99% Invisible - 389- Whomst Among Us Has Let The Dogs Out

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

The story of how “Who Let The Dogs Out” ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something about inspiration, and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person. About ten years ago, Ben Sisto was reading the Wikipedia entry for the song when he noticed something strange. A hairdresser in England named “Keith” was credited with giving the song to the Baha Men, but Keith had no last name and the fact had no citation. This mystery sent Ben down a rabbit hole to uncover the true story. Whomst Among Us Has Let The Dogs Out

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On any given day, there are a few different kinds of songs rattling around in my head. Some were just classics, like literal classics. Then there were songs that are just in there that are my own favorite. Songs that have carved out a space in my brain because I listened to them over and over and over. That's the song Solidarity by the band Scream. Oh, that song is so good. And then there's this other category of memorable songs, the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone's permission, snuck their way into our collective unconscious

and now are just lingering there for all eternity. These songs aren't necessarily good, but they usually have some undeniably catchy quality to them, a hook that worms its way into our brains and never leaves. Like this one. But I think there's one song in the last 25 years that exemplifies this phenomenon more than any other. It's a song that I think nearly every one of you will recognize. It is not my favorite. it. You did not ask for it, dear listener, but today's entire episode is devoted to who let the dogs out. Don't go. I swear, it'll be good because this is a story about how that song ended up stuck in all of our brains, and it's actually really complicated and it goes back decades and spans continents, and in the end, I think it tells us something

important about inspiration and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person. To tell the story, we have brought in the world's foremost expert on who let the dogs out. Yeah, it's an undisputed title. This is Ben Sisto. And about 10 years ago, Ben was reading the Wikipedia entry for the song Who Let The Dogs Out by the Bahamian. And I noticed this like missing citation.

The Wikipedia entry said that the Bahamian didn't actually write the song, but a British hairdresser named Keith had heard it on a trip to Carnival in Chinatown, in Tobago, and that he passed it along to music producers. But it was all very vague. And that made Ben curious, so curious that he spent the next 10 years trying to figure out the answer to what seems like a pretty straightforward question. Who wrote Who Let The Dogs Out? And I just kind of got this journalism bug,

so I just kept asking people who let the dogs out. And here we are a decade later. Psst. Our story begins in the year 2000, but the release of that song by The Baha Man. I know exactly where I was the first time I heard this song. I saw a game at Pac-Bow Park, it was what it was called then, to see the Giants play. And before the game, The Baha Man came out, played this song, I'd never heard it before, never heard of the Bahamian. It might have been already a hit,

but it seemed like everyone already knew it. And even if you'd never heard it before, you kind of feel you know the song already, like it has a kind of like Jungian, Urtex kind of quality to it. So who are the Bahamian? So Bahamian are a really hardworking, multi-generational band from the Bahamas, and they've been playing together in one form or another since the 70s.

They started off as a group called High Voltage, sort of playing resorts around the islands, and they've always been known for this style called Junkanew, and that's the music associated with a street parade by the same name, you can think big bright costumes, hundreds of steel drums and cowbells and goat skin drums, just like a big party. This is kind of like the scene that Baja Man are part of. You don't have to worry, or even say a sorry, when you hear the joke of new. They were signed by a young Ann Argy, Steve Greenberg, and he stayed with them across multiple labels and break even releases, and Steve actually ends up being the guy who convinces

them to record who let the dogs out. The song had a really amazing hook, and I'd say one of these days I'm going to figure out how to do this, you know, do this song right, because there's something here, and I just never forgot about the song. I knew that the Bahamian were the people who I wanted to record the song. They just made sense to me. In fact, I used to keep a diary and I wrote in my diary, I'm going to record that song, who let the dogs out with the Bahamian and have a big hit all over the world, I'm certain. This sounds kind of crazy in retrospect, but Bahamian were like, no thanks. The song was already a hit in that area. And

they just didn't think it would be a good look to cover something everybody already knew. I didn't want to do the song. That's why I have to give Steve credit. I'm not gonna actually do anything else just one song. And hey, as a Steve conversation is finished, we will do the song. I'm extremely happy that we did. So why did their producer, Steve, care so much about the song? I think Steve's just one of these guys who knows a hit when he hears it. Steve's also given, for better or worse, the world, he's given the world acts like Hansen. And if there's a song that's going to like play well and stadiums and Disney, yeah, he just knows. So you said the song was already hitting the Bahamas. Is that where

he heard it originally, Steve? Yeah. So Steve heard the song via Keith Wainwright, who's like my original kind of Wikipedia mystery guy. And Steve Greenberg kind of instantly knew that there was like something special about the hook and that kind of led to him deciding to pitch it to Baja Man. Yeah. So Steve, here's the song, likes the song. Well, it doesn't really like the song, but likes the hook of the song.

