![]() Kaktus agreed to make the animation on condition that they had carte blanche to do what they wanted. Wolfgang Boss, executive president of A&R at Sony Music, wanted to pair the frog with a sped-up version of the theme tune to Beverly Hills Cop, a song called Axel F. “I myself got annoyed with it,” admits Söderberg. Jamba! then spent an unprecedented amount of money promoting the infectious ringtone on TV – in May 2005, it was shown 2,378 times a day – incurring the wrath of the British public. Kaktus agreed an advance and a royalties arrangement (“obviously way too low”, says Söderberg) and the deal was done. In 2004, ringtones were a billion-dollar industry with their own charts – even printed in the pages of NME, to the horror of some loyal readers. The first came when the mobile phone content provider Jamba! called Wernquist, who had landed a job at Kaktus thanks to his frog design, to ask if they could license the character’s noise for a ringtone. There were two important steps in Crazy Frog’s original ascent to cultural infamy. ![]() Kaktus decided that the world was telling it one thing: bring back the frog. Earlier this year, Rita Ora sampled the Axel F track in her song Bang Bang (though this is news to Söderberg). Interest seemed to surge a few years ago, says Söderberg, who claims that it was at one point getting 4m new views per day. The original hit has more than 3bn views on YouTube, making it the 26th most-watched video on the site, and the Crazy Frog YouTube channel has 11.5m subscribers. Not to be quite stopped there, the follow-up arrived in 2009 in the shape of Everybody Dance Now, which included the single "Cha Cha Slide" and "No Limit".You might well question who wants this dated irritation back, but the frog fandom endures. In 2006, the Crazy Frog phenomenon was still healthy in Europe, with toys and gadgets available and a potential TV series in the works that summer, the Frog dropped another album, aptly named More Crazy Hits. Later that summer, the ringtone and full-length album Crazy Frog Presents Crazy Hits marked the Frog's arrival in the States. It was so popular that it kept Coldplay's comeback single, Speed of Sound, from debuting at number one. Crazy Frog's popularity peaked in the spring and summer of 2005, when the full-length single of the "Axel F" ringtone, which was created by members of the German production team Bass Bumpers and based on Harold Faltermeyer's instrumental theme for Beverly Hills Cop, topped the U.K. By 2004, the character - rechristened Crazy Frog - was licensed as a sound and video ringtone for cellular phones and was accompanied by a massive advertising push that included a deluge of TV commercials. Though Wernquist initially credited the Annoying Thing's voice as "Anonymous," Malmedahl eventually contacted him and Wernquist gave credit where it was due.nn The Annoying Thing made its debut as a marketing tool in 2001, when it appeared in Belgian ringtone commercials. Fellow Swede Erik Wernquist, a computer animator, heard Malmedahl's noises in 2000 and was inspired by his impression of a moped motor to create the Annoying Thing, and posted the animation on his website, where it also became a popular Net attraction. In the late '90s, Swedish teen Daniel Malmedahl began recording his impressions of internal combustion motors after he performed on a television show, the impressions were posted on the Internet and became a fad among file-sharers. Though Crazy Frog mania began its momentum in 2004, the character's creation took several years. Originally known as "the Annoying Thing," the helium-voiced, bluish-gray, anatomically correct CGI lump Crazy Frog became a pop culture epidemic in Europe and especially the U.K., with ringtones, TV commercials, pop songs, and other forms of (over)exposure.
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