Sunday, August 21, 2005

internet...your key to fame?

Watching C4 the other day, for the first time I saw the video clip to Crazy Frog…yeah I know its been around for awhile…but it brought me back to last semester Sociology 211 when we watched a few versions of the Crazy Frog thing and also the Numa Numa dance thing. Its kind of funny to think that just playing around with a webcam or experimenting with sound effects could make two guys so famous. I guess it just shows how much the internet is really capable of.

Crazy Frog originated from17 year old Swedish Daniel Malmedahl who was really into imitating the sounds of combustion engines. His friends saw comedic potenitial in his impressions and posted some of these on the internet. A researcher heard Daniel’s impressions on the internet and asked him to appear on a Swedish television show. It was after this show that Daniel’s recording started to appear on peer to peer file sharing networks and websites all over the internet. In 2003 the Crazy Frog animation was created by another Swede, Erik Wenquist, though it was then known as The Annoying Thing. It was in 2004 that a German company Jamba licensed The Annoying Thing renamed it Crazy Frog. Crazy Frog started off as a ringtone and Jamba earned at estimated £ 14 million from the ringtone. After that came the Crazy Frog song and video clip, video game, computer virus and even Crazy Frog popcorn! How crazy is that?! All because of some guy’s impressions of engines….

The Numa Numa dance is kind of a similar story. A guy used his webcam to record himself lip synching a Romanian song and dancing along to it. I think it’s so funny. Gary Brolsma actually published his Numa Numa dance in 2004 and then turned into a huge “web celebrity”, although he is now supposedly embarrassed of this performance and is not very hapy about his fame. But you can now buy T-shirts and other Numa Numa dance memorabilia and there was even a Numa Numa dance competition to become the next Gary Brolsma. If you haven’t seen the Numa Numa dance you can do a Google search on Numa Numa dance and there’s a whole lot of websites where you can watch it. I think it’s worth watching…it’s hilarious (but that could just be me..).

Anyway, all this just got me thinking about all the possibilities that the Internet offers people and in just how many ways people have got into it.

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