So who wrote the hook? To find that out, it's the late 90s. So Steve went and as someone did in the late 90s, asked Jeves to come into the website and said Jeves, who let the dogs out. And this led Steve to a message board where people were discussing their vacations and music played at Carnival. This is where Steve first learns that this track is cut by a guy named Anselm Douglas.

I'm still amazed that after 20 years it's still out there and playing a new kid's, a new generation is growing up on it. If you don't know the song, who let it go so that you will living under a rock, think about it. What are the songs you know been out there for 20 years and kids every child knows it? So Douglas, who's actually already a known name in the Bahamas music scene, and he wanted to use his platform to write kind of a feminist anthem, like a song that could be this rallying cry for women who are fed up with like the dogs' men behaving poorly on the dance floor.

So do you want to, and we can take a listen? Yeah, it's his version. Totally. That is the song. That's it. Wow. I mean, that seems very clear. So, Anselm Douglas wrote that hook, and that's the thing we think of when we think of this song, we let the dogs out. Although I love the arrangement, actually.

Yeah. I do too. And, you know, Douglas is obviously more in the Soko-Colipso tradition and it's more like a take off your shirt, take off your towel, whip it at a high BPM. And the Bahamas is like Americanized hip-hop influence. But the Bahamas version retains this like junk-a-new undertone, which was really important for us crossover movements for the genre. So when it comes to the question, who let the dogs out? The answer is, Anselam Douglas.

Not quite. Douglas wrote Doggy, but it really wasn't like his idea alone. I never tool anyone. I came up with the phrase, never did, because I didn't. I know that my brother-in-law was the one who said, yeah, you've got to do the song. You've got to do the song. Oh, I don't know. I said, all right, now we'll do it. So he was the one who encouraged me to do it. So I gave him that You got to do the song. Oh, let her do it. I'll say, all right, now we'll do it. Yeah, no. So he was the one who encouraged me to do it.

So I gave him that credit because he was the one who said, do the song. So Douglas's former brother-in-law was the host of this DJ Mix Show, Rec Shop Radio out of Toronto. And two of that shows producers were these guys, Patrick Stephenson and LaRoy Williams, who, you know, they're like writing promos and jingles for it.

And one of those jingles contained the phrase, who let the dogs out, followed by the sound of dogs barking. And this is late 95, early 96. At the front of the office, I used to go, who let the dogs out? And Marie simply had that and he'd go, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, let the dogs out? You hear the weirdo's going, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, And Murray simply had that and he'd go, Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho- produce these original recordings. Ooh, let the dogs out! Hoor, hoor, hoor, hoor! ["Horror, hoor, hoor!" ["Horror, hoor, hoor, hoor!"

["Horror, hoor, hoor!" ["Horror, hoor, hoor!" ["Horror, hoor, hoor!" Yeah, so that's really it. That's the chorus right there, that's it. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's the hook. But this part kind of gets a little fuzzy because we'll want it to 20 years ago,

but people involved have different accounts. The long short is that Stephenson and Williams kind of on a handshake agreement told Douglas, like, okay, like, use this, write a song, go down to Carnival, but they didn't think it was gonna become a big hit, and they didn't really know much about like protecting publishing rights at the time.

We were so in love with doing the music and being creative, going to become a big hit and they didn't really know much about like protecting publishing rights at the time. We were so in love with doing the music and being creative, but we were passionate about creating and not taking care of the business and the business bit us in the end. Wow. So they like sort of handshake deal, allowed Anselm Douglas to make this carnival song of who let the dogs out called doggy. And then it's the one who gets licensed to the Baha Men to make who let the dogs out. So did Stephenson and Williams know anything about the licensing to the Baha Men? Not until they heard it on the radio.

Oh, that's rough. Yeah, I mean, for a song so happy, it's a very dark moment. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm going to a Jamaican restaurant and hearing this record that we did, and I'm hearing it on the radio. Oh, yeah, we wrote that. And other people are making so much money off this thing. That was just like,

yeah, it was hard after you found out that someone else is making money off your idea. So there's no official ruling, but Douglas signs in AffityVid, It was hard after you found out that someone else was making money off your idea. So there's no official ruling, but Douglas signs in Affidavid, asserting that Stephenson and Williams were the original authors of the hook, that his work was based on, that gives Douglas the rights to move forward with his own version and licensing.

