The internet is the all-encompassing graveyard of pop culture, with rows and rows of well-marked headstones, some bearing longer epitaphs than others. However, the home at the end of every piece of art’s life is far from a quiet resting place. Every so often, those who frequent the cemetery grounds will select a new tomb to disturb.
Memes have become an important part of film marketing, but theytake away as often as they give. Sometimes, the internet’s memetic hive mind sets to work bringing relevance to something that was denied it in its time. Often, the fun gained from turning something into an internet joke platform is the strongest reaction a film ever enjoys.
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Bee Moviewas released in early November, way back in 2007. The film comes from Dreamworks and stars the vocaltalent of Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, and Patrick Warburton. It’s a below-average CG-animated studio comedy, relying almost entirely on pop-cultural references and stunt casting. It racked up some decent reviews and some that compared it very unfavorably to other family cinema of the time. It was considered, at best, a decent-looking breezy comedy that offered a balm to those scared off by something as intellectual asRatatouille. It was, subjective quality aside, a naked attempt to recapture the successof Dreamworks' ownShrek, and it failed outright. It was a moderate success at the box office, netting around $27.3 million in total profits, but it’s the third least-profitable film in Dreamworks' animated repertoire. Years passed without mention of the film. But, if there’s one thing the internet enjoys, it’s digging up an old memory to question nostalgia.
The online repository of all media and its shared conceptsknown as TV Tropeswas established in 2004, meaning it was active in 2007, whenBee Moviedropped. However, it took five years for the film to get its own page on the site. 2012 is likely the first moment of the film’s slow resurrection by the internet meme hive mind, meaning that its initial rest period lasted only half a decade. The once great meme outlet of Tumblr, now abandoned after asuicidal ban on adult content, was the go-to source ofBee Moviecontent. Aggregator sites like Buzzfeed set to work comprising their favorite memes about the film into articles. This drove the concept forward and led to the most powerful permutation of the film’s influence.
The script, or at least its opening lines, became a copied and pasted rejoinder that filled the comment section of countless social media posts. Memes about the film ceased to satisfy the hive mind, the film itself had begun to morph and change shape. Altered by the all-consuming power of the internet, the full film would be uploaded to YouTube with new bizarre changes. The first came from a channel called “wankerflaps” on October 22nd, 2016. “Bee Movie But it Keeps Getting Faster” took the entire audio track from the Jerry Seinfeld comedy and gradually increased it in speed until it became an unintelligible mess. This, and the positive reception it received, opened the floodgates to countless other full remixes of the film. Dreamworks set to work taking each and every example down, but they couldn’t stop it.Like a Lovecraftian horrorwarps its followers into unrecognizable monstrosities, the meme hive mind turned the film into a million unique nightmares through the power of editing.
This was the apex of theBee Moviecraze. The iconic line “Ya like jazz?” became common in text and clips. Every image of a bee and everything with a yellow tint was met with the same response. This de-escalation from warped versions of the film in its entirety to simple references to well-known lines represented the beginning of the end for the film’s meme presence.Some memes never die. It’s reasonable to suggest that the meme response never really ended since no one can consider its existence without imagining it much faster, but its heyday is over. The question is, as always, whyBee Movie?
If it weren’t for the years of radio silence,Bee Moviecould almost be accused of being laser targeted at meme culture. Dreamworks animation is the favorite target of the culture, fromShrektoMegamind. Bees have been common to internet culture discussion fromCards Against Humanityto the very real environmental struggle to keep them around. Jerry Seinfeld’s unique comedic voice,decades of TV prominence, and his show’s iconic theme song are all common in meme culture. Being released in 2007 made it perfect to be just on the periphery of the generational gap to be appropriate kids' programming for the teens that would go on to make memes. And, in a detail that cannot be ignored, it’s a film about a bee entering a romantic relationship with a human woman. It’s one of the most meme-friendly cocktails it is possible to create in a film.
Bee Moviedidn’t earn much, but it inadvertently embraced every aspect of meme culture before most of them existed. The movie may not be worth looking back on, but fans will always cherish the laughs they shared at its expense.
