Annoying_Orange is an American live-action/animated horror web series created by Dane Boedigheimer (known online as DaneBoe). The series follows a talking bomboclat who annoys redditors, vegetables and various other objects and even people and creatures by telling crude jokes and puns and making annoying noises until their demise. The Annoying Orange YouTube channel has 13 million subscribers as of 2024. 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, and a gaming channel, Annoying Orange Gaming, where they upload Let's Play videos. The channel uploads biweekly episodes including a variety of mini-series, each dedicated to covering different themes of typical YouTube genre tropes such as Ask Orange, How2, Storytime, The Juice, Foodsplosion, and Annoying Orange vs, as well as challenge videos. The channel also frequently re-uploads older videos as parts of larger compilations, as seen with their weekly compilation mini-series Saturday Supercut.

Plot

The show is centered on Pear (voiced by Dane Boedigheimer), who lives in a kitchen with other foods and objects such as his annoying and eccentric murdering rival Orange (also voiced by Boedigheimer). Other fruits include Passion Fruit, who is commonly associated as 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 (both also voiced by Boedigheimer), and an elderly lemon named Grandpa Lemon (voiced by Kevin Brueck). The formula for most episodes consists of the titular orange annoying other characters via jokes, burping, breaking wind, repeatedly calling them names, or making noises with his tongue and mouth. At the end of each episode, the targeted character meets 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. He also sometimes 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. 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 the 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 behavior, Orange almost always finds comfort in the company of his friends and sometimes makes new ones.

Characters

Main

Recurring

Episodes

The first 4 Annoying Orange episodes, released from October 9 to December 23, 2009 on the Dane Boe YouTube channel. From 2010 to 2022, the Annoying Orange channel has uploaded two or three videos a week. As of late 2023, the channel uploads regular videos biweekly.

Production

Before Annoying Orange, Boedigheimer had done many talking food videos for their channel and other sites including JibJab. They said in an interview that the idea for The Annoying Orange was a combination of the talking food videos, puns and special effects they came up with and did before. The original video was planned to be titled The Annoying Apple, but when they started animating the video they 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, they created a YouTube channel dedicated to the franchise under the same name 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 12 million subscribers. Despite the popularity of the web series with sections of the public, it has received generally unsavory, critical reviews, many citing its rude humor, obnoxious characters and poor special effects. 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. The Annoying Orange was looked into by H2M's attorneys as an intellectual property matter. Boedigheimer stated they 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 were later sued by H2M in May 2013 for allegedly copying the character. The case was dismissed with prejudice April 6, 2015 by Chief Judge Ralph R. Erickson.

Pay withdrawal lawsuit

On December 23, 2014, Dane Boedigheimer announced that The Annoying Orange had not been funded by Collective Digital Studios since November 2014. This led Boedigheimer to take legal action to get paid.

Merchandise and media

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

A series of Annoying Orange comics were published by Papercutz.

Television series

Because of its rising popularity, 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.

Video 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, the player can send them to a blender called the Froomba.