@@daveweston2042haha, its only because i'm currently trying to get jimmythegiant audience over to the pod so its more recognisable. We are reshooting thumbnails soon and going to experiment with different styles. don't worry!
Being born in 97 thus 7 years old in 2004, it was the funniest thing in the world to me at the time. I had this as a ringtone for several years. So long that I didn't change it until Fireflies by Owl City came out in 2009. So that was a solid 5 years I had Crazy Frog. It was truly massive at the time.
@@SoloSanguine I was born In 91 too and I think I know why this is. I had a phone in your equivalent to 5th grade here in the UK. Phones back then did a great deal of not alot. You could text and phone but the excitement ended at listening to the list of ringtones or playing a terrible "game" if you were lucky.... The biggest showcase was the aftermarket case your old dear bought you off a market stall for £2:50 !! You have to remember that after the millennium, technology really took off and it wasn't long before phones were being sold that were centred around certain aspects like gaming phones and Walkman phones.... It's only natural that as they got more advanced they'd appeal more to kids... hence why when I was in 6th grade a Nokia 3310 would have cost you £100 as if was top of the range. A top of the range phone now will set you back £1500+ to buy out right!! ... Not because they cost more to make but purely because people are so addicted to them now they have that constant dopamine tap. Kids playing up? Buy them a cheap one to keep them quite whilst you sit glued to yours too! 😅
@@SoloSanguine many kids had a Nokia or Sony Erikson in 2004. I was too young to take any note of how much it cost, but we definitely had mobile phones. Cheap enough that many kids had them for Birthday or Christmas. When Blackberry Messenger came out, that's when I remember almost everyone being glued to their phones for hours on end for the first time, both kids and adults. And BBM was mid to late 00's.
I worked in a mobile phone call centre around this time, and believe me they were a nuisance. You'd regularly get people phoning up asking why their bill was huge and they were near impossible to contact. If you want another idea for a scam video, check out the mobile phone cashback scams around the same time. They were way worse.
Same! I worked for a mobile phone's call center back then and after a while, I went from answering the phone to replying to written complaints. There were so many people who saw an advert to get their horoscope sent to their phone for 50cts (for exemple) but at the end of the month, they were surprised (and very pissed off) when they saw a big amount charged to them on their phone bill. Every time they were sent their horoscope by SMS, they were charged and some people received their daily horoscope, a joke, some kind of inspiration quote or whatever, sometimes even twice a day! At some point, it got so bad that the EU had to intervene and decided that if someone requested a refund, these companies had to refund them, no questions asked! I remember spending half of the day requesting refunds for our customers and making sure people were indeed refunded.
@@Sadlander2not just horoscopes, I remember there was something else that did this and you couldn't cancel and it just kept messaging you. I kinda suspected a scam so I used my pay as you go phone with no credit to sign up, I was funny watching them trying to charge me each week but failing. Went on for months with no way to cancel lol! Felt sorry for anyone who had legit signed up for this crap.
What was even worse than the weekly payment, was the inability to unsubscribe from the service. I recall there being either a law or court case, where ringtone companies had to include an easy unsub method.
11:59 they actually showed there how to unsub from this one. But I do remember that part ye, once was so naive to buy "one ringtone" and got screw'd hard, had to get a new number and everything, cancel that simcard XD
The rabbit and the yummy gummy bear ring tones stand out as way worst in my head. Seeing the clip of the rabbit literally gave me a bit of a traumatic flashback😂 I remember the gummy bear being kinda crusty looking which always disturbed me, like it felt seedy and adult but under the guise of kid friendly. The frog was annoying but almost managed to remain marginally cool from what I remember😅
I couldn’t have known at the time that these were all related from the same company but this unlocked these core memories and I understand things better now lolllll
I got my first cell phone, at 15, for Christmas. My parents set it up with What is Love as the ring tone and put it at the bottom of my stocking then called the phone when I was near the bottom of the stocking. I left that ringtone for a while. Such a key memory for me
Man, I never got a grand gift-giving experience when it came to my first mobile phone. In the end, I was 15 years old still without a phone and I was like to my mum "hey do you think I should have a phone?" and she didn't seem fussed but then she decided to buy a smartphone so I took her little nokia. It was very inauspicious.
This whole ringtone and background picture business was one of those weird ones that came out of nowhere in the late 90s, ballooned into an industry worth of billions during 00s and then went bust practically overnight.
As a kid I fell for this too. I wanted a cool ringtone on my phone like they were advertising on tv so I sent the text message, got my ringtone and figured that was that. Boy was I wrong. The only thing that kept my phone bill from exploding was the fact that I was like 10 and had to work with those prepaid phone cards and I only got a new one after the old one ran out. After 2 15 euro cards were used up in a couple of weeks (where that used to last me months) my mom figured something was off so she called the phone company who pointed her in the direction of those scammers and gave them an earful.
I think a big part of it is around 2005-2010, a lot of people had already learned how to use limewire or download youtube mp3s then send it to their phone and save it as a ringtone etc. not to mention as soon as smart phones hit, doing all of that became like 20 times easier
Yes basically phones changed. You no longer needed to pay a third party for a ringtone you could just download one yourself, of course what kicked off the craze was that mobile phones stopped allowing you to make your own ring tones and phones became polyphonic.
I can proudly say I never purchased any ringtones. Even though I was a teenager at the time 😅 but friends got scammed and their parents were furious about the phone bills. Good old times.
I was literally showing the crazy frog to my 5 year old the other day and I don’t think the hype transcends generations 😂 she was bemused but not blown away. And I’m worried she can’t look at me the same way, now she knows I was into something so weird back in the day 😂😂😂
I had my Nokia decked out with a chrome case. Not like todays phone cases, you actually replaced the outer shell of the phone. Mainly because the phones were indestructible. But the cherry on the cake was the light up antenna that would flash a bunch of LEDs when the phone rang. I made bad financial decisions back then...