Okay, so let me try to get this all straight. So when it comes to who let the dogs out, there's Steve in the Baham and who made the super popular version that most people know. There's Anselam Douglas who made the version from the Bahamas called Doggy that was directly covered in license by the Baham and then there's these DJs who had this brilliant innovation of pairing a rhetorical question with the dogs barking. And so that's incredibly complicated set of people and versions and rights and rights holders and people fighting. It's just kind of stunning. Well, actually, there's more.

So what is that? That is a remix of a song called Yura Dog, which is by a group called 20 Fingers featuring the singer Jalette, and that came out in 94. the singer Gillette and that came out in 94. It was a follow-up single to their global kind of mega hit short Dick Man. Do you remember that song? No, it doesn't. It doesn't leave immediately to mind. Well, I mean, as I kind of just implied, short Dick Man was in fact huge. And it's this big, big global hit. And yeah, people were paying attention to these artists

and stuff coming out of the Chicago scene. They were sort of like Douglas. They wanted a way to like make a fun record that hit back against some of the like, misogyny that was going on in dance music at the time. Many more who is part of the 20 fingers writing a production team just felt very frustrated by all that. So that's kind of where your dog comes from.

So this one was released in 1994. Does that mean that they are like the legally the authors of the song who let the dogs out? So here we kind of need to maybe shift gears and talk about copyright for a sec. Okay. So when you're considering a copyright infringement claim, there's two areas you really want to focus on.

And there are access and similarity. The latter similarity is pretty straightforward. It's like, do these things look or sound the same? But even if two things seem very similar, which of course is subjective, like courts will recognize there's a finite number of ways to arrange notes and words, so you also have to consider this concept of access, which, in short, means was the alleged infringer aware of the plaintiffs' work.

Like, what's the line between copying and coincidence? Okay. And so did the Canadian DJs? did they hear this song by Gillette? Stephenson and Williams claim to have never heard of a song or anything about 20 fingers. Based on Gillette's charting and billboard and stuff, I find that a little tough to believe, but I have to take them at their word. And so legally, does Gillette and 20 fingers have a case that their copyright had been infringed?

I think they did, but at the time their label didn't want to pursue it. You know, there's a joke about copyright being the right to be held up in court until your bankrupt. And if you're like an indie, if you're like an indie label or something like that, you might not have the resources and assets to sue a major label who can just kind of treat their legal expenses the same way one might like marketing costs. You know, it's kind of all the same pot as long as you have like a net positive result.

Okay, that makes sense. So I guess the DJs are the ones with the legal claim to the song because they weren't challenged by 20 fingers But 20 fingers can say that they are the original authors of the song Not so fast for them That's one of these people. This is Miami Boom Productions of Jacksonville, Florida with their song Who Let The Dogs Out, which was written and recorded in 1992. Goodness. This duo is Brett Hammock and Joe Gonzalez.

They're stage names at the time, Be Nasty and Miami J. Who are basically just like cool teenagers and they want to write, produce, and perform Miami-based music. That was it. That was everything to them. I actually had someone call me

and they're like, hey, I heard you and Joe's song on the radio and I was like, no, you didn't. And he was like, oh, yeah, I swear to you, who let the dog of that? I just heard it on the radio. we flipped it on and I'm just thinking somebody ripped off our track. Wow. So this is another set of people completely blindsided by hearing the Bahamans who let the dogs out on the radio. Completely. And there's actually this kind of amazing story of where they came up with the hook.

So these guys are, they're driving around Florida and their parents, Chevy Astro Van, they've taken the back seats out to make room for extra speakers and they're blasting this album Kings of Base by Base Patrol. On that album, there's a song called Demand Scientist and very, very low in the mix. Like, you can barely hear it if you're not looking for it. There is a sample and Bret and Joe didn't know what it said. They're making up lyrics and at some point they just said, who let the dogs out and kind of stuck.

I just started throwing my arms out. Oh, let the dogs let me drive. He didn't take me as mocking him. He started doing it too. So we're jumping around, hopping around, singing this song we just made up. And I looked at him, I said, he looks a pretty good hook. That sample is actually saying who's rockin' this dog's house.

And it comes from Pump Up the Party by Hassan. We should take a listen to this one. It's not exactly the same. I would argue the Miami boom stuff is transformative enough to be considered a new work, but you can really hear the seeds of it. So this is the thing that Miami Boom heard and turned it into their version of who let the dogs out. Correct. You can see how it's a progenitor, but it does seem like the leap between the two versions is greater than this one, as opposed to a lot of the other ones that we've heard today.

