The Annoying Orange

''Annoying Orange'' is an American live-action/animated comedy web series created by Dane Boedigheimer (known online as DaneBoe). The series follows an anthropomorphic orange who annoys fruits, vegetables, and various other objects by telling crude jokes and puns until their demise. In addition, the show satirizes and parodies pop culture, including television programs and commercials, anime series, films, music, celebrities, politicians, fairy tales, video games; and internet culture, with a touch of off-color humor, surreal humor and gross-out humor.

The show became popular, leading to three video games, a range of toys, backpacks, couches, pillows, blankets, lunch boxes, drink bottles, mattresses, towels, plushies and a T-shirt line. Other accessories, such as costumes of the series characters, have also appeared on the market.

The original web series has also expanded to multiple separate series, such as ''The Adventures of Liam The Leprechaun'', '' The Misfortune of Being Ned'', ''The Marshmallow Show'', the television series '' The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange'' and many YouTube secondary channels featuring the rest of the main characters as well as a gaming channel. It also has released episodes such as ''Ask Orange'', ''The Juice'', ''Emoji Raps'', ''Foodsplosion'', ''How2'', ''Adventures of Buttman'', ''Storytime'', ''Let's Play'', ''Annoying Orange vs'', ''Annoying Orange - (insert random thing here) Challenges'' and ''Trailer Trashed''. A Halloween-themed event called ''Shocktober'' has been releasing on every month of October since 2013, meanwhile, a Christmas-themed event called ''X-Massacre'' has only aired in December 2017. A compilation of episodes with a particular theme called ''Saturday Supercut'' has also been released on Saturdays since 2017 and the Spin-off The Juice.

The ''Annoying Orange'' YouTube channel had around 11.5 million subscribers in December 2022.

Plot

The show is centered on Orange (voiced by Dane Boedigheimer), who lives in a kitchen with other foods and objects like his best friend, Pear, an irritable, geeky Bartlett pear (also voiced by Boedigheimer). Other fruits include Passion, a sensible passion fruit and Orange's love interest (voiced by Justine Ezarik), an arrogant Grapefruit (voiced by Bob Jennings; later Jon Bailey), a tiny but hot-blooded Red Delicious apple known as Midget Apple (though he prefers the name Little Apple), a happy-go-lucky and slightly eccentric Marshmallow who always sees everything filled with enthusiasm, and an elderly lemon named Grandpa Lemon, all joining the show over the years.

The formula for most episodes consists of Orange heckling other characters until they meet a sudden, gruesome end, usually being killed or mutilated by a chef's knife (although implements used to maim them range from a blender to a toy pinwheel). Orange usually tries to warn them by crying out the weapon-in-use, such as "Knife!".

Orange has recurring mannerisms. He often begins an episode by repeatedly calling for a character's attention until the character responds. Orange also often refers to the character as something playing on the object's name or appearance (such as calling Grapefruit "Apefruit"). If an object behaves in a way that Orange dislikes, he will often call that object an "apple" (the food equivalent to " asshole"), even if the object is not an apple. Otherwise, Orange tells jokes, burps, breaks wind or makes noises with his tongue to get attention.

Despite the contentions of other fruits and objects, Orange generally cannot control his quirks and rarely tries to annoy others on purpose; he usually means well for most fruits and objects. In one web episode Mango, a life coach, suggests that Orange is using his annoying nature to cope with the demise of the fruits he tries to befriend. Regardless of his outward anti-social behaviour, Orange almost always finds comfort in the company of his friends and sometimes makes new ones.

Episodes

The first Annoying Orange episode was released on October 9, 2009. Since then, the Annoying Orange YouTube channel has uploaded two or three videos a week.

Background

Before ''The Annoying Orange'', Boedigheimer had done many talking food videos for his channel and other sites including JibJab. He said in an interview that the idea for ''The Annoying Orange'' was a combination of the talking food videos, puns and special effects he came up with and did before. The original video was planned to be titled ''The Annoying Apple'', but when he started animating the video he found it easier to put features on orange than an apple and make it clearer.

The first Annoying Orange video initially was meant to be the only one on YouTube. However, viewers requested more videos, and after the 4th one, Boedigheimer decided to make a full-time series. Following the success of the series, he created a channel dedicated to ''The Annoying Orange'' under the name "Annoying Orange" on January 11, 2010.

Reception

The series was rated as the most viewed web series of February and March 2010 by Mashable, with over 52 million views. On April 26, 2010, the series had over 108 million views on YouTube. In June 2010, the channel had received 137 million views. By August 13, 2010, it had received 1 million subscribers. In June 2011, the channel was ranked as the eighth most subscribed and 30th most viewed, with more than 2,000,000 subscribers. On January 13, 2012, the series hit 1 billion channel views and 2.3 million subscribers. The Annoying Orange YouTube channel currently has over 11 million subscribers.

Despite the popularity of the web series with sections of the public, it has received generally unfavourable critical reviews, many citing its rude humor. Liz Shannon Miller considered the show to be "annoying for many reasons." In the web series column ''Pass the Mustard'', Ned Hepburn called the show "pure, pure unfunny, highly concentrated, in droplet form, just purely nonsensical riffing from an Annoying Orange." Hepburn concluded, "''the Annoying Orange'' series is one of the few that I had a physically bad reaction to. It was horrible." 411mania.com called the show "idiotic" and "creepy as hell", while other publications have referred to it as "third grade humor."

