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Friday, March 29, 2024

The very weird resurgence of “Bee Movie”

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“According to all known laws of aviation there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.”

In 2007 Dreamworks Animation produced Bee Movie, a fairly standard anthropomorphic animal kids CG animated movie. It opened to mediocre reviews and a disappointing return for the studio. Dreamworks films have never quite hit the same chord with the critics and audiences that Pixar’s catalogue have with star driven duds such as Shark Tale, Antz and Over the Hedge rehashing the same shlocky formulaic “hey they’re animals and they can speak” plots. They even spawned the trope known as “Dreamworks Face” where the characters on are making this sort of impossible “wry raised eyebrow smirk” face on every promotional poster. Bee Movie was no exception.

Jerry Seinfeld’s successful brand of humour that ascended him to TV megastardom in the 1990’s never really translated onto the big screen. However, recently this rather underwhelming film has been making a strange comeback in the very weird world of internet memes.

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According to the folks over at KnowYourMeme.com, interest for the film peaked at its time of release in 2007 yet searches for the film have begun to rise again as of late 2016.

Around 2013 the entire text of the films screenplay began popping up on internet forums such as Tumblr, Reddit and 4Chan. This is a phenomenon known as “copypasta” in which users spam and “shitpost” threads with inane content. This in turn has lead to loads of videos of people reading out the entire script, most notably YouTuber and silky smooth voice owner Brendaniel. His Seinfeld impersonation is amazingly spot on.

Others have taken the script with its ubiquitous opening lines “According to all known laws of aviation…”  and had fun turning them into visual memes and videos. Stranger still are the random edits of the entire film and trailer with views hitting the 100k mark on videos which have the entire film speed up every time the word “Bee” is mentioned, the entire film without bees, and a particular favourite of mine where every word in the trailer is arranged alphabetically. There’s even a video of a YouTuber rapping a portion of the script and another having President Obama “speaking” the opening lines.

Whilst this article has described “the what” of this meme it cannot begin to get into the “why” behind it! And that’s part of the beauty of shitposting and memes, they’re not meant to make sense. They are true 21st Century forms of pure absurdity. So here’s a link to the entire script for the film Bee Movie which you can do anything you like with.

Enjoy and remember to “bee” good.

trekkiemark
trekkiemark
Mark lives in Belfast where he runs a ukulele club, plays board games and watches old TV shows. His interests include Cold War architecture, trawling for vintage toys on eBay and reading Starship schematics on Memory Alpha. He was a finalist on the UK version of King of the Nerds.

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