NEW YORK — Matt Antener, an amateur bass fisherman, has an unusual way to wake up his wife in the morning.
At about 5 o'clock, the Bellmore, N.Y., resident crawls out of bed and tiptoes over to a trophy fish hanging on their bedroom wall. After Antener pushes a button, the mounted bass wiggles its tail fin, turns its head and bursts into "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and "Take Me to the River." Antener cracks up as his wife is jolted from her slumber.
Elizabeth Antener isn't laughing. "He does this just to annoy me," she says.
Big Mouth Billy Bass may be the most annoying yet in a long line of silly adult toys like the Dancing Flower and the pet rock. Activated by motion sensors or by pushing a red button below its belly, the fish is stuffed with a microchip and three small motors that make it shimmy, flap and sing.
The singing fish recently made an Amazon.com list of most-hated products, based on consumer reviews, rivaling Bubble Fairy Barbie; "Dutch," a biography of Ronald Reagan; and the video of the movie "Showgirls."
But since it was introduced in February, Billy has become a hit with fishermen, kids and lovers of gadgets and kitsch who hang the $19.95 singing bass in game rooms, offices, bars and restaurants. Jeri Hervitz, vice president and merchandise manager at Spencer Gifts Inc., said the fish is reeling in so many shoppers that some of the retailer's 700 stores have waiting lists for Big Mouth Billy.
At K B Toys, Billy is the best-selling toy in five years and should be big for Christmas, says Len Patnode, who buys impulse products for the unit of Consolidated Stores Corp. in Columbus, Ohio.
"We've had instances where stores get upwards of 100 units and sell out in a matter of 12 or 13 hours," he says. "It was tough even for me to get one as a gift for my 6-year-old nephew, and I'm a buyer."
Regis Philbin gave Kathie Lee Gifford a custom-designed Billy with Philbin singing "Pennies from Heaven." A Big Mouth Billy has made a guest shot on the CBS soap opera "The Guiding Light" and can be spotted hanging in the chief investigator's office on the same network's crime-investigation show "CSI." President Clinton, the White House confirms, gave a Billy to Al Gore on the campaign trail.
Big Mouth Billy has been so popular that its manufacturer, Gemmy Industries, which doesn't even bother to advertise it, is now offering a number of spin-offs, including a singing trout, lobster, shark and gopher. Rivals are pushing their own knockoffs on infomercials for Boogie Bass and Louie the Large Mouth.
Gemmy, a closely held Irving, Texas, toy manufacturer that specializes in animated products, doesn't disclose product revenue. But it expects the singing bass to ring up more sales than its other popular products, including the singing, dancing Douglas fir Christmas tree and Pete the Repeat Parrot, a bird that flaps its wings and repeats words. The fish with a big mouth was born in 1998 when creator Joe Pellettieri, a Gemmy product developer, drove by a bass pro shop in Grapevine, Texas, and his wife, Barbara, suggested he make a singing fish to pitch to fisherman.
The prototype didn't make it. Billy was gray, generic and tacked onto a round plate. "It looked like a comic fish and it didn't excite anyone," Mr. Pellettieri remembers. "A motor made it wiggle its head and another motor made its mouth move, but that was it."
His boss told him to forget the fish, but Mr. Pellettieri cast about for a better model. He consulted a taxidermist to make Billy look more real and added a third motor to make him completely turn his head. After almost two years of tinkering, Billy had fins and scales and was mounted on a wood-grain plastic plaque.
He brought Billy home to get approval from his wife, his nine-year-old son and his three-year-old daughter, but the fish left gutted. "They played it over and over again," he says of his children. "I had to take the batteries out."
A Florida woman loathed the Billy she bought for her husband so much that she took it to WIRK-FM in West Palm Beach, Fla., to be destroyed. The morning show "J.D. and the Wake-up Crew" drove a van over it twice in the station's parking lot.
"We ran over it once and it still kept singing, but the second time it stopped," says disk jockey J.D. Pelletier.
The station gave the woman a parting gift: Travis the Singing Trout, Gemmy's lip-syncing fish that sings a spoof of "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy" and "Rock the Boat." Mark Kurtz, managing editor at the American Journal of Archaeology, bought his Big Mouth Billy to annoy co-worker Kevin Mullen. Mr. Kurtz put the fish above the coffee maker in their small Boston office.
At first, Mr. Mullen, an electronic operations manager at the journal, says, "I found it completely annoying." But then, he says, he did a flip-flop. "Now I play it to annoy everyone else," he says. "I want everyone to share my pain."
Mr. Kurtz is, indeed, pained, especially since the fish is just a few feet away from his desk. "Every time I'd get on the phone, the dumb thing would go off," thanks to its motion sensors, Mr. Kurtz says. "It drove me crazy."
Joan McAuliffe had to chastise the Rev. Mark Di'Nardo, a priest at St. Patrick's Church in Cleveland, because of Billy. A friend for more than 44 years, Father Di'Nardo would come over to her Rocky River, Ohio, home three or four times a week to play the Billy she and her husband, Bob, received as a 40th-anniversary gift. "I told him enough is enough," asserts Mrs. McAuliffe. "He's a bit of a lunatic with it, and I just had to say stop."
Father Di'Nardo protests: "When she starts squawking about it, I just say she's a frump," he says.