Ugh same. Replaced the power button with a gemstone type button, changed out the faceplates all the time. Carried around my cool brick not caring how many times I dropped it 😂😂
I was born in ‘04 and subconsciously this ‘annoying sound’ has been ingrained in my head for my whole life even without knowing where it has come from. Congratulations to jamsters marketing team for haunting me for my entire life
I got into this when I was a kid. Every time I’d convince my parents to top up my phone by a £10 it would just vanish. I’d then have to wait a few weeks to ask them again lol. Happened for months until finally stopped
Same I can't remember if it was from the Crazy Frog, but it was certainly one of those dodgy ringtone companies. Was literally my first bitter sweet taste of debt from a young age!
This takes me back. Buying ringtones was such a scam... You could get this little snippet and it was never the part of a song you wanted... I remember ordering a usb to proprietary cable from china and finding some qualcomm software on irc to access my phones filesystem and make my own ringtones. Its crazy to remember how much of a reaction you got with a clever ringtone back then.
I would just use a pc with internet find the sheet and type the notes in when I had nokia 3330(it was mostly monophonic renditions of rap/hiphop songs I liked back then in 2002/2003) , but when I had nokia 3510i I was on wap nonstop.. I downloaded everything, mostly games, programs, wallpapers and ringtones too.. it was all free except the internet itself was rather expensive. It was like $0.05 per kB. The phone only had 700kB too and each game was around 60kB, so I would regularly have to delete and redownload them later. I browsed without pictures to save data, it was still $20 a month and that was with the cheaper rate that would AFTER you downloaded 1MB each month.. the cheaper rate was 10% of the full at 0.005 per kB.. The first 1MB was very expensive. ah yes the '03 and '04 these were the dark ages.. then I got the pocket pc.. oh boy that was like light years ahead of that nokia phone.. It was basically a smartphone without phone.
Dang, the production history behind Crazy Frog is a lot deeper than I thought. It’s a good thing Crazy Frog’s still popular, with their recent cover of “Funny Song” having help from animator Antoine Delak (who’s a very talented UA-cam animator who I hope gets a great job at either Mikros Animation, Reel FX, or Illumination).😁👍🏻
This unlocked a memory I haven't accessed in over 10 years. These "Jamba" commercials were EVERYWHERE! Even here in Germany. It was truly a pest. Thankfully I wasn't allowed a cellphone back then. I qould totally have fallen for this scam since I was an absolute idiot child.
Back in the days when MTV was still free to watch. Assuming you can call it "watch" if the music videos got relegated to a corner of the screen while the rest was taken up ringtone ads 24/7 -- unless interrupted by the occasional full-screen ringtone ad.
although crazy frog was annoying as hell other jamba ads where much more annoying like this red dude singing italian..think was called Figaro and the damn bird. ffs hated that bird lol you couldnt escape it and it was just freaking awful. the thing that made crazy frog tolerable was combining it with that bass boosted version of axel f which blended in extremely well
@@the_kombinator So you were the other guy? Never actually believed that I'd meet the other guy who had used the cable, but hearing from you on UA-cam is kind of mind boggling!
I was 10 years old in 2004. Even though I'm from the Czech Republic, I rode the wave called Crazy Frog and I totally love it. "Crazy Frog the greatest hits" album was the first album I bought with the money I earned from part-time jobs. I even had a racing pc game and Crazy Frog was my the most favourite thing. I'm shocked, I had no idea how dark the background was.
Schnuffel (the rabbit) holds such a special place in my heart cause for some reason a german discounter gave you the full album CD of his songs when you shopped there for a while. So all of my friends had it and we sang the songs a cringe inducing amount. I totally forgot about it until I saw it in this video. I had no idea crazy frog and sweety the chick were at some point owned by the same company
Man my memory is.... not reliable. I remember seeing that damned frog on TV at my grandparent's house, every commercial break, and my grandma thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I specifically remember it was Sci-Fi Channel, it's the only thing she watched. She died in 2001, and by 2003 I was at college and basically stopped watching TV altogether. Where the hell did I see that frog?!
Pretty sure there was a brand that used the crazy frog for a commercial? Idk I remember that too but my family and I listened to that song on repeat all the time so maybe it's just that
I remember these ads so well hahah! A boy in my school was able to draw crazy frog on big sheets of paper and he had so many people asking for them me included 😂
1:08 Lower Right Hand Corner, and 7-8cm to the LEFT of The Blue Phone on Top Layer of Pile...Is a NEC P110 (Top Row of Buttons under the display are Green/Red/Blue)... My Second Phone, and the first one that wasn't a "Bag Phone" - There were Two Antennas, the short one attached, and the LONG one, much like the Motorola Flip Phone's long antenna.
"And now I do everything in my power to keep this rectangle from making any noise that isn’t directly caused by me." -- Crazy Frog, on behalf of Jamba, Germany, 2004
i'm honestly still a big fan of custom ringtones. of course it's much easier to do it yourself now, but i feel like most people just don't. they'll settle with one of the default ringtones, leading to mass confusion whenever someone gets a phone call because at least 5 other people in a crowded area will have the exact same ringtone. me, however, i will live and die by the obnoxious techno song i set as mine.
When phones started getting Bluetooth that was a game changer! I remember transfering an MP3 over inferred.. We put them on a table, faced the IR thing to each other and it TOOK AN HOUR!
