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The crazy frog prince
  Posted: June 10, 2005
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KCRW's radio show, The Business, has a great segment on the world's most popular mobile phone ring tone, and its strange and backward route to the top (you can listen to the show on-line, the story is about 14 minutes in). Here's their short description of the story:

...a song made from a cell phone ring-tone and attributed to an animated frog on the Internet tops the pop charts in the UK. We take a listen to Crazy Frog and examine its weird journey to European pop culture ubiquity. Is a ring-tone-turned-pop song a sign of the coming apocalypse?

In a nutshell, here's the provenance (for more details, see this archive history):

• 1997 -- Swedish teenager Daniel Malmedahl records his vocal impression of his friend's moped engine. It sounds so odd and annoying, friends pass it around at parties and by computer.
• 2001 -- the sound starts circulating on the web, appearing here, among other places. Bouncing from friend to friend, newsgroup to web link.
• 2003 -- computer animator Erik Wernquist hears the sound on-line and creates a strange animation to go with it, featuring a frog-like character called 'The Annoying Thing.'' The sound and the animation become a high-traffic web element once again.
• 2004 -- German company Jamba! buys the rights to ''The Annoying Thing,'' and releases it as a mobile phone ring tone called ''Crazy Frog.'' The tone becomes the most popular of all the company's ring tones and a cultural phenomenon in Europe (where everyone has a mobile phone), leading to a whole host of related ''Crazy Frog'' products (screensavers, games, and such).
• 2005 -- a musical single featuring the sound (mixed with the 1980s song from Beverly Hills Cop called ''Axel F'') hits the top of the UK singles charts, because people can't get enough of that strange, demonic, motorcycle-riding frog, and long to dance to it. Meanwhile, some other Britons decide that they've heard enough.

It's not clear what message or insight we might draw from this strange journey, especially as it contrasts to the creative production of most other cultural works. Perhaps it underscores the grassroots/word-of-mouth power of the Internet. Perhaps it proves that we've all gone nuts.

One thing's for sure. The ''crazy frog'' is already in America and finding its way onto mobile phones...so prepare yourselves.