About

The Sound of The Thingy That Fries Potatoes in McDonald's (Japanese: マクドナルドのポテト揚げるやつの音), also called "The Sound when French fries are ready in McDonald's" (マクドナルドでポテトが揚がった音) or "TiLoLi" (ティロリ), refers to a series of musical remixes, mashups, and MAD videos featuring a notification sound of an electric fryer equipped in McDonald's in Japan. Those online user-generated remixes and parodies after 2009 have grown the presence of the sound enough to sometimes take a prominent part in official adverts since the late 2010s.

Origin

Though it's unknown when the company started introducing it, McDonald's Japan uses an electric deep fryer that notices the finish of cooking by repeating the "G, F, G", or "Sol, Fa, Sol", alarm sound (shown below, left). Many Japanese people nowadays consider this melody is the sound of McDonald's and its french fries because they have listened to it many times when visiting the most popular fast food chain everywhere in the country. The alarm's presence before the middle of the 2010s was enough to get cited by the Japanese jazz band Special Others^[1] in their 2009 song "Potato" (below, right). Also, a 2013 TV anime series for the light novel The Devil is a Part-Timer!^[2] used the alarm in the show because the protagonist was a part-time worker at a hamburger shop MgRonald's.

For quite some time, customers of the fast food chain often sing this melody like "Te-Le-Te" (テレテ), "Te-Le-Le" (テレレ), "Pi-Lo-Pi" (ピロピ), "Pi-Lo-Li" (ピロリ), "Ti-Lo-Li" (ティロリ), "Po-Te-To" (ポテト) or occasionally "Pa-Lo-Ma" (パロマ) which is the name of a company said to be the fryer's manufacture. But it didn't receive an official calling till the late 2010s.

Spread

On Niconico, a user posted a musical remix featuring that alarm on December 10th, 2008 (shown below, left), which is known as the oldest instance of introducing this sound into online parodies and remixes. This video led to a further increase in videos after the summer of the following year, which made the sound one of the minor but popular subjects of MADs, along with Suneo's bragging theme, FamilyMart's jingle, and Hammer from the Super Smash Brothers series on the Japanese video-sharing service. Because there was no proper name for this sound in those days, Niconico users came to give posts featuring it the tag with a vague naming, "The Sound of the thingy that fries potatoes in McDonald's," (マクドナルドのポテト揚げるやつの音)^[3], and the number of those posts increased over 100 by the following year.^[4] Among those uploads in that period, famous MAD video creator and musical remixer Sara (皿), also known by the alias "Man in A Bending Machine" (自動販売機の中の人), attracted many viewers to his video of a mashup with a song "Ren'ai Revolution 21"^[5] by Japanese idol group Morning Musume^[6] released in 2001 (below, right). His video made a resurgence in Niconico's ranking chart in June 2015 through a famous Niconico singer's tweet, which gave it lots of viewers and an online news outlet.^[7]

Furthermore, online artists and even professional musicians/singers started using this sound often in their works in the late 2010s, when the company began featuring it in the official adverts, as described below.

In Official Adverts

McDonald's Japan became using this famous sound in its advertisements in the 2010s. In February 2012, the company released a ringtone of the sound for a limited time, calling it "The Timer's sound when French fries are ready" in those days. Then, the hamburger chain began to feature the sound more frequently from 2019 onwards, officially calling it "TiLoLi" (ティロリ). Between March and April of that year, a hashtag campaign of a dance challenge, "#TiLoLiTune" (#ティロリチューン)^[8], was held on TikTok and released the "Official TiLoLi" (公式ティロリ) song^[9] which succeeded in playing more than 150 million times and receiving 65,000 user submissions throughout this campaign, according to TikTok Business.^[10]

The following year, the customers could receive the "Potato Timer" (shown below) as a novelty in several promoting events.

On January 13th, 2023, McDonald's Japan released a music video for "TiLoLi Mix" (ティロリミックス), the mashup of "TiLoLi" and popular songs for Japanese Zoomers, "Odo" (踊) by Ado^[11] and "PAKU" by Asmi^[12], on YouTube. The company added an official "TiLoLi" sound video six days after (below, right) and encouraged users to use it for their videos and musical remixes.

The hamburger restaurant also provided a dance for that song^[13], created by the famous Japanese influencer and dance group Local Campione (ローカルカンピオーネ)^[14], for the TikTok campaign, which hashtag #TiloliMix (#ティロリミックス) had earned over 200M+ views in total within its first week.^[15]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References