Love your videos and this is an awesome blast from the past - worked for a telco when this was going off lol so many memories of people having no idea and the push back from us at the time was cringe looking back! But I gotta say... 1.6% of 50 mil is 800k bruh
Thank goodness I missed this somehow. I did not even have a cell phone for about a decade or more to the point, service. And I guess it's ads did not play much on PBS. 😅
If you haven't done one already, I'd love to see a video about the 'rich kids of Instagram' fad that happened and what eventually killed it. I'm hoping it's moral standards or kidnapping that killed it off but it could be a pretty interesting video. ❤
Born in 88. Just got my first cell phone in 2003. It was consider sooooooo boomer-esque to have a default ringtone. Crazy how fast that changed as the cell phone market started their campaign of "you have to buy a new phone every year".
I grew up with it, i heard it, i saw it and i was not bothered to download the ringtone, you know how much of a effin effort it was to download ring tones back then.
9:51 the clip shown here is definitely from a German speaking country (see the "ballermann hits" in the background) so instead of Australia, he maybe meant Austria lol it's apparently a common mistake that people make
Wow, I just learnt that Crazy Frog actually got infamous as a ringtone mascot - that ad luckily never aired in Czechia - so until now, I just thought it had been created specifically for the music video, as building a short-lived musical career around one weird/funny single was pretty common at the time (remember Eiffel 65 and the likes?) 🙃 That being said, hearing the song aired over and over again on most radio stations was annoying enough for me - I don't even want to imagine what it must have been like to see it on TV all the time too 😅 Then again, one of the biggest Czech e-shops (Alza) has a similar mascot with pretty annoying way of talking (I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually inspired by Crazy Frog) - no wonder many people hate it too. At least they're not scamming people...
I thought this was a real song by a real group, especially when you had bands like Gorillaz coming out at some point. I feel...slightly betrayed, actually.
You sure? We had the ad for some time in Poland, tough I mostly saw it being played a few times every hour on German music TV channels (yeah, that was a thing 20 years ago: music TV). like Viva,
Oh god i remember that stupid tone. I absolutely could not stand it. Even listening to it for half a second would make me fly into a frothing rage. Im not surprised that the company behind something so demonic would turn out to be a dodgy scam.
Growing up whit these ring tones was something else. We didn't have these places to pay for the ring tones here in Bulgaria so how could one get it? Well people were working overseas and came back whit company cellphones whit these songs! And from there from one phone to the other they spread via Bluetooth. And we were just hanging out in the school yard smoking cigarettes and Bluetoothing each other ring tones. And I there I got it. The crazy frog ring tone on my little Nokia brick. Aaah.. What a time to be alive!
Also on the ringtone subject, was I the only one who’d listen to the radio for hours waiting for my favorite song to play so I could record it on my phone and put it as my ringtone? lol. Good times.
I am born in 2000, I remember the adverts even though i was really young. It literally ran everywhere and especially the kids programs got extremely advertised with it. Fast forward a couple of years and i have my first mobile, a sony erricson and i believe my dad preloaded the ringtone for me. Rocked the sound for way too many years.
You didn’t even mention that the rights owners for Crazy Frog didn’t even want to do the NFTs, they were forced to by higher ups. So people on the Crazy Frog Twitter page were seeing “Buy our NFT now” while people on the Crazy Frog Discord server were seeing “Please don’t buy it, our hand was forced by higher ups.”
I was born in 2000, so when Crazy Frog was a thing I was 4. I genuinely can't remember much from back then obviously, but absolutely remember it being on TV constantly. I was on a family holiday and it was on ALL THE TIME. I get a feeling of anxiety whenever I think of it, even 20 years later. What a strange, simple time it was back then.
I never had the ringtone (I was 8 in 2004 born 95) but always found it hilarious 😂 I actually remember the annoying thing video my aunt showed me it One school disco they played crazy frog and everyone ran round the assembly hall pretending to be him Weird times
I was an adult in college at this time in 2004. I completely missed all of this Crazy Frog stuff. I only caught up with it much later when I found videos for my babies to watch. Not once did I ever think, "I want that for a ring tone!"
my brother and i made our mom’s ringtone the nyan cat song. she couldn’t figure out how to change her ringtone back so she left it. that was her ringtone for nearly a decade and she never missed a phone call in that time
Hey Jimmy Thanks dude I been learning more English since I watch your videos I also lear about your country and the different with Usa :D also Jimmy your edition looks kinda different did you finally find an editor?
I strangely don't remember the ads for this frog but, i remember seeing the other ads and listening to the crazy frog music from kidz bop. I still have that soung on my mp3...
I remember seeing a crazy frog toy at Walmart, it was way to big and had a horrible speaker, such a treasure, born 1998, more of a gummy bear ringtone fan
The marquee info text at the bottom of the screen was only reradable on a HD flatscreen. In 2004, a lot of people still had a low resolution CRT television.
I grew up listening to Crazy Frog. The Crazy Frog version of Popcorn introduced me to that song. Ever since then the Popcorn song has been one of my top fave songs of all time. It eventually lead me down a rabbit hole of discovering a bunch of different covers/remixes of that song. The song was originally released in 1969 by Gershon Kingsley. Kingsley was one of the early pioneers of electronic music since he experimented with a Moog Synth.
Axel F (the tune) was amazing. The frog thing, not so much. Fun Fact, the song is named after Eddie Murphy's character in Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley. Judge Reinholdt played the local LA cop, and Murphy player a Detroit cop in LA, doing unconventional things to defeat criminals. Banana in the tailpipe. Rather be pissed off than pissed on. Beverly Hills Cop is an amazing film.
Yea the 80s version was better in the 2000s it was a trend to make bad techno versions of older songs. Beverly Hills Cop came out before i was born but i saw it on tv a few years before the crazy frog commercials but most of my friends didn't know about Beverly Hills Cop so they thought this was the original .
My Dad worked in cybersecurity sector at the time and I followed very closely in his footsteps. The commercial screamed "scam" or "trojan virus", but damn was it tempting every time a commercial came on.
