A Texas teenager recently posted a photo on Tumblr of her new T-shirt, which features the entire script of Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld’s 2007 animated film about bees, printed in type so small it’s nearly illegible. Her photo has 133,000 notes. People are nuts for this shirt. What? Why?
See, there’s a thriving Bee Movie fandom on Tumblr, which is not so much about the movie itself, but about the script. It’s a big, huge block of text that no one really cares about, which makes it perfect to send to friends as a prank. And 17-year-old Madison had pulled off the real-life version of this very good internet prank by putting it on her shirt.
Madison explained to BuzzFeed that her commitment to the Bee Movie bit started way before she got the shirt. She and her friends adopted it as an inside joke years ago, before it became mainstream on Tumblr:
“One year, my friend Jenna signed my yearbook with as much of the script as she could fit; another, Cassady, received the Bee Movie on DVD as a gift and forced all of her friends to suffer through it on principle.”
She told BuzzFeed her casual selfie of the T-shirt blew up so quickly overnight that people she’d never met started approaching her to talk about it. It would appear that 100,000 Tumblr notes is the threshold that makes you a local high-school celebrity.
As for the shirt, Madison said it was a gift from a friend, created by another Tumblr user. You can buy one on Redbubble if you’re the kind of person who believes that according to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly.
But be warned that this cool meme has now received significant mainstream attention, and will now begin a gradual descent into the internet’s scrapyard. Within months, teenagers will stop liking it, and some major national brand will tweet “more like bae movie! lol.” So it goes.
