Bart Simpson, “ The Great Money Caper”: Wow, look at all this loot! What should we buy first?
Homer Simpson: A singing rubber fish, of course.

Pellettieri: Billy Bass was so big that it’s part of pop culture now. It was on The Simpsons,and recently, I saw it on a Geico commercial. McDonald’s did a Filet-O-Fish on a plaque a couple of years ago. I don’t work for Gemmy anymore, but Gemmy’s come out with anniversary versions of it and stuff like that, so I guess they’re still trying to keep it alive.

Bensch: We here at the Strong Museum of Play have a Big Mouth Billy Bass. We got one in 2000 because it was one of the hot things from that year.

Stewart: Certain things define generations, and novelty products are one of them. The Frisbee was kind of a defining product of the 1950s. Every generation picks up on different icons of their generation, much the same way that each generation has its own genre of music.

Pellettieri: It was neat that it was on The Sopranos when The Sopranos was really hot. [Tony Soprano] opened it up as a Christmas gift.

Vincent Pastore, actor, Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero on The Sopranos : In the show, Tony was having these dreams and the wise guy term is “sleeping with the fishes,” you know? So he dreamt about these fish. I guess it was in his head that he wanted to whack Pussy, because he knew Pussy was a rat. He knew Pussy was a rat from the time I came back from wherever I went, and then I met him in the driveway and we went downstairs and he was frisking me. He never trusted me! He never trusted me after John Heard, the cop, told him that I was a rat! But I always felt that Tony knewPussy was a rat and he couldn’t accept it, which is why he had that dream.

For the fish scene, I had to go into the studio and they filmed me saying those lines, “four dollars a pound, blah, blah, blah.” Then they created the fish character using me moving my lips, so I was involved in the animation process, which I thought was cool. They do that a lot for animated stuff, like when I did Shark Tale, they did that. Anyway, I thought it was a funny scene.

People often show up at meet-and-greets with that fish and I sign it. But that fish, the one that this thing is all about, that was seen in the series later, when Tony got one. But my character wasn’t that fish, my character was a bass lying in Asbury Park along with other fish.
That fish you’re talking about though, I’ve signed that at a lot at meet-and-greets. I wish I could make some money on that, to be honest. As a marketing thing, I wanted my agent to get involved with those people because, after The Sopranos, when people saw that thing — if they were a Sopranos fan — they thought of me. That’s why I’m doing this interview — maybe something will come out of it.

Kreiss: In the pilot of the British version of the Office, David Brent is trying to land all of these different jokes with the new temp and nobody’s laughing, then he finally comes to the Big Mouth Billy Bass, which is supposed to be this perfect gag, so he pushes the button and the batteries are dead, which is kind of their way of showing that not only is it out of batteries, but also David and his jokes are out of batteries. It’s funny, this episode was only in 2001, but it already knew the role that Billy was going to play in the culture.It also appeared just this year on an episode of What We Do in the Shadows, so it’s still popping up on TV.

Wynne: I was designing a fish restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas, back in 2002 and I needed to come up with a good hook — get it? This was 20 years ago, and back then, Billy Bass was closer in the rear-view mirror than they are now in terms of their relevance, so I knew that there were lots of them out there that people had and didn’t want anymore, and I needed to cover some walls. So I came up with the Billy Bass Adoption Center, which means that if you brought your Billy Bass in, we’d give you a free basket of catfish and adoption papers that stated that we’d feed and house your Billy Bass for the remainder of its life.
The walls filled up so quickly with them, they soon gravitated to the ceiling. I’d say there’s close to a thousand fish in there now. That was our first location; now we’ve got 11 and each has a Billy Bass adoption program. I have no idea how many Billy Basses we have altogether, probably 5,000, but we’re still doing it, so if you’ve got a Billy Bass to get rid of, we’ll give you a free bucket of catfish for it.