I cannot stress how big this damned frog got tho. I was born in 1999, so whilst I don't remember the ads I do remember it being very big (both as a ringtone and just as a popculture thing). I absolutely loved it. I also remember when McDonalds had these little music players that played the 1 pre-installed song and losing my mind when I got the Crazy Frog one😂 (I did have the gummy bear one as well tho, don't remember much of the other ones). I even still have a pin of the Crazy Frog lying around in my bedroom somewhere😂
Omg. I didn’t know this was a thing outside of Germany. Wtf. And thumbs up for using ballermann Hits alone 😂 I see you are stepping up your game. Love to see that you have found a passion in video essays!
I had no idea there were music albums, tv shows, and video games involved with this thing. I only knew of the commercials that sounded so annoying after hearing it for the third time in commercial breaks for a 30-minute tv show episodes.
For more discussion on Crazy Frog, the ringtone era and more... Join us on The Afters Podcast! ua-cam.com/video/2dHTGZ4b__U/v-deo.html
Yes lads!
Niceee 🎉
I know you're a narcissist but maybe, just maybe you've realised that all of the thumbnails for your podcast feature you and not your co-hosts?
@@daveweston2042haha, its only because i'm currently trying to get jimmythegiant audience over to the pod so its more recognisable. We are reshooting thumbnails soon and going to experiment with different styles. don't worry!
1.6% of 50M is not 1.9M 🤣 Smh.
Being born in 97 thus 7 years old in 2004, it was the funniest thing in the world to me at the time. I had this as a ringtone for several years. So long that I didn't change it until Fireflies by Owl City came out in 2009. So that was a solid 5 years I had Crazy Frog. It was truly massive at the time.
i was 3 in 2004 so obviously i don’t know about when it came out but i do know that crazy frog dominated my childhood
@@SoloSanguine I was born In 91 too and I think I know why this is. I had a phone in your equivalent to 5th grade here in the UK. Phones back then did a great deal of not alot. You could text and phone but the excitement ended at listening to the list of ringtones or playing a terrible "game" if you were lucky.... The biggest showcase was the aftermarket case your old dear bought you off a market stall for £2:50 !!
You have to remember that after the millennium, technology really took off and it wasn't long before phones were being sold that were centred around certain aspects like gaming phones and Walkman phones.... It's only natural that as they got more advanced they'd appeal more to kids... hence why when I was in 6th grade a Nokia 3310 would have cost you £100 as if was top of the range. A top of the range phone now will set you back £1500+ to buy out right!! ... Not because they cost more to make but purely because people are so addicted to them now they have that constant dopamine tap. Kids playing up? Buy them a cheap one to keep them quite whilst you sit glued to yours too! 😅
@@SoloSanguine many kids had a Nokia or Sony Erikson in 2004. I was too young to take any note of how much it cost, but we definitely had mobile phones. Cheap enough that many kids had them for Birthday or Christmas. When Blackberry Messenger came out, that's when I remember almost everyone being glued to their phones for hours on end for the first time, both kids and adults. And BBM was mid to late 00's.
@@SoloSanguinefree calls to other o2 users on weekends was amazing
Crazy Frog and Owl City are literally the 2 worst things of the 00's.
I worked in a mobile phone call centre around this time, and believe me they were a nuisance. You'd regularly get people phoning up asking why their bill was huge and they were near impossible to contact.
If you want another idea for a scam video, check out the mobile phone cashback scams around the same time. They were way worse.
Great idea Mikey boy.
Same! I worked for a mobile phone's call center back then and after a while, I went from answering the phone to replying to written complaints. There were so many people who saw an advert to get their horoscope sent to their phone for 50cts (for exemple) but at the end of the month, they were surprised (and very pissed off) when they saw a big amount charged to them on their phone bill. Every time they were sent their horoscope by SMS, they were charged and some people received their daily horoscope, a joke, some kind of inspiration quote or whatever, sometimes even twice a day! At some point, it got so bad that the EU had to intervene and decided that if someone requested a refund, these companies had to refund them, no questions asked! I remember spending half of the day requesting refunds for our customers and making sure people were indeed refunded.
@@Sadlander2not just horoscopes, I remember there was something else that did this and you couldn't cancel and it just kept messaging you. I kinda suspected a scam so I used my pay as you go phone with no credit to sign up, I was funny watching them trying to charge me each week but failing. Went on for months with no way to cancel lol! Felt sorry for anyone who had legit signed up for this crap.
@@Sadlander2 "and making sure people were indeed refunded" nice
I had a Nokia 6630 on the cashback thing £2.99 a month my mum got her cashback never had an issue.
What was even worse than the weekly payment, was the inability to unsubscribe from the service. I recall there being either a law or court case, where ringtone companies had to include an easy unsub method.
Great comment Bruce
Nice one Bruce!
11:59 they actually showed there how to unsub from this one.
But I do remember that part ye, once was so naive to buy "one ringtone" and got screw'd hard, had to get a new number and everything, cancel that simcard XD
Thanks for this information Bruce
That’s what’s known as a ‘dark pattern’, and there’s a reason why they made it seemingly impossible to unsubscribe - to keep the money flowing in…
The rabbit and the yummy gummy bear ring tones stand out as way worst in my head. Seeing the clip of the rabbit literally gave me a bit of a traumatic flashback😂 I remember the gummy bear being kinda crusty looking which always disturbed me, like it felt seedy and adult but under the guise of kid friendly.
The frog was annoying but almost managed to remain marginally cool from what I remember😅
Yeah no you’re right, the gummy bear was always sorta skeevy 😂
I couldn’t have known at the time that these were all related from the same company but this unlocked these core memories and I understand things better now lolllll
They used to play the hamster dance as the 5 minute warning at my highschool
The gummy bear looked like a cartoon divorced dad
That bunny gave me flashbacks ❤
I got my first cell phone, at 15, for Christmas. My parents set it up with What is Love as the ring tone and put it at the bottom of my stocking then called the phone when I was near the bottom of the stocking. I left that ringtone for a while. Such a key memory for me
That was cool. Thanks for sharing.