I would say this is more an instance of influence than copying. Right. Okay, so Miami Boom wrote this song in 1992. And was it released? Did other people hear it? Very few. And I only became aware of it because they had posted it to YouTube, which isn't really great for copyright dating purposes, because it's like, who knows when it was recorded.

But after kind of earning their trust over a couple of years and stuff, they eventually produced a bunch of stuff like old flyers and one of the best things they produce with these floppy disks that had the original vocals and samples from the recording session. In that box of floppy, is there was even the original receipt from the Kmart where they bought them in Florida. So that was like one way of dating it. Then I took those disks to a data preservation company in the UK called Cryoflux,

who helped me identify the hardware that would have been used, and then I found a DJ who had this piece of hardware and we open them up, all the samples were there. And this DJ and producer, his name is Mishna, he's also from Florida, knows a lot about Miami-Base and he kind of verified for me There was no way that this was fake Once you determine the veracity of Their song that it was out there in the world does Miami boom also feel like they're owed something like in terms of the copyright of who let the dogs out? They definitely do and I think they also want credit given to their

studio engineer her name was Mama Do. When I think about the times making this music it was phenomenal. It was the best times of my life. The bottom line is I know where we believe it came from. There's three names messing from that song, and they're sitting right here. We should own that song. The story is fun because the song is kind of funny and light, and it's a carnival song. But there's a real sadness to this. Yeah, it's difficult as an artist to think about people who aren't given proper attribution. You know, like being cut out of a financial deal is one thing, but to be unknown when your

song is known globally, I think hurts. Yeah. Okay, so I feel like I need to recap here a little bit. So let's go through all the versions. So first, here's the Bahamian playing the version that we all know. Who let the dogs out? Which they got from Anselm Douglas in the Bahamas. Which he got from the Canadian radio DJs in the mid 90s.

But before them Gillette and 20 Fingers wrote this version in Chicago in 1994. Before that Miami Boom wrote this in 1922. Yeah, Roman, I hate to keep doing this to you, but there is more. So what is that? Yeah. After I started doing some research and getting a little pressed, this guy, John Michael Davis from Duwajak, Michigan, learned about what I was doing and gotten touched. He told me this story that starts in 1990 in Duwajak. Then it was sort of like a down and out place.

I had this nickname, the dog patch. And the town really needed like something to rally around. So John tells me this like Rudy like tail of high school football, where there's like a Hail Mary pass and he just starts chanting, ooh, ooh, let the dogs out. And then the whole stadium starts chanting it. And then yeah, it just happens.

I should preface and say, that's how he remembers it. Other people from this football team don't remember it that way. Some people told me a guy named Keith the funky bus driver came up with it. It's kind of a mystery, but what's important is this team blew up. They won the state champion and this chant was their motto. So as part of the research, we visited

Duwajak and just like locals were like, oh, what are you guys doing here? Oh, we're researching who let the dogs out. And people just start giving us VHS tapes and like old silk screens and there's just all this stuff there with who let the dogs out on it from 1990. This team's coach was named Bernard Thomas and he was so beloved they called him Saint Bernard. His players were like his dogs and it just like it just made sense. So is the assertion that they're making is that this football chant traveled down to Miami to to inspire Miami boom?

I think they're not sure where it traveled to next or how but get this Joe from Miami boom is originally from Michigan until he was like eight years old or something. So I plotted this Google map of all the places the chant appeared in Michigan after the Duwajak Chief Dins had this great victory year. And that map formed a near perfect circle around Joe's hometown. So I was like, are you kidding me?

So it just looked so clean. So I got in touch with Joe and he verified for me that he was there that summer visiting family, but he says he's got absolutely no memory of hearing the chat. But also when I pressed him with the evidence, he wasn't overly defensive about it So as it turns out who let the dogs out let the dogs out let the some dogs loose These are all phrases that actually pop up here and there in regionals, high school sports, long before someone recorded a song, before Stevie B.

So I'm scouring like all these old newspaper archives. The earliest I've been able to find was from 1986, the Austin Reagan High School in Austin, Texas Their team the Raiders used it Oh, Molly Yeah, that's that's from a pep rally and it's just a weird like couple of seconds Embedded in this much longer, chronicling the football team. It's been on YouTube this whole time. And what year is that?

