This year Radioinfo will take you back 50 years to the songs that were released and charted in that mighty fine year for music.

How did Hooked on a Feeling go from a sweet and innocent country love ballad with an electric sitar into an ooga-chaka-ing pop song of cultural significance featuring dancing babies, Harvey Keitel and The Guardians of the Galaxy?

Let’s go back to where it all began, with a man called Mark James, who died, aged 83, in June this year.

Mark aspired to be a singer. After serving in Vietnam, he rekindled a childhood friendship with B.J Thomas, who also wanted to be the same. As it turns out Mark would be employed as a songwriter, and in 1968 he wrote Hooked on a Feeling not exactly for B.J to sing, but that’s what happened. The beautiful electric sitar, so key to the song’s success, was played by Reggie Young.

That was just the start of an extraordinary song writing career for James. He would write and record Suspicious Minds, also in 1968, which Elvis Presley decided to record when searching for the right track to revive his then somewhat floundering career. He would later write one of Elvis’s last hits, Moody Blue, as well. In 1972 Mark co-wrote Always on My Mind, which Elvis first recorded and Willie Nelson later covered. Reggie Young plays guitar on Elvis’s Suspicious Minds and later, on Willie’s Always on My Mind, which I bet Colonel Tom Parker wished had happened for Elvis.

In the UK there was a singer called Johnathan King, quirky to say the least, who had several hits in the 60s and 70s under his name and several other monikers. In 1972 he would form his own record label discovering bands like 10CC and Genesis. He also was one of the original backers of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Under his real name, in 1971, he recorded a cover of Hooked on a Feeling inspired by Johnny Preston’s No 1 hit from 1959, Running Bear. Listen below:

Running Bear had been written for Preston by The Big Bopper a few months before he died in the plane crash that also killed Buddy Holly and Richie Valens. Singing back up is future country music legend George Jones. That’s not him though doing the uga ugas, although it would make a great story. Jones would cover Running Bear a few years later too.

Anyway, for no good reason other than that King totally transformed the song with the ooga-chakas into something far removed from the original.

Now we head to Sweden where rock band Blue Swede decided to record an album of covers. For one reason or another they selected Hooked on a Feeling but went with the Johnathan King version, not B.J Thomas. King’s was only a very minor hit so goodness knows how they found it.

They released it in the US in early 1974 and someone obviously started playing it on radio because by April it had reached No 1 there and was a top ten here.

It is one of those songs so unusual that it should have faded into obscurity (Blue Swede are one hit wonders in Aus) but it was used in a key scene in Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough film Reservoir Dogs in 1992. A couple of years later it became part of the famous dancing baby moment in TV show Ally McBeal and, a decade ago, was the critical song on Peter Quill / Chris Pratt’s mixtape in the Marvel Universe film Guardians of the Galaxy.

So culturally significant has it become that the lead singer of Blue Swede, Björn Skifs, sang it to start the final of this year’s Eurovision Song contest.

King says he has never received any monies for his arrangement that is now so massively successful. I wonder if I say Hooked on a Feeling to you, whether you hear the sitar or the ooga-chaka?

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and music trivia buff for Radioinfo.