A couple of days ago TDR reported on the Do You Want Fries With That? parody site. The big question since then has been, “Who are the people behind all this?”

It may be that the question won’t be answered — at least not yet. TDR sent an interview request to their mysterious Hotmail address and got two different replies. It seems that there is a loosely connected group of people behind this, probably located in more than one country. Most of the work, however, was done by only two people. Most likely these two are the people who answered my message.

• Do You Want Fries With That?

The first message started with an official disclaimer:

This is an automated reply to a message you sent to Roxette via the Do You Want Fries With That? website. Due to Roxette’s popularity and the amount of mail they receive, they regret to say they are able to answer every single bit of mail you send.

The sender of the message introduced him/herself as “the Jolly Friar”. JF writes to TDR:

OK, the “Do you want fries with that” part came up in conversation one day, as with the McDonalds theme and some of the ideas in the “Album” section. I can’t remember most of it or even how we thought of making a website, but one morning we just decided to make it, and believe it or not it took about an hour. Ask Per and the lyrics wrote themselves but some of the Album section’s documentary took a while longer. We all kept sending bits to each other and they made us laugh so it was fun to do.

As you’ve seen in DYWFWT site’s “Ask Per” section, the creators of the site have got ideas from the “real” people writing to Roxette Mailing List.

A few people worked on the site, so I can’t speak for them all but I’ll do my best. A few knowingly worked on it, and as you can see from the people in Ask Per, some people gave us ideas without knowing it at the time.

According to the second message I received, the creators of the site are “Consuela Martinez and Hobert Wilkington-Smythe III”. He/she agrees that it didn’t actually take a long time to build the site.

[It took] two hours. Or was it three? You lose track of time when you’re blind drunk.

Even though most of the feedback I’ve seen on the Mailing List and in DYWFWT’s guestbook has been surprisingly positive, the people behind such a fierce parody are probably making some enemies. It doesn’t seem to scare them.

Marie Fredriksson says ’without enemies you have no real friends in the end’… I think there’s something in that for all of us don’t you?

But why? Don’t these lonely souls have anything better to do?

I think anything that’s a waste of time is time well spent.

So there.