That is awesome
The intro to that song is hype, that would be amazing lol, thanks for sharing
Aww, that's sweet of them.
Man, I never got a grand gift-giving experience when it came to my first mobile phone. In the end, I was 15 years old still without a phone and I was like to my mum "hey do you think I should have a phone?" and she didn't seem fussed but then she decided to buy a smartphone so I took her little nokia. It was very inauspicious.
I hated it back in the day but you don't know what you have until it's gone, those were such lighthearted and simple days.
Even for adults.
Truth
It just reminded me of how fuckin annoying it was.....and still fuckin is. Fuck I hate that thing. 🤬🤬😂
Of course they were.
Ignorance is bliss!
Why do you think the Nazis burn books and restrict education?
Same concept.
Nostalgia is one hell of an drug. Chances are it was worse than you think today!
This whole ringtone and background picture business was one of those weird ones that came out of nowhere in the late 90s, ballooned into an industry worth of billions during 00s and then went bust practically overnight.
As a kid I fell for this too. I wanted a cool ringtone on my phone like they were advertising on tv so I sent the text message, got my ringtone and figured that was that. Boy was I wrong.
The only thing that kept my phone bill from exploding was the fact that I was like 10 and had to work with those prepaid phone cards and I only got a new one after the old one ran out. After 2 15 euro cards were used up in a couple of weeks (where that used to last me months) my mom figured something was off so she called the phone company who pointed her in the direction of those scammers and gave them an earful.
I think a big part of it is around 2005-2010, a lot of people had already learned how to use limewire or download youtube mp3s then send it to their phone and save it as a ringtone etc. not to mention as soon as smart phones hit, doing all of that became like 20 times easier
Yes basically phones changed. You no longer needed to pay a third party for a ringtone you could just download one yourself, of course what kicked off the craze was that mobile phones stopped allowing you to make your own ring tones and phones became polyphonic.
By time 09 hit u didn’t even need limewire because dat piff and sound cloud before it blew up crazy was much easier
zedge ftw
yeah i used to cut songs up and make my own ringtones 🤣
@@TheFakeyCakeMakermost new phones still let you set a custom ringtone
I can proudly say I never purchased any ringtones. Even though I was a teenager at the time 😅 but friends got scammed and their parents were furious about the phone bills. Good old times.
You were uncool
Hahaha ringtones and that crappy pixelart like a heart and some barbwire 😅 classic
I also never purchased ringtones or mobile games back then. I was downloading them from torrents sites 😎
never bought a ringtone, but remember getting like 2 songs? Can remember '5 years time' was one and cant remember the other.
I did’nt know how to buy ringtones (kind of dont know now to) so I completely missed the scam and with this video found out the scam existed 😅
I was literally showing the crazy frog to my 5 year old the other day and I don’t think the hype transcends generations 😂 she was bemused but not blown away. And I’m worried she can’t look at me the same way, now she knows I was into something so weird back in the day 😂😂😂
You start with gummy bear first
@@breekat3785 that’s so true 😂 it would have made way more sense!!
Annoying Orange
Crazy frog was always gai tho
Same with my daughter. Tell her that a generation of adults was behind this ;)
I remember a ringtone that said: "Answer the f**king 'phone". It was very popular.
Or the also popular * alarm sound* " it's the wife, it's the f#$kin wife!" * alarm sound. Repeat....
I remember that, someone I knew had that.
I had my Nokia decked out with a chrome case. Not like todays phone cases, you actually replaced the outer shell of the phone. Mainly because the phones were indestructible. But the cherry on the cake was the light up antenna that would flash a bunch of LEDs when the phone rang. I made bad financial decisions back then...
Ugh same. Replaced the power button with a gemstone type button, changed out the faceplates all the time. Carried around my cool brick not caring how many times I dropped it 😂😂
Better days lol
Ooh i vaguely remember those phones ✌️
As someone born in the 2000s, I only saw Crazy Frog as how kids see Skibidi Toilet, today.
I was born in ‘04 and subconsciously this ‘annoying sound’ has been ingrained in my head for my whole life even without knowing where it has come from. Congratulations to jamsters marketing team for haunting me for my entire life
Born In '05 and I'm completely with you on that
That’s wild to me. In my head I think of people born with a 0 a child. But yall are grown ass people. Man I’m getting old
@@AlphaAchilles 19 in a month now man, still feel like a 14 year old sometimes though ey
Its the same for me. Loool
haha suckers
I got into this when I was a kid. Every time I’d convince my parents to top up my phone by a £10 it would just vanish. I’d then have to wait a few weeks to ask them again lol. Happened for months until finally stopped
I also couldn't get internet on the phone whatsoever so could never follow the link lol
Same I can't remember if it was from the Crazy Frog, but it was certainly one of those dodgy ringtone companies. Was literally my first bitter sweet taste of debt from a young age!
This takes me back. Buying ringtones was such a scam... You could get this little snippet and it was never the part of a song you wanted...
I remember ordering a usb to proprietary cable from china and finding some qualcomm software on irc to access my phones filesystem and make my own ringtones. Its crazy to remember how much of a reaction you got with a clever ringtone back then.
I did this to put a custom "24" CTU ringer sound on my phone. Got some call outs for that one.
I would just use a pc with internet find the sheet and type the notes in when I had nokia 3330(it was mostly monophonic renditions of rap/hiphop songs I liked back then in 2002/2003) , but when I had nokia 3510i I was on wap nonstop.. I downloaded everything, mostly games, programs, wallpapers and ringtones too.. it was all free except the internet itself was rather expensive. It was like $0.05 per kB. The phone only had 700kB too and each game was around 60kB, so I would regularly have to delete and redownload them later. I browsed without pictures to save data, it was still $20 a month and that was with the cheaper rate that would AFTER you downloaded 1MB each month.. the cheaper rate was 10% of the full at 0.005 per kB.. The first 1MB was very expensive. ah yes the '03 and '04 these were the dark ages.. then I got the pocket pc.. oh boy that was like light years ahead of that nokia phone.. It was basically a smartphone without phone.
