Basso Profundo

Boat/US Magazine, Nov, 2000 by Ryck Lydecker

"This silly fish brought me to tears."

So flapped an excited San Francisco "toy enthusiast" on Amazon.com's customer review page last summer about the hottest splash on the U.S. novelty market in years -- a singing fish. And although some reviewers love to hate Big Mouth Billy Bass, it's easy to see why he keeps swimming off retailers' shelves.

Hang this life-size, trophy-looking largemouth mounted on a wood-looking plastic plaque on your wall and wait for a victim. When someone gets close enough, the motion sensor strikes and Billy wiggles his tail, twists his head to the audience and belts out a few bars of "Take Me to the River." And that's all Texas-based Gemmy Industries needs to keep taking Billy to the bank because when your guest stops laughing, the next thing you'll hear is, "I've gotta have that."

Actually, Billy's two-song repertoire includes "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and judging by the response -- some stores selling out hundreds in days -- he's made a lot of people happy. He's delighted anglers and non-anglers alike, comforted the terminally ill and, according to one reviewer, "added a little redneck heaven" to a tony Manhattan apartment.

And he's also driven people nuts.

"The maw of hell opened ... and Billy Bass swam out," another reviewer wrote. "Eek, it's the singing fish again," said a store employee who had to listen to Billy every time a customer came in. He's been called "evil" and "a tool of the devil." But that doesn't bother Billy. The plastic, fantastic Big Mouth has been "a keeper" since he swam onto the scene last February.

Billy is everywhere. A quick-and-dirty midsummer Boat U.S. survey found him in mass-market retailers, touristy gift shops and mom-and-pop tackle shops coast to coast. But when Billy first hit the big time, around Father's Day, stocks were fished out fast. Billy back-orders piled up and some stores reportedly had to keep new supplies under heavy cover to prevent fish fights until they filled their standing orders.

Even people who complain loudest about this two-song tenor caught him with a credit card or cash in the first place and now he's spawned a whole school of singin' and swingin' "animatronic" underwater animals.

There's Travis Trout, Cool Catfish and even Larry Lobster. And Billy, he's gone "seasonal" these days with a spooky Halloween version (Big Mouth Billy Bones) and next, a Christmas Billy with Santa hat, jingle bell, red ribbon on his tail and singing holiday tunes. Big Mouth Billy Bass has turned into a marketing coup that surprised even his creators.

"It's been unbelievable," says Jim Van den Dyssel, Gemmy's VP for marketing and sales. "We knew this would be a good idea but never in our wildest dreams did we imagine this kind of success."

Not bad for a toy that almost wasn't.

Just for the Halibut

As Van den Dyssel tells it, Joe Pellettieri, products division manager at Gemmy, and his wife Barbara, a jewelry designer with years of experience in retail marketing, actually got the idea for the singing fish in 1998 at a sporting goods store. Gemmy was already in the toy business, having started in 1983 with a parrot that talks back via an internal tape recorder. The company went on to make its mark in the business with animatronic novelties like a singing Christmas tree, Santas that boogie to recorded pop tunes and a crooning cactus. But they didn't have anything for the fishing crowd.

The Pellettieris' idea sounded good to the folks at Gemmy but when a prototype went belly-up a few times, Van den Dysell tried to gut the fishing venture. But Pellettieri kept Billy in the bait bucket until company engineers got the fish's moves just right. Then he turned the singing fish on his boss.

"When I saw it, I'd been sick in a hotel room for three days," Van den Dyssel reports. "Well, I laughed out loud because that was the first time I saw it turn out its head to you. And I figured, if it could make me laugh, as sick as I was, it could make others laugh as well."

To fine-tune the final product's appeal to anglers, company designers consulted several taxidermists because they wanted to get the body shape and markings right. So, could this piece of piscatorial plastic fool a real, live Betty Bass? According to Bruce Shupp, conservation director of the Bass Anglers Sportsman's Society (B.A.S.S.), Billy is close.

"Judging by the eye and the lower jaw location, Billy is a largemouth bass," Shupp says. "However, with the coloration they've given him, he could be a smallmouth, too. But hey, who cares? It's only for fun."

Actually, Shupp and Billy have had some fun together themselves. Shupp says a B.A.S.S. member donated one of the first Billies to the association headquarters in Montgomery, AL, and he's still hanging around the lobby, albeit with his motion sensor deactivated. Another Billy used Shupp as his straight man at a statewide meeting last summer.

"I was the guest speaker at a meeting of Alabama Water Watch, a citizen water quality monitoring group," says Shupp. "Since healthy bass stocks depend on clean water, the host thought it would be sort of symbolic to have Billy sing into the microphone when I got up to speak. Of course, it cracked up the audience and Billy was a tough act to follow."