McDonald's Filet-O-Fish Commercial

Chances are, you've heard the jingle, even if you haven't seen the ad.

"Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish, gimme that fish!" an animatronic fish sings to a bearded man eating a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. "Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish, gimme that fish!"

Since it was first broadcast in late February, the commercial has found a cult following, inspiring a slew of remixes and ringtones, and garnering more than a million views on YouTube.

"It's very catchy," Danya Proud, a spokeswoman for McDonald's USA, told Slashfood on Tuesday. "Excuse the pun."
McDonald's, which traditionally advertises its fish sandwich during the Lenten season, ran the commercial in select markets across the country, Proud said.

"We sell 300 million Filet-O-Fishes annually, and we sell approximately 25 percent of that during Lent," Proud said. "So I think that this has certainly increased awareness and certainly made people think more about the Filet-O-Fish sandwich."

The spot was hatched, ironically enough, in a conference room called the "Fish Bowl," said Pete Harvey, the copywriter for the campaign created by the Arnold ad agency in Boston.

"We were faced with certain creative parameters when we were coming up with the idea, and the first parameter was it had to run in both English and Spanish," Harvey told Slashfood.

A few weeks of wrangling in the Fish Bowl lead the team to remember the Big Mouth Billy Bass, a mounted singing novelty fish that found its way into American homes at the turn of the millennium. And so, McDonald's Frankie the Fish (in English) and Pepe de Pescado (in Spanish) were born.

"What if it were you hanging up on this wall?" Frankie sings in the English-language spot. "If it were you in that sandwich, you wouldn't be laughing at all."

Pepe's song is slightly different: "Tu amigo ha comprobado al dejarme aquí colgado que nunca le supe tan bien. Filet-O-Fish dorado muy bien acompañado el pescado en filete es mejor! El pez quedo pescado y en McDonalds lo hacen ¡bien!"

"Our singing fish knows he didn't make the cut to be a Filet-O-Fish, and that is why he ended up on a wall," says songwriter Fernando Ruiz. "Because the Filet-O-Fish is the one and only tasty fish out there, he's jealous."

But it's the English language lo-fi garage rock spot that really became the overnight sensation.

"Oddly enough, it was the first YouTube posting that told us that this might be a phenomenon," Harvey said. "We didn't post it ourselves: Some guy in his living room videotaped his television while the commercial ran, posted that on YouTube and by the next morning, it had 10,000 hits."

Harvey said he's heard of a hockey team that uses "Gimme that Filet-O-Fish" line as a chant before they hit the ice ("which makes no sense, but it's funny") and a man who used a variation on the commercial to propose to his girlfriend.

Gemmy Industries Inc., which sold millions of the Big Mouth Billy Bass fish in 2000-01, this week released a new recordable Billy Bass at Cabela's, a company official told Slashfood. Gemmy also plans to release an iPod Billy Bass application in about a month.

Jason McCann, Gemmy's senior vice president of marketing and product development, told Slashfood on Thursday he thought Arnold's Filet-O-Fish ad was "a riot."

"I sent them a thank-you note," he said.

Love it or hate it, the "Gimme That Fish" jingle seems to be here to stay.

"It's a polarizing commercial as a lot of popular commercials are," Harvey said. "Some people love it and some people hate it, and luckily we've been in the camp where more people love it than hate it."