Big Mouth Billy Bass

Joe Pellettieri, a product developer at Gemmy Industries of Coppell, Texas, was walking into a Bass Pro store in Grapevine with his wife Barbara in 1998 when, as the story has been told, she asked why Gemmy didn't make a singing fish. His boss told him to "bury the idea." Gemmy, founded in 1984, already sold motorized lip-syncing creatures, and Pellettieri kept at it, hiring a taxidermist to get the color right and asking the engineers whether they could make the head turn. That motor, swinging the bass off its plaque to face you, is the whole gag. The prototype came together in 1999: soft PVC over a plastic skeleton, singing Al Green's "Take Me to the River" and Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy," tripped by a motion sensor meant to startle passers-by.

It reached stores in early 2000 at around $25 to $30, first through sporting-goods and novelty chains and by summer through Walmart, and by Christmas 2000 it was a phenomenon: a Cracker Barrel in Manassas, Virginia sold 400 in three days, and Gemmy, a private company that has never published the number, is rumored to have grossed more than $100 million on the fish. Queen Elizabeth II kept one on the grand piano at Balmoral, Bill Clinton gave one to Al Gore, and Tony Soprano got one from his daughter on The Sopranos. Teenie Hodges, who co-wrote "Take Me to the River," said in 2013 that the fish had paid him more in royalties than any recording of the song.

The crash was as fast as the rise; within a year or so retailers were clearing them at $5. Gemmy chased it with Big Mouth Billy Bones, a skeleton singing "Bad to the Bone," a singing trout, a singing lobster, a great white shark that hummed the Jaws theme and, in 2001, a standing Billy Bass Superstar with a microphone. The fish has never quite gone away: an Alexa-enabled version that mouths along to an Amazon Echo arrived in 2018, Green Day put out a "Basket Case"-singing "Big Mouth Billie Bass" for Dookie's 30th anniversary in October 2024, and in 2014 burglars in a Rochester, Minnesota bait shop tripped one's motion sensor in the dark and fled, leaving money on the counter.