Bee Movie — Dreamworks’ 2007 animated cult classic that details the romance between a bee (Jerry Seinfeld) and a human woman (Renée Zellweger) — has long served as the inspiration behind the internet’s weirdest memes. Recently it’s paved the way for something that transcends Bee Movie — something absurd, an artful and heroic exercise of futility and devotion. Something notably hollow.
Image: Getty
In November, YouTubers began methodically remixing Bee Movie and its trailer into absolute gibberish. A funny absurdist idea that kept building on itself, soon reaching the point of no return.
- The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster
- The Bee Movie Trailer but Every Word is in Alphabetical Order
- The Bee Movie But Without Bees
- Bee movie trailer but every bee is duplicated
- Bee Movie Trailer but every “Bee” is replaced with another letter
- The Bee Movie but every original Bee triggers the video to play from the start on a new layer
- bee movie but every ‘bee’ is replaced by “Barry B Benson” and every ‘Barry’ is replaced by “BEEEE!!”
- The Bee Movie But every time they say Bee, Shrek Screams “DONKEY!”
Now, we’ve moved past Bee Movie — people have been meticulously re-crafting choice pieces of pop culture using similarly nonsensical rubrics.
The results are a sort of 21st century Dada experiment — deeply pointless, sort of confusing, and interestingly astute. Not all the video remixes even exist, but in the case of this meme — what do we even name it? — it’s the concept that counts.
@leyawn @dylan_275 FUCK pic.twitter.com/VibcXN5L0g
— Kai (@lonelykai15) November 30, 2016
The core notion is simple — re-editing various piece of pop culture based on a set of inane rules that make no sense. These edits are time-intensive, involving a lot of mental power to create something ultimately futile, something that destroys any sort of coherent narrative.
All Star by Smashmouth but the words are ordered from lowest to highest score in scrabble pic.twitter.com/BvjeTMtrW3
— james nielssen (@cool_as_heck) December 2, 2016
It’s a good meme because it reminds you how dumb, pointless and incredibly fun things can be. A century ago, they would have called this art.