1986. I mean, that sounds more like the last version, you know, like the final version than even some of the ones in between. Roman, it's a wild ride. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness. So is this, have we finally reached the bedrock of who let the dogs out? Do we actually know who let the dogs out at this point? Well, this is as far back as I can go. The title of the Bahamian song doesn't have a question mark in it and I'm just going to have to look into it all this time. I just have to accept that maybe it's not a question, it's probably unanswerable. I mean, when you started this, did you think it would be this hard to determine who wrote a single song? No way. I think if I had known I would not have done this. But you know, it is a nice surprise and there's been a lot of nice surprises along the way.

I got to meet all these cool people and producers. Maybe I would have done it again. Yeah. There are all these sort of like ways in which people borrow and they take in information. It comes process in their brains. They maybe they spit it out as an homage or maybe they don't know where it comes process in their brains, they may be they spit it out as an homage or maybe they don't know where it comes from. Do you think about how a song is passed between different people, or some of them lying, or none of them lying? Where do you stand in everyone's story in this story?

I don't think anybody in this story is lying and I actually think people have been pretty forthcoming and open to the notion that you can hear something and it's just in there subconsciously until like it's ready to come out. I think one of the big myths we tell ourselves about art is that it's like made by individuals and that myth is sort of what the art market is like propped up on. I mean, like for my own experience, I vividly remember being 20 at art school.

I had this idea to like, you know, wood shop class to make a box. And the box was gonna have an audio tape that contained the sound of the box being made, just like youthful conceptual daydream or whatever. This was my idea until like years later I learned that Robert Morris created a work in 1961 called Box with the Sound of its Own Making.

So it's like, I don't know, did I get the idea from him? Was it coincidence? Was it copying? I just can't tell you. And I think that's what's cool about all the dog stuff is like, it's just about the very nature of art and life. And I think that all these ideas apply to like every piece of creative work ever made.

Well, that's so cool. Well, I really appreciate you taking us on this journey. And, you know, maybe we'll never know the answer to who let the dogs out, but the question is still worth asking. Well, thanks for having me. I'm surprised many times before wanting to hear me talk about this, but yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thank you. It certainly surprised me to learn that who let the dogs out doesn't actually have a question mark, but titles that are grammatically questions without actually being written as questions are surprisingly common.

More on that after this. So I'm in this video with Chris Perube and you're actually in town. I am. I'm in Oakland, California. That's amazing. It's so good to have you here. It's great to be here. And you helped us put together this episode on Who Let The Dogs Out. And one of the things that is kind of remarkable that is hard to convey in a podcast is that there is a kind of quirk to the title Who Let The Dogs Out.

Yes. And that is, is that it isn't a question. It doesn't end in a question. Who Let The Dogs Out. Yes. And that is, is that it isn't a question. It doesn't end in a question. Who Let The Dogs Out is just the end of it. There's no question mark at the end of it. Yeah, it's a statement effect, which is really strange. And actually, it reminded me when Ben was talking about the question mark, it reminded

me of something that happened to me a year ago. So I was hanging out with my friend Liz, who's a movie producer. We watch a lot of movies together, and she's like, hey, have you seen Who Frame Roger Rabbit? And I tried watching it as a kid. It's really scary when you're a little kid because they're very mean to the cartoons. So I was like, you know what?

Yes, let's give it another try. Let's put it on. So she turns the movie on, and then immediately, I'm like, oh, there's something really weird about this movie. And she's like, oh, that the humans and cartoons are interacting, I'm like, oh, there's something really weird about this movie. And she's like, oh, the humans and cartoons are interacting. I'm like, no, that is fine, that is logically consistent to me. There is something else, like, right when the movie starts that really bothered me.

It starts with a very lovely kind of jazzy, low, blue note. And then the movie's titles fade onto screen. It's literally the first visual of the film. these titles fade onto screen. It's literally the first visual of the film. And it's who framed Roger Rabbit except instead of a question mark, it is phrased with an exclamation point at the end. So not who framed Roger Rabbit,

but who framed Roger Rabbit? So that's my friend Liz who I watched the movie with. And she told me there's a very specific reason for that. And it's because the director of the movie, Robert Semeckis, gave this interview where he said, there is a superstition in Hollywood that if you put a question mark at the end of your title, the movie will bomb at the box office. And when you think about it, there's lots of examples that back that up. So like, what's eating Gilbert Grape is a statement of facts. Statement, okay.

What's love got to do with it with Tina Turner is also a statement. And what's weird about it though is this is not a superstition that everyone follows. So there's lots of examples where they don't use the question mark and there's lots of examples where they do. Say for example, guess who's coming to dinner? I think it came out in 1967.

