Pellettieri: This is kind of a funny story. A few years later, we had this big, life-size deer. Its name was , and we launched it on TV with a local network here in Texas. We did it at The Flying Fish restaurant and they knew I did Billy Bass,

Pam Louwagie, Star Tribune , February 5, 2014, excerpt from “ Robbery Thwarted by Big Mouth Billy Bass, the Singing Fish”: Score one for the fish. The crime scene of a break-in at a Rochester’s Hooked on Fishing shop showed evidence that a burglar got scared off by a motion-activated, singing bass, authorities said. The novelty bass, which had been hung near the door and would start singing “Take Me to the River” whenever someone entered the shop, was found on the floor after the intruder knocked it down as part of breaking the door to get in.
Ashley Albert, co-owner, Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club: Here at the Royal Palms in Chicago, there are lots of little delightful moments all around the club that you can discover. Like, we have this very iconic pink flamingo wallpaper and a hedge wall of View-Masters, so there are all these strange things. I was looking for something to put on the wall leading up to the roof deck and someone suggested a giant marlin, but from an animal cruelty perspective, having a giant stuffed, magnificent, nearly extinct sailfish on our walls would probably not go over well with people. So I searched for fake trophy fish and Big Mouth Billy Bass kept coming up. We thought it would be hilarious if we just did a wall of them. Then it snowballed into, “What if we could get them all to sing at the same time?” and “What if we could get them to sing what we wanted them to sing at the same time?”

I scoured the internet and got 75 of them. I asked a friend who was a prop master if he knew someone who would wire them all together, and he immediately said, “I know a guy.” After I mailed the guy a couple Billy Basses to figure them out, he flew to Chicago and we put it all together, so now they sing the Talking Heads and the Bee Gees and lots of other stuff.
Richard Carter, creator of the Shashimi Art Car Parade Here in Houston, there’s a big thing called the Art *Car* Parade and I always thought about making one. In late 2000, I saw all these Billy Bass around and it was kind of cool and extraordinarily ridiculous. I thought, “Maybe I could turn that into a car.” I bought one and took it apart and all the mechanics were really simple, so I started to think about making an art car with them to choreograph them to different music.

A bunch of friends joined in the project, and we made it work. We started around Christmas of 2000, and the Houston parade was just a few months after that. We managed to get about 250 of the fish mounted onto the car. So we put it in the parade with a couple hundred thousand spectators and people were dropping to their knees and cracking up — it was just beyond anything that we could have imagined in terms of making people laugh.
In the years since, we’ve kept it going and even taken the car on a few trips to the East Coast and four or five trips to the West Coast. It’s still a hit at the Art Car Parade every year — it’s evolved over the years and become more sophisticated, with different soloists and a lobster as the conductor. The car is from 1984, but it’s a Volvo and they run forever. The fish, though, not so much — maintenance of the fish has been a major concern. I actually became an early adopter of 3D printing so that I could start printing replacement parts for them instead of buying more fish online. Most people probably would have given up in the last 20 years, but people laugh so hard at this, you know? How can you give up on the people who want to laugh?

James Vincent, Circuit Breaker , November 28, 2018, excerpt from “ You Can Preorder an* Alexa-Enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass *for $40”: The must-have gadget of the holiday season is finally here, the latest in cutting-edge fintech: an Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass, which is now available at Amazon for $40. This gadget has been a long time coming. A developer named Brian Kane first came up with the idea of hacking a Billy Bass to connect to Alexa’s API in 2016, before, in 2017, the makers of the fishy ornament said they were going to make Kane’s idea real. More than a year later, the product is available for preorder, complete with an official “Alexa Gadget” certification.
Unfortunately, you’ll need to connect the Alexa-enabled Billy Bass to an existing Echo device for it to work. But once it’s hooked up, you can use it for all of the usual tasks, including setting timers, answering basic queries, and playing music.

Bensch: Items like this, especially those that are only around for a short while but that are very popular, they become sort of the landmarks in our lives. When you see that item, it sends you to a particular time and place. So, when you see Big Mouth Billy Bass, you remember, “Oh, that was the haircut I had back in 2000,” or, “I hung my Billy Bass over this piece of furniture.: They really help crystallize a time period because of the power of their nostalgia and their ability to set our personal chronologies.