A 60-second parody of the famous Coca-Cola commercial, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” conceived by Island activist John Sellers and produced by Vashon’s Church of Great Rain, has gone viral, garnering nearly 75,000 hits on YouTube in the last several weeks.

The provocative parody, a shot at the controversial conservative billionaires David and Charles Koch (pronounced Coke), was shown at the comedy revue’s season finale Sunday before an audience of nearly 600. Melodic and catchy, it opens with popular Island vocalist Sarah Christine singing, “I’d like to buy the Kochs a world, so they’d leave ours alone.” 

From there, the video — a close facsimile of the original in both staging and mood — pans the faces of dozens of Islanders, standing in a grassy field and singing happily, as they accuse the Koch brothers of financing the Tea Party. It ends with a close-up of a beatific-looking Alex Clarke singing, “They’re the evil thing.”

The parody marks a milestone for Vashon’s home-grown Church of Great Rain, which for some time has wanted to produce a video that would garner national attention. Jeff Hoyt, lead writer for the group, said the video is far more political than the Church of Great Rain is; the group, he said, took it on as a job — it was hired by Sellers’ Agit-Pop Communications — as well as a challenge.

“We wanted to see if we could execute a project like this,” Hoyt said.

David Godsey, another lead player in the Church of Great Rain, said he acted as the project’s artistic director, working with musician Adrienne Mildon, videographer Eric Perlman and others to pull off what was a complex production.

“We wanted to capture the spirit of the original one closely enough so that people would really get it,” he said. 

Godsey, Perlman and Mildon viewed the original commercial several times, Godsey said. Cindy Hoyt, a writer for the Church, helped Sellers with the lyrics. Mildon recruited singers and musicians. 

They gathered on Friday, April 22, Earth Day, in the field next to the Open Space for what turned out to be a full day of filming. 

Godsey estimates the effort took 500 to 700 hours of various people’s time. “For 60 seconds of produced video, there’s easily 40 people behind it,” he said.

The Kochs have come under increasing scrutiny for the role they’ve played in financing a radically conservative political movement. The two brothers own Koch Industries, a conglomerate and the second-largest privately held company in the United States.