. The fictional book and the enormous animated rock opera were growing up alongside each other.
Yes, we made five days of lessons for a 13-minute rock opera
Watching the video is only the beginning.
Inside Wooly, El antídoto del dragón has a complete 5-day lesson plan built around the story and its language.
The plans include the instruction, rationales, and leveled resources so teachers can adapt the activities for different groups of students.
So if you found this page because you were looking for a Spanish song, a comprehensible Spanish story, or Spanish listening practice for your students, you can watch the complete video above for free. If you want to turn it into a week of instruction, that's where Wooly comes in.
Want to teach El antídoto del dragón?
Open El antídoto del dragón in your teacher account and head to the lesson plans.
Log in to Wooly →Wooly combines memorable Spanish stories and music with scaffolded classroom materials built around them.
Explore Señor Wooly →
