Imagine hearing a song you’ve never heard before, and falling in love with it, then finding out it’s the very song that you’d been reading hateful internet posts about for more than a year. Oh, how it hurts to be tricked into digging Kelly Clarkson…
In the toy department in the BHV department store in Paris, I came across a goofy little plush gremlin wearing an old-school motorcycle helmet. I picked him up and squeezed him, and was rewarded with a Sean-Stevens-style onomatopædic two-stroke engine sound. I almost died laughing, and listened another dozen times, but I was too cheap to pay €30 for the thing. When I got home, I looked it up on the internet and found it was the “Annoying Thing”, the basis of the “Crazy Frog” Axel-F-ringtone CD that topped the British charts last year. Cy will never let me live this down, but if you remove it from it’s pop-culture context, it’s pretty damn funny.
Yes, you will never live it down. hehe.
We know it simply as “The Crazy Frog”.
Ringtone commercials here are way annoying. At the frog’s commercial pinnacle, it was on tv two or three times per commercial break. Kinda force feeding the market into liking it. and it worked.
The kids loved it. Adults hated it.
On a serious note though, it became a big problem here for kids in schools, as they’d all mimic the frog noise.
The ring tone managed to upset the whole country.
Re-releasing the axel-f theme is bad enough, but with this thing on its back, and the marketing it had, it was bound to go to number one. I beleive they actually made an album of songs with the crazy frog on it. This was basically the two stroke “ring a ding ding ding ding” noise the frog makes, chopped up and crowbarred into secondhand hits that have been re-released too many times.
It’s making me cringe just thinking about it. **shudder**
Cy
wait. Which came first??
I’d swear I heard this same audio clip p[assed around Portland scooter email two or three years ago.
Read the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Frog
it’s actually kind of fascinating. The sound was bouncing around the internet for a while with various video clips before the frog was added and it became the famous ringtone. Also, cy’s not exaggerating the frequency of the ad:
Yes it was being passed around the internet for years before the frog ever was put to the track.
zwei takt pritchard is what I’ve got it listed as on a Napster (remember when it was free?) cd rom from quite a few years back.
Someone else mentioned “Pump Up the Trabbi” as a potential source for the “Sean Stevens mimics the Ham Sandwich” tone.