Nobody involved in the production of Netflix’s new action-comedy release, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, is even trying to act like the film—a 30-years-later sequel to the two-thirds-beloved trilogy—isn’t primarily a nostalgia exercise. The film puts it all right up on the screen, after all: Eddie Murphy, Bronson Pinchot, Judge Reinhold, and basically every other surviving member of the original trilogy trooping across its wisecracking versions of Detroit and California, allowing viewers to go “Oh yeah, Paul Reiser!” with a happy little smile every few minutes of movie that they consume.
We’d like to consider ourselves basically immune to this sort of thing, as sophisticated and refined cinematic viewers. But damn if Netflix doesn’t know how to push our buttons, too, with a well-deployed reunion between two beloved franchise veterans. Why else would the streamer release a new promo for the film this weekend that brought together two of screendom’s most beloved allies: Axel Foley and Crazy Frog?
Y’all remember Crazy Frog, right? (It occurs to us, as we slowly fossilize into the amber of having grown up primarily in the 1990s, that y’all might not remember Crazy Frog.) Crazy Frog was, to quote Wikipedia “a Swedish CGI-animated character and Eurodance musician” who was used to sell cellphone ringtones, and also had one of the biggest hit songs on the planet for a hot minute in the very stupid days of 2003. And while we understand that you might be reeling in this moment, after just having crossed to the far side of one of the most difficult sentences that we, personally, have ever written: For modern brains, it might be easier to think of him as a version of Japanese vocaloid Hatsune Miku, if Hatsune Miku was a horrible frog thing that the worst people you knew gave money to to make him their cellphone ringtone.
Ignoring the wider Crazy Frog phenomenon—the video games, the failed TV show, the NFT plan that got shut down by death threats, and, for the love of god, the “Genitals” section listed under “Controversies” on his Wikipedia page—the actual upshot here is that Crazy Frog has a weirdly strong connection to the Beverly Hills Cop franchise. That’s because “his” remix of Harold Faltermeyer’s ridiculously catchy theme song for the movies, “Axel F,” ended up charting at number one in, like, most of Europe. (It was a simpler time, when people had yet to really absorb the idea that a frog could be so goddamn crazy.) There was a time when you simply could not get away from the sound of a CGI frog thing doing Autotuned Porky Pig noises over one of the ’80s most iconic synth scores, and that time is once again now, because Netflix went ahead and made a new Crazy Frog “Axel F” video to promote Axel F. The video not only features the song, but also plenty of footage of Crazy Frog getting in Axel Foley’s way and even potentially murdering his, because seriously, we don’t think this amphibian is well.
So, yeah: Crazy Frog is back. Axel Foley is back. Nostalgia is a natural impulse of retreat when one feels the future plunging into a hell we are both culpable for, and yet have no meaningful control to prevent. Let’s go crazy! (Frog.)