"What Does the Fox Say?" wanted nothing of the sort. It was kind of a fluke that it suddenly became popular like that, as it's just part of the talk show that Ylvis has in Norway. They have quite a lot of songs and music videos, good stuff actually. Bard and Vegard (brothers) were actually surprised, and very amused, that "Fox" became as popular as they did.

If you get a chance watch/listen to Ylvis doing "Massachusetts", "Pressure" and well other ones. "Mr. Toot" is a recent one.

I liked Ylvis's "Stonehenge" one (slightly NSFW).

My understanding is that "What Does the Fox Say?" was never meant to be popular - someone with a production team owed them a favor, and they wanted to make the stupidest, most over-the-top video they could with these high-quality resources, just for laughs.

And I kind of love it.


I think you've underestimated just how many "Let It Go" variants there are out there. There are some pretty amazing ones, and having small children, we watched them all.

"Space Oddity in Space" is awesome. Chris Hadfield is awesome. I'm glad they let him repost it (once David Bowie got the rights issue cleared up for him).

I think you're conflating what the creators wanted with what the video "wanted" ;)

Psy certainly didn't create Gangnam Style with the intent to literally break YouTube, but that's what happened. Art has a tendency to do things the artist never intended one it's out of their control. The way people were talking about What Does The Fox Say when it first hit the internet it sure seemed like some portion of the zeitgeist wanted it to go ballistic, but it didn't have quite enough thrust to achieve that.

What Does the Fox Say was amazingly popular in the crowd of people with small children. It was also played at the roller skating rink near where I grew up. You can't really show Gangnam Style to your 3 year old, but you can show What Does The Fox Say. Over and over and over and over...
--Beth

I'd certainly believe that :) Unfortunately(?) 3 year olds don't create very many parody videos.

And i'm sure there are parodies out there, but i kept tripping over Gangnam Style and Call Me Maybe parodies without even going looking.