It's a huge, huge hit. It's got fence or treasy. It's got Sydney, Pau allier. It's guess who's coming to dinner? No question mark. And I always took that as an example of a movie. They're like, okay, they followed the rule. Contemporaneously, you have who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, which is like Liz Taylor's

huge, huge, huge, come back, massive, massive, massive hit. You have, they shoot horses, don't they, starting Jane Fonda. That's got a question mark. That's a huge hit. So it's not precise. So you have movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which do really well, but then you have all these other movies at the same time, which we're also doing well. So Liz and I were like looking through all these titles in history and trying to figure out like some pattern or some rhyme or reason to why you put in a question mark.

And what we noticed is that there's lots of dramas that don't use question marks. So what's even Gilbert Grape, you know, really serious movie. But comedies use them all the time. So, dude, where's my car? That is a question. Yeah. A brother where I at though. That's a pretty goofy film. That is also a question. Yeah. And Liz's theory about this is it's really, the question mark really sets you up for a certain kind of mood. I would say sort of a zaniness or wistfulness. It's sort of like one or the other. So you have what about Bob, which has a question mark at the end, because it's kind of like, what about Bob? And it makes you feel kind of like cheerful and goofy.

Like, you're waiting for the punchline, you're waiting for the shoot or drop. It's like being told the first half of a joke. So ultimately, there's kind of no rhyme or reason to this. Like, there's lots of movies with question marks. There's lots of movies with that question marks. But what Liz explained to me, which is interesting, is it really isn't keeping with how the movie industry

makes decisions, that one thing does really well, and then they kind of try to guess if that thing is gonna do well. What was the thing that did it? Again. So she says it's part of this bigger pattern where people are trying to guess things in this industry where success can sometimes feel totally random.

You can't fully predict how people are going to act. And so people get very, very into these like, nitty gritty sort of, you know, like, oh, people don't like leads with blonde hair this year. That remake flops were never gonna make remakes for like 15 more years. That musical did really well. So now we're gonna do 30 more musicals.

I mean, like these kind of superstitions are just trying to put lighten it in a bottle and trying to like apply any kind of rhyme or reason to what is ultimately like such a multi-variant and shifting public mood that will put or not put money in your pocket that you'll latch on to stuff like question marks in the titles which is like the equivalent of wearing the same pair of shorts for every NCAA finals game you play in. So, ultimately, there's kind of no answer to the mystery, except to say that all creativity and art is a mystery.

And what I think I take some kind of delight in is the potential that there's these sweaty people and suits, like, really vexed over whether or not a question mark should go next to the title or not Absolutely, and like what is this what is this telling our audience if we are telling them dude. Where is my car? As a complete sentence. No, oh I kind of love it. I so I guess I you know There's so much of what we do on the show is to think about all the thought that goes into things. And often the result is a beautiful object or a functioning street or a curb cut or whatever.

And this is truly like deck chairs on the Titanic. I mean, this is like, this is truly, we don't know how this works. We don't know what it's going on. It's probably means nothing. Right. We're going to make all sorts of decisions. It's going to be a meeting about it. So it is a whole meeting to decide whether or not dude wears my car is a statement or a question.

And if that is going to influence whether a teenager is going to go see that movie. Oh, I love it. I love it. Okay, well, that's, you know, and mystery unsolved, but I'll now think of it whenever I see a poster and, you know, like, and someone deciding that this is a declarative statement versus an a query, which is awesome.

Cool. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Robin.

99% Invisible was Produced This Week by Ben Sisto and Chris Baroube edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. There is a whole documentary about Ben's investigation called Who Let The Dogs Out. And it goes into a bunch of detail we couldn't fit into this episode. It is delightful to watch. You can watch it on iTunes or Amazon. Special thanks this week to Brent Hosh, Ali Kelly, and Jazzling Corp for providing audio for this episode, and thanks to Liz Watson for the story about who framed Roger Rapid. Not a question. Mix in Tech Production by Sriviusif, Additional Music by Sean Rial with Barking by Carrot Riddle Rial. Carrot.

Baby. Baby. Baby. Katie Mingle is a senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. Avery Trouffleman saw the Who Let The Dogs Out documentary and insisted we make an episode about it. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Vivian Le, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99pi org on Instagram and read it too. But the original home of 99% invisible. But there's no mystery. It's all there just waiting for you at n-i-i-p-i dot org.

Do you actually like the song itself? I'm indifferent. Radio til P.R.X.