In 2014 The Annoying Orange YouTube Channel was listed on New Media Rockstars Top 100 Channels, ranked at #32.

Lawsuit

The success of the series had received attention from H2M, a Fargo, North Dakota advertising agency, which in 2006 created its own "talking orange" character to be the spokesman for a North Dakota Department of Transportation ad campaign. Both characters were anthropomorphic oranges with ties to the Fargo-Moorhead area. Despite only slightly resembling H2M's talking orange, the Annoying Orange was looked into by H2M's attorneys as an intellectual property matter. Boedigheimer stated he had not watched H2M's talking orange videos before being informed about the disagreement, and also believed that the characters were not very similar. Boedigheimer and Grove was later sued by H2M in May 2013 for allegedly copying the character.ND Ad Agency Sues Creators Of Adult Swim Show
CBS Minnesota. May 22, 2013. Accessed from July 9, 2013. No information has been made public about the status of the dispute.

Pay withdrawal lawsuit

On December 23, 2014, Dane Boedigheimer announced that ''The Annoying Orange'' has not been funded by Collective Digital Studios since November 2014. This has led Boedigheimer to take legal action to get paid. Due to this, the series has had a noticeably lower budget on YouTube since then, with less use of live-action footage of foods.

Controversy

On April 12, 2021, the ''Annoying Orange'' channel faced significant backlash on Twitter when it was announced by their official account that the original Annoying Orange video from 2010 would be remastered in 4K and be sold via the digital market on April 15 as an NFT. ''The Annoying Orange'' addressed the criticisms with: "NFTs do not increase Ethereum's carbon emissions, and to those that might be angry because you think I've 'sold out', I'm sorry you feel that way. We are a very small animation studio that work very hard to do what we love—which is make silly videos that make people smile". The announcement Tweet was later deleted and the video was eventually uploaded to YouTube.

Merchandise

Collective merchandise

Since late 2011, The Collective has produced many accessories, toys and clothing with toymaker The Bridge Direct and clothing retailers such as JCPenney, Shopko and rue21. The Collective also announced a partnership in December of that year with costume manufacturer Rubie's Costume Company to produce children and adult Halloween costumes and accessories featuring characters such as Orange, Pear, Marshmallow, and Midget Apple from the web series.

Plushies

In 2020, Annoying Orange partnered with Warren James, LLC and has produced Memory-foam plushie toys depicting every major character. The inventory of plush toys includes Orange, Pear, Midget Apple, Marshmallow, Grandpa Lemon, Grapefruit, and Passion Fruit. The toys can be purchased on the official website individually, or in a bundle of seven.

Comics

Annoying Orange comics are published by Papercutz.

#''Secret Agent Orange'' (December 11, 2012) – Reference to ''James Bond''.
#'' Orange You Glad You're Not Me?'' (May 28, 2013) – This is a reference to the joke that ends in the punchline ''orange you glad... ?'' and has other endings depending on the joke, like "that I didn't say 'apple'?".
#''Pulped Fiction'' (August 27, 2013) – Parody of ''Pulp Fiction''.
#''Tales of the Crisper'' (January 14, 2014) – Parody of ''Tales from the Crypt''.
#''Fifty Shades of Orange'' (April 8, 2014) – Parody of '' Fifty Shades of Grey''.
#''My Little Baloney'' (August 5, 2014) – Parody of ''My Little Pony''.

Television series

''The Annoying Orange'' got a TV series on Cartoon Network, and it ran from 2012 to 2014 with two seasons and a total of 60 episodes.

Games

''Carnage''

A video game developed by Bottle Rocket Apps under the name ''Kitchen Carnage'' was released for the iPod Touch and iPhone on April 7, 2011. The game was later released in HD for the iPad on May 6, 2011, and for Android devices on October 14, 2011. The Christmas version of the game was released in December 2011 and the free version of the game, Kitchen Carnage Lite, was released March 2, 2012.

The game aims to throw different items across the kitchen into a series of blenders before the time runs out. The player is given apples and bananas at the start. When the second level is reached, tomatoes (replaced by baseballs for the 64-bit version) are added. Level 3 adds cantaloupes, level 4 pineapples, level 5 strawberries and level 6 adds Fred FiggleCorns. ''Kitchen Carnage'' was renamed to ''Carnage'' in 2021.

''Splatter Up''

''Annoying Orange: Splatter Up'' is the second game by the Annoying Orange, after ''Carnage''. The game is based on baseball, and the player slides a finger while a fruit enters the home plate. The faster the player slides, the farther he gets. The game sprites are the same as the ''Carnage'' game, the only one that does not appear in this game but appear in ''Carnage'' is Fred Figglecorn.

''Skewerz''

''Skewerz'' is the most recent Annoying Orange game. The player is given fruits and vegetables to collect and they need to catch them in the skewer. When collected, you can send them to a blender called the Roomba.

See also

* Syncro-Vox, a low-cost animation technique it has been used in the series

References

External links

The Annoying Orange official website

{{The Annoying Orange
2000s YouTube series
2009 web series debuts
2010s YouTube series
2020s YouTube series
American animated web series
American comedy web series
Black comedy
Cultural depictions of Abraham Lincoln
Fruit and vegetable characters
Internet memes
Internet memes introduced in 2009
Leprechauns in popular culture
Parodies
Satirical works
American surreal comedy television series
The Annoying Orange
Viral videos
YouTube controversies
Works about death
Works subject to a lawsuit
Works involved in plagiarism controversies