Fun fact:
Erik, the creator of Crazy Frog, directed and animated my music video "Winter".
He's a very talented and genuine guy!
Dang, the production history behind Crazy Frog is a lot deeper than I thought.
It’s a good thing Crazy Frog’s still popular, with their recent cover of “Funny Song” having help from animator Antoine Delak (who’s a very talented UA-cam animator who I hope gets a great job at either Mikros Animation, Reel FX, or Illumination).😁👍🏻
I don’t care what anyone says, when he drops that “Bing Bing.” the club goes crazy. Every time.
This unlocked a memory I haven't accessed in over 10 years. These "Jamba" commercials were EVERYWHERE! Even here in Germany. It was truly a pest. Thankfully I wasn't allowed a cellphone back then. I qould totally have fallen for this scam since I was an absolute idiot child.
Back in the days when MTV was still free to watch. Assuming you can call it "watch" if the music videos got relegated to a corner of the screen while the rest was taken up ringtone ads 24/7 -- unless interrupted by the occasional full-screen ringtone ad.
And now Germany's biggest export is "rewarded play" scams
although crazy frog was annoying as hell other jamba ads where much more annoying like this red dude singing italian..think was called Figaro and the damn bird. ffs hated that bird lol you couldnt escape it and it was just freaking awful. the thing that made crazy frog tolerable was combining it with that bass boosted version of axel f which blended in extremely well
I've never seen one, and I was a teenager/young adult at the time. I didn't rely on TV though, and I used cable+software to get stuff on/off my phone.
@@the_kombinator So you were the other guy? Never actually believed that I'd meet the other guy who had used the cable, but hearing from you on UA-cam is kind of mind boggling!
I was 10 years old in 2004. Even though I'm from the Czech Republic, I rode the wave called Crazy Frog and I totally love it. "Crazy Frog the greatest hits" album was the first album I bought with the money I earned from part-time jobs. I even had a racing pc game and Crazy Frog was my the most favourite thing. I'm shocked, I had no idea how dark the background was.
same here, got the whole album and u till today no idea about background lmao, peace bratře ✌️🇨🇿
Ya total scam aimed at kids lol 👍✌️
Axel F was an absolute banger and no one will convince me otherwise.
Is
I watch the video veeeery frequently, and love it!
I thought Crazy Frog and Jamster were the coolest things as a kid, and they still have a special place in my heart.
Out of all the Jamster stuff, Crazy Frog and Gummy Bear managed to survive longer and became very popular on UA-cam, lol.
I hated the frog but loved schnuffel
Schnuffel (the rabbit) holds such a special place in my heart cause for some reason a german discounter gave you the full album CD of his songs when you shopped there for a while. So all of my friends had it and we sang the songs a cringe inducing amount. I totally forgot about it until I saw it in this video. I had no idea crazy frog and sweety the chick were at some point owned by the same company
2005: "this ringtone made half a billion dollars"
2023: "candycrush made half a billion dollars this morning"
12:28 I am disgusted by the finger in this shot. Why would you do this to us Jimmy??
It truly is a gift to say "BAH-DUM-DU-REE-DUM-DUM-DUM-BWAAA-BEE-OOOH-BOOR-AH-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM" with your mouth.
Man my memory is.... not reliable. I remember seeing that damned frog on TV at my grandparent's house, every commercial break, and my grandma thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I specifically remember it was Sci-Fi Channel, it's the only thing she watched. She died in 2001, and by 2003 I was at college and basically stopped watching TV altogether. Where the hell did I see that frog?!
BET too and sometimes adult swim😂😂😂
Pretty sure there was a brand that used the crazy frog for a commercial? Idk I remember that too but my family and I listened to that song on repeat all the time so maybe it's just that
ua-cam.com/video/Fn6P8D7dU_s/v-deo.htmlsi=wBZdxVEt9Yr1m_iL
The frog was everywhere so you probably briefly saw him when walking past an electronics shop or when visiting a friends house .
Your videos are really hitting their stride, jimmy the giant. Love your work!
i totally agree
Me too, just found about this channel and i'm having a laugh
I remember these ads so well hahah! A boy in my school was able to draw crazy frog on big sheets of paper and he had so many people asking for them me included 😂
You knew kid was really cool when after Crazy Frog went mainstream they still called it "annoying thing" to show that they were one of the OGs
I hated it back then when I was a wee kid and I hate it now, but it still does remind me of the good times when life was easier
Thanks for not pixelating the frogs genitalia. This is what made the Crazy Frog hugely successful because meat and 2 veg.
I had the Crazy Frog album on CD. I didn't have Internet. I didn't know what it was. I listened to it ... a lot.
1:08 Lower Right Hand Corner, and 7-8cm to the LEFT of The Blue Phone on Top Layer of Pile...Is a NEC P110 (Top Row of Buttons under the display are Green/Red/Blue)... My Second Phone, and the first one that wasn't a "Bag Phone" - There were Two Antennas, the short one attached, and the LONG one, much like the Motorola Flip Phone's long antenna.
And now I do everything in my power to keep this rectangle from making any noise that isn’t directly caused by me
"And now I do everything in my power to keep this rectangle from making any noise that isn’t directly caused by me." -- Crazy Frog, on behalf of Jamba, Germany, 2004
i'm honestly still a big fan of custom ringtones. of course it's much easier to do it yourself now, but i feel like most people just don't. they'll settle with one of the default ringtones, leading to mass confusion whenever someone gets a phone call because at least 5 other people in a crowded area will have the exact same ringtone. me, however, i will live and die by the obnoxious techno song i set as mine.
