Savan Kotecha, executive producer of the soundtrack, explained alongside the song’s producer Christian Persson in a Vulture interview:

“Remember that episode of Friends where Ross thinks he’s a musician, and he’s playing the keyboard, and he really just takes himself super-seriously?” [Kotecha] gave that reference point to Gustaf Holter and Christian Persson, Swedish writing-and-composing duo who created “Volcano Man.” He also suggested they think of Ferrell “just doing something like ‘Huh huh huh huh huh,’” to start the song. “And they just came up with "Volcano Man”!“ Holter and Persson imagined the song as something from "a bad superhero film.” Or as Persson puts it, “It’s like a German child’s idea of something really amazing.”

While recording the song, Ferrell needed some time to find the right balance between satire and tribute. “It was feeling a little bit without personality,” he recalls. “I started messing around with it, singing a little more with Lars’s intonation. That ten-degrees difference just made it come to life.” David Dobkin [the movie’s director] points to how Lars “opens the ‘ah’ in ‘mahn’ when he sings the words ”Volcano Man“ as an example of the song’s comic effect. "Will knows exactly how far to bend the comedy of it.”