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: EMAIL EXCHANGE WITH THE INSPIRATOR OF HATTEN

[charlie] Have you seen www.kramgo.se/ansiktsburk?
          It's an old Azar Habib tune misheard in
          Swedish.

[b3ta]    No. that's a new one on us. It looks
          quite derivative of the web classic,
          hatten, though.

[charlie] Actually Hatten is a derivative of
          ansiktsburk and fiskpinnar. We've
          had over 1.3 million visitors on
          ansiktsburk...

[b3ta]    Tell us more about them. Did you
          make them?

[charlie] The guys behind hatten also made the
          lyrics to ansiktsburk and fiskpinnar.

          Originally they circulated as an e-mail
          with the music attached. We made the
          films on October 7,2000. Several months
          later we finally learned who was behind
          the lyrics, two Swedish students.

          The music is Azar Habib a Lebanese1
          songwriter who has been really popular
          in the middle east.

[b3ta]    so did you guys animate hatten? (I'm
          trying to work out the difficult
          chronology here...)

[charlie] No. Hatten was made by the guys who
          made the lyrics. But they made it
          after we made the ansiktsburken and
          fiskpinnar animations. I'll try to
          make myself more understandable later
          on. Too much to do right now.

[b3ta]    that's interesting. so you guys
          basically started the crap
          music/bad flash trend?

[charlie] Well, crap music was here before us.
          Bad flash is our middle name.

[b3ta]    oops. no offence meant. er... so you
          started the "fanstic animation with
          rubbish music trend?"

          so - who are you guys? an agency?

[charlie] no offence taken.

          I don't know if we started this trend,
          but I had not seen anything like it at
          the time. We're a small ad/web agency
          in Stockholm, Sweden, since 1999.

          On the web we specialize in flash content
          for a wide spectrum of clients.

          The trend with strange lyrics to existing
          music started with Patrik Nyberg and Johan
          Gröndahl, at least in Sweden. They made
          the lyrics for Hatten, Ansiktsburk and
          Fiskpinnar. They all circulated in text
          form for a while, but it was the films
          that brought the explosion.

          Ansiktsburk was on Swedish television,
          Norwegian TV made a rip-off, the whole
          thing was written about in numerous
          newspapers and there was a public debate
          at Stockholm University on whether
          Ansiktburk was racist or not. The text in
          Swedish is just nonsense actually.

          The films were made on a lazy friday
          afternoon after a couple of beers. As
          of today Ansiktsburk has had 1.4 million
          visits. It peaked at about 27 000 per day.

          Azar Habib himself was interviewed in a major
          daily newspaper and was pretty happy
          about the whole thing. The original lyrics
          is about being embraced by happiness and 
          the like. Ansiktsburk was written to 
          one of his friend's daughter's wedding.

          The drop in the web market has held viral
          marketing in high demand. Everybody wants
          loads of traffic at no cost. It is,
          however, not an easy thing to deliver.

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