When phones started getting Bluetooth that was a game changer! I remember transfering an MP3 over inferred.. We put them on a table, faced the IR thing to each other and it TOOK AN HOUR!
sum1 walks past too close its a wrap lol 🤣
Fantastic video. The Crazy Frog album was the first album I ever bought with my own pocket money :') Truly a musical masterpiece.
🖤
No moi!
That was the day your dad went out for a pack of cigarettes and vanished.
There's a cure for that. Straight jacket! 😅🤣
Thanks for this breakdown. This really took me back to those times!
Love your videos and this is an awesome blast from the past - worked for a telco when this was going off lol so many memories of people having no idea and the push back from us at the time was cringe looking back!
But I gotta say... 1.6% of 50 mil is 800k bruh
Yeah.... someone can't do math lol.
Thank goodness I missed this somehow. I did not even have a cell phone for about a decade or more to the point, service. And I guess it's ads did not play much on PBS. 😅
If you haven't done one already, I'd love to see a video about the 'rich kids of Instagram' fad that happened and what eventually killed it. I'm hoping it's moral standards or kidnapping that killed it off but it could be a pretty interesting video. ❤
Lil Tay had something to do with kids being trashy with money.
Most of them were fake like the one with money in the toilet but the bowl was dry.
There was someone at my school who hated the Crazy Frog, so his nickname became the Crazy Frog.
Being swedish and hearing you pronounce 2taktare was hilarious
Does it mean 2 stroke? As in 2 stroke engine?
@@ThatSockmonkey yes it does
Born in 88. Just got my first cell phone in 2003. It was consider sooooooo boomer-esque to have a default ringtone. Crazy how fast that changed as the cell phone market started their campaign of "you have to buy a new phone every year".
I grew up with it, i heard it, i saw it and i was not bothered to download the ringtone, you know how much of a effin effort it was to download ring tones back then.
at 6:35 (blink and you'll miss it) looks like Scrat from Ice Age!
Oh trust me, I could NEVER forget when this happened
9:51 the clip shown here is definitely from a German speaking country (see the "ballermann hits" in the background) so instead of Australia, he maybe meant Austria lol it's apparently a common mistake that people make
Wow, I just learnt that Crazy Frog actually got infamous as a ringtone mascot - that ad luckily never aired in Czechia - so until now, I just thought it had been created specifically for the music video, as building a short-lived musical career around one weird/funny single was pretty common at the time (remember Eiffel 65 and the likes?) 🙃 That being said, hearing the song aired over and over again on most radio stations was annoying enough for me - I don't even want to imagine what it must have been like to see it on TV all the time too 😅 Then again, one of the biggest Czech e-shops (Alza) has a similar mascot with pretty annoying way of talking (I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually inspired by Crazy Frog) - no wonder many people hate it too. At least they're not scamming people...
gotta admit, i thought the same - "hey funny vid" and I moved on
You've never seen those adds in Czechia? I remember seeing them on private German TV stations without any reservations like DSV or RTL.
@@kamukameh The company probably didn't care that much about smaller countries like us - too small market :D
I thought this was a real song by a real group, especially when you had bands like Gorillaz coming out at some point.
I feel...slightly betrayed, actually.
You sure? We had the ad for some time in Poland, tough I mostly saw it being played a few times every hour on German music TV channels (yeah, that was a thing 20 years ago: music TV). like Viva,
Great video mate!
Oh god i remember that stupid tone. I absolutely could not stand it. Even listening to it for half a second would make me fly into a frothing rage.
Im not surprised that the company behind something so demonic would turn out to be a dodgy scam.
I grew up with Crazy frog, and known about him for like 20 plus years, and i never knew he had a "knob" until you pointed it out.. hahaha
Growing up whit these ring tones was something else.
We didn't have these places to pay for the ring tones here in Bulgaria so how could one get it?
Well people were working overseas and came back whit company cellphones whit these songs!
And from there from one phone to the other they spread via Bluetooth.
And we were just hanging out in the school yard smoking cigarettes and Bluetoothing each other ring tones.
And I there I got it.
The crazy frog ring tone on my little Nokia brick.
Aaah.. What a time to be alive!
with not whit. I'm only telling you not to be rude but because your English is very good but that's a glaring error. Great story. 😊
I'm gonna say a word: Waptrick
I remember this scam lmao, its what started the whole "never text those 5 digit numbers you see", I still dont even today lmao
Also on the ringtone subject, was I the only one who’d listen to the radio for hours waiting for my favorite song to play so I could record it on my phone and put it as my ringtone? lol. Good times.
Haha, I did the same! I also went on youtube in 2005-2007 to record the audio from the videos I managed to find as well 😂
Lol! Cute. IMG an 80s kid we did the same but it was with tape.
No but i did this with tape in the 90s
I am born in 2000, I remember the adverts even though i was really young. It literally ran everywhere and especially the kids programs got extremely advertised with it. Fast forward a couple of years and i have my first mobile, a sony erricson and i believe my dad preloaded the ringtone for me. Rocked the sound for way too many years.
You didn’t even mention that the rights owners for Crazy Frog didn’t even want to do the NFTs, they were forced to by higher ups. So people on the Crazy Frog Twitter page were seeing “Buy our NFT now” while people on the Crazy Frog Discord server were seeing “Please don’t buy it, our hand was forced by higher ups.”
Just found your channel and it good so far man keep it up
Even as a kid (born in 97), I thought crazy frog was the most annoying thing ever.
I maintain that stance.
I was born in 2000, so when Crazy Frog was a thing I was 4. I genuinely can't remember much from back then obviously, but absolutely remember it being on TV constantly. I was on a family holiday and it was on ALL THE TIME. I get a feeling of anxiety whenever I think of it, even 20 years later. What a strange, simple time it was back then.
