It’s been 10 years since Bee Movie—a movie most notable for how Jerry Seinfeld wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it—flew into theaters and stung us with its lack of memorable jokes and characters. It should’ve ended there, but some wiseass had to cut it “20000x faster” and inspire an endless litany of memes that include “Bee Movie But Everytime They Say Bee It Gets Faster,” “The Bee Movie But Without Bees,” “The bee movie trailer but every time they say bee the content aware scale gets stronger,” and “The Bee Movie But Every Time They Say Bee We Explain The Deal With Bee Movie.” We’re exhausted, too.
Turns out, however, that Bee Movie’s memetic roots date back even further. In an absurdly thorough look into Bee Movie’s Tumblr-era resurgence, New York discovered that the film’s modern-day appeal began sincerely, with users genuinely inspired by the film’s opening salvo about how “bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.” Sincerity, however, is the quickest route to irony these days, so the whole thing quickly morphed through a number of monstrous forms.
Beginning in 2013, for example, a good way to own your enemies was to post the entire Bee Movie script onto their Facebook timeline. As the article puts it:
This trick — which could cause the unwitting victim’s phone to crash — quickly became a standard internet prank, thanks in a large part to the efforts of Pastebin user KIDOUYUUTO, who uploaded the entire script(which had been lifted from Script-o-Rama) to the site. It would go on to wreak havoc across a number of platforms over the next two years, reaching its zenith in 2015 — when the Facebook page “bees don’t exist” posted the entire Bee Movie script as a life event.
If you’re interested in how the internet can mold the innocuous into the insane, the whole breakdown is interesting. If you’d rather just watch Bee Movie without all the fuckery, drop Jerry Seinfeld a line. He wants to make a sequel, apparently.