WSJ: Now Playing on a Computer Near You - A Fruit With an Obnoxious Streak

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APRIL 26, 2010

Now Playing on a Computer Near You: A Fruit With an Obnoxious Streak

Barely Six Months Old, 'Annoying Orange' Seeks TV Deal; 'Like Watching a Car Wreck'

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Dane Boedigheimer

Dane Boedigheimer and Justine Ezarik in character as Annoying Orange and Passion Fruit.

Annoying Orange has been kind to Dane Boedigheimer. But not to anyone else.

"Annoying Orange" is an animated fruit who stars in YouTube videos, where he sits on a kitchen counter and taunts whatever vegetable, fruit or other unlucky edible gets set down near him. He hectors the other guy with questions, cracks lame jokes and cackles at them in his shrill voice, until the fun ends, tragically, when a human hand slices his new friend with a knife.

Schoolchildren love it. And Mr. Boedigheimer makes a living off it.

The series has been viewed about 108 million times on YouTube. Mr. Orange has half a million fans on Facebook. His creator, Mr. Boedigheimer, a North Dakota native who moved to California to work in film, now collects ad revenue, sells T-shirts and has an agent exploring spinoffs, all for a character that didn't exist until October.

Dane Boedigheimer

Dane Boedigheimer, left, created the Annoying Orange character and Justine Ezarik plays Passion Fruit.

Watch a clip of "Annoying Orange", Dane Boedigheimer's YouTube sensation.

He was able to turn a talking orange into a pop-culture force in six months because "the Internet today is like TV was in the 1950s—it's a new technology that changes the way we view culture," says Ben Huh, founder of Cheezburger Network, which runs Internet sites.

YouTube and Mr. Boedigheimer won't disclose ad revenue, but YouTube says content creators get more than half and many make thousands of dollars a month this way. Advertisers on videos such as Annoying Orange don't choose to be there but are placed by an algorithm.

Last month, Mr. Boedigheimer signed with a management agency, the Collective, to explore commercial opportunities, including corporate sponsorships, toy licensing and a TV-show pilot.

"When Dane puts up a [YouTube] show on Friday, by Monday it has a million and a half views. Any cable network would take those numbers," says his manager at the Collective, Dan Weinstein. Sponsors, he speculates, might include "any of the fruit beverages."

There is a catch, though: Mr. Boedigheimer's videos specialize in eviscerating foodstuffs.

An early one showed a dozen humanoid eggs watching in horror from their carton as a human cracked and fried an egg named Steve.

In another, an animated pumpkin, who already sported a face supplied digitally by Mr. Boedigheimer, found a new one being carved on his backside, Halloween-style—after his seeds and pulp were suddenly sucked out in a swoosh.

Before the end comes, Annoying Orange pesters the other food character on the counter to set up his adolescent jokes. "Hey, Apple!' he says. "Hey, Apple! Hey, Apple!" Wearily, Apple finally asks what he wants. "Orange you glad I didn't say 'apple' again," Annoying Orange says, laughing gleefully at his own dumb joke. "Hey, Apple!" he says again. "You look fruity."

When there's no other fruit around, though, the orange sits on his countertop lamenting how bored he is, rolling his tongue around and making gurgling noises.

Annoying Orange on YouTube

The Annoying Orange YouTube channel

Videos: Passion of the Fruit | Apple | Pumpkin

Seeing one of these "is almost like watching a car wreck," says Mr. Huh from Cheezburger Network. "The awfulness of the orange is what brings the enjoyment."

There's not much enjoyment for Ned Hepburn, a Los Angeles writer. It's "third-grade humor," says Mr. Hepburn, 25. Of all the strange videos he has watched on the Web, this "is one of the few that I had a physically bad reaction to. It was horrible."

Mr. Boedigheimer, the video maker, figures that for fans, the appeal is that "everyone knows somebody like him: They don't listen, they are annoying, and at the same time they are kind of lovable."

He seems so to Patricia Vivo, who has a picture of Annoying Orange on her phone. "He's funny because of his voice, his expressions and how his face looks," the 15-year-old Londoner says. "I do think he's annoying, but in a good way."

Mr. Boedigheimer was 12 and living in a suburb of Fargo, N.D., when his family got a camcorder for Christmas. Soon he and his brother were turning out productions such as a zombie film starring Legos. After studying film in college, Mr. Boedigheimer moved to California and worked as an assistant on the MTV show "Pimp My Ride."

To pitch his video and special-effects firm Gagfilms, he posted short videos on YouTube, now owned by Google Inc. Besides the one where Steve the egg gets fried, there's a video where a marshmallow, also named Steve, shrieks "I'm on fire!" while someone roasts him alive over a flame.

Mr. Boedigheimer, who is 31 and goes by "Daneboe" on YouTube, superimposes video of his own moving mouth and his eye (digitally doubled) on pieces of food. Annoying Orange's shrill voice is Mr. Boedigheimer's own, speeded up. Orange "is kind of a mash-up of people in my life," he says.

Annoying Orange

The original navel-orange star is no longer part of the crew. He began to rot.

Given the fruit's sadistic streak, a looming question is whether an artistic evolution will be needed if he manages to go corporate.

Steven Addis, the CEO of a Berkeley, Calif.-based branding firm Addis Creson, isn't convinced that Annoying Orange would be a good marketing match for corporate foodstuff. "Most advertisers would want their produce depicted in a positive light," he says.

Mr. Weinstein, Mr. Boedigheimer's manager, thinks he shouldn't "focus so much on the chopping." He concedes that's a large part of the appeal, but notes that Annoying Orange's world does have occasional food characters who are spared, such as a full-lipped charmer named Passion Fruit, who seems to set Annoying's heart aflutter. Nobody lays a knife on her. A TV show might focus on those relationships, the agent suggests.

Mr. Boedigheimer concedes it's possible that gleeful mayhem isn't the only appeal of his videos, but "I wouldn't want to lose that edge," he says.

This leads to an inevitable question concerning Annoying Orange: Could the cynical citrus himself eventually die by the sword?

It won't happen. "I have fallen in love with the little guy," Mr. Boedigheimer says.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at [email protected]

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