I never had the ringtone (I was 8 in 2004 born 95) but always found it hilarious 😂
I actually remember the annoying thing video my aunt showed me it
One school disco they played crazy frog and everyone ran round the assembly hall pretending to be him
Weird times
I was an adult in college at this time in 2004. I completely missed all of this Crazy Frog stuff. I only caught up with it much later when I found videos for my babies to watch. Not once did I ever think, "I want that for a ring tone!"
my brother and i made our mom’s ringtone the nyan cat song. she couldn’t figure out how to change her ringtone back so she left it. that was her ringtone for nearly a decade and she never missed a phone call in that time
I have always wondered about the origin of the crazy frog! Thanks so much for this :) great video
This straight up plagiarized VLACO's video about this. The title is even the exact same.
I like how you said "you go to Twitter and come back" but Twitter didn't exist yet 😛
Speaking of crazy frog, yall remember Gummy Bear?
crazy frog is better because than gummy bear because crazy frog did not make a terrible movie
@@MolternK I hated them both because my sister loved them.
Song was Banger for sure :P haha Great video ,))
Thanks for the trip down memory lane man lol
Hey Jimmy Thanks dude I been learning more English since I watch your videos I also lear about your country and the different with Usa :D also Jimmy your edition looks kinda different did you finally find an editor?
the effort u put into making these is insane and i dont just mean the editing, i feel like there's a point to ur vids its not just content 10/10
I strangely don't remember the ads for this frog but, i remember seeing the other ads and listening to the crazy frog music from kidz bop. I still have that soung on my mp3...
I remember seeing a crazy frog toy at Walmart, it was way to big and had a horrible speaker, such a treasure, born 1998, more of a gummy bear ringtone fan
The marquee info text at the bottom of the screen was only reradable on a HD flatscreen. In 2004, a lot of people still had a low resolution CRT television.
I would like to say there is a video with the exact same title and says very similar stuff that came out 2 years ago and only has 10k views
Yeah I noticed that, very weird/strange.
ai generated script?
I grew up listening to Crazy Frog. The Crazy Frog version of Popcorn introduced me to that song. Ever since then the Popcorn song has been one of my top fave songs of all time. It eventually lead me down a rabbit hole of discovering a bunch of different covers/remixes of that song. The song was originally released in 1969 by Gershon Kingsley. Kingsley was one of the early pioneers of electronic music since he experimented with a Moog Synth.
Axel F (the tune) was amazing. The frog thing, not so much.
Fun Fact, the song is named after Eddie Murphy's character in Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley. Judge Reinholdt played the local LA cop, and Murphy player a Detroit cop in LA, doing unconventional things to defeat criminals. Banana in the tailpipe. Rather be pissed off than pissed on. Beverly Hills Cop is an amazing film.
Yea the 80s version was better in the 2000s it was a trend to make bad techno versions of older songs. Beverly Hills Cop came out before i was born but i saw it on tv a few years before the crazy frog commercials but most of my friends didn't know about Beverly Hills Cop so they thought this was the original .
6:30 why were they calling Eric? He didn’t make the sound, he made the character. A ringtone is a sound.
1.6% of 50 million is not 1.9 million. C'mon dude.
Thanks for bringing back this 2000s memory. I’ve been 12 in 2004 and yes my parents had a big phone bill, me+ 2 brothers 😅
Axel F Is and always will be a Banger
No. Just no.
9:51 that Crazy Frog costume is nightmare fuel. Must be the same people who made the Ninja Turtles costumes for the third movie and their own concert.
This frog has brought me so much joy it’s not even funny 🤣
13:58 "considering they had 50 million subscribers, 1.6% is equal to about -1.9 million- 800 thousand users"
My Dad worked in cybersecurity sector at the time and I followed very closely in his footsteps. The commercial screamed "scam" or "trojan virus", but damn was it tempting every time a commercial came on.
"You couldn't find the answer anywhere" shows the advert numerous times that tells you how to unsubscribe.
I cannot stress how big this damned frog got tho. I was born in 1999, so whilst I don't remember the ads I do remember it being very big (both as a ringtone and just as a popculture thing). I absolutely loved it. I also remember when McDonalds had these little music players that played the 1 pre-installed song and losing my mind when I got the Crazy Frog one😂 (I did have the gummy bear one as well tho, don't remember much of the other ones). I even still have a pin of the Crazy Frog lying around in my bedroom somewhere😂
Ohhh Anna Blue! Cuts deep! I was in such a sad phase during 2015-2016 and listened to her songs on repeat 😂
1.6% of 50 million isn't 1.9 million.....
800k?
I couldn’t find your comment until after I posted. But yeah right? I know he checked that math and knew it was wrong. Ain’t no way
I never knew this actually came from some guy imitating the sound of a 2 stroke engine, idk why but knowing this makes it so much funnier to me now
Why did you use the same title name as the other?
I had somehow never noticed his knob until I saw this video and now I can't unsee it. Thanks for that.
Omg. I didn’t know this was a thing outside of Germany. Wtf. And thumbs up for using ballermann Hits alone 😂
I see you are stepping up your game. Love to see that you have found a passion in video essays!
The Dutch did suffer, I can tell you 😆
It plagued us in the US too…
I had no idea there were music albums, tv shows, and video games involved with this thing. I only knew of the commercials that sounded so annoying after hearing it for the third time in commercial breaks for a 30-minute tv show episodes.
Bro you stole the whole vid script and title of another youtuber with 100 subs
Yeah, VLACO
Could have mentioned the youtuber's name at least
Someone got my nephew a teddy of that when he was 5 or 6.
When you squeezed it it would start with the "adding ding ding" & it terrified him. 😂