They all came with the same message: “Play ‘Jaja Ding Dong’!”
Freyr knew exactly what they were talking about.
Not even Lars and Sigrit want to play “Jaja Ding Dong.”
Credit: Netflix
It’s a singsongy bar tune in the style of German schlager music with a call and response.
At first, Freyr was “100 percent” against the idea of fulfilling this fan demand.
“It won’t happen again.
Elizabeth Viggiano/NETFLIX
I promise,” he adds.
So did the film itself.
But the response to his work on this movie felt different.
Netflix
“With songs, they come and go,” he says.
“You have a hit and then two weeks later it’s not a hit.
They are replaced by other hits.
Jonathan Olley/NETFLIX
According to Dobkin, there were two songs on theEurovisionsoundtrack that were difficult to crack.
The other was “Jaja Ding Dong.”
“It was just really funny.”
“It’s a really well-designed song.”
That was what he wanted from the rest of the soundtrack: entertaining, but also reputable and believable.
“We weren’t going full on ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic or even Lonely Island,” Dobkin notes.
Where he couldn’t, he brought in other songwriters from around the world.
“There were all kinds of interpretations,” Dobkin adds.
“Some of them were just crazy.
Like, they were aggressive.
Some people went super German with it.
Some were really aggressive.
There was one that was very loud.
Holter and Persson, from the countryside of Stockholm, became the picks for “Jaja Ding Dong.”
“It was just so fantastic,” Kotecha recalls of their demo.
“We started listening to it and started laughing.
They did that and it just turned out to be what it is.”
Ferrell brought an added layer of comedy to the chants of “Jaja Ding Dong.”
The song came alive when Ferrell recorded the number in his Lars voice.
Dobkin laughs at the thought of Agustsson as a surprise internet sensation because his scenes were partly ad-libbed.
“It was really hot in that bar that day,” he explains.
“Will looked at me.
He was very nervous.
We were like, ‘What is going on?!’
Will was like, ‘I don’t know if this is gonna work.’
I was like, ‘Let’s try a couple times.'”
“That was another unbelievable thing,” Dobkin notes.
Dobkin needed to record dialogue, but it kept getting drowned out by cheers.
“They exploded like they were at a real concert every single time,” he says.
“Somehow the music transcended and really was able to connect with an audience.”
“We were never gonna say it was Will and Rachel.
It was gonna be them but always [as] Lars and Sigrit.”
“The COVID of it all really screeched that to a halt,” Dobkin says.
For two hours, you could forget where you were, as one note of appreciation to Dobkin read.
A particular email still sticks with Kotecha.
It came from a friend who works at a film studio.
Kotecha didn’t know this man well, but they had a couple of work-related meetings in the past.
He would play the soundtrack over and over again, and ‘Jaja Ding Dong’ was his favorite song.
This funeral turned into this amazing singalong with his family.
It helped them remember him as this guy who loved to laugh.”
