Memeing Classic Movies: Top Films From The '80s For Memes

Movies are a natural resource for memes. Farming internet points is easy when it comes to Napoleon Dynamite’s Tina or Hagrid's iconic line “You’re a wizard, Harry.” For over a decade, we’ve been creating and sharing memes on anything from The Lord of the Rings to Shrek. Movie memes are so deeply intertwined in our society that we often don’t even recognize them as such, believing they’ve been around since the beginning of time, like taxation or Queen Elizabeth II.

Many of these forgotten memes are from '80s-era movies, such as the Epic Handshake, spawned by the original Predator from 1987. Here are three top examples of '80s movies that make the perfect meme material.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

This movie follows two high school self-proclaimed rock stars, William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, as they travel through time and kidnap influential historical figures in order to pass their history report. It should be clear why numerous memes have been spawned by this movie, but to clarify, Napoleon takes over a waterslide park, Freud helps educate a crowd about Bill’s Oedipus complex, and the two main characters spend the entire film behaving as if they’re studying for a grammar test while on magic mushrooms.

This movie is like watching a fire being put out with gasoline. From Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure comes an ancient meme template, Conspiracy Keanu. Several lines of dialogue in the movie have also made their rounds on meme platforms, further reviving the lewd interest in the number 69.

The Princess Bride (1987)

This is a favorite childhood movie of millions. It’s a modern fairytale without the standard Disney fluff, and it tells the romanticized, yet darkly edited story of soon-to-be bride Buttercup and her love interest Westley as they sabotage her wedding and somehow manage to get tortured, kidnapped and fed to giant rodents throughout. The reason The Princess Bride is great material for memes is because of its sentimental value. Everyone who’s ever seen the movie will enjoy references to it in memes and perhaps cry a little, mourning the loss of an innocent childhood where they didn’t have emo bangs and didn’t have to pay bills.

Another reason for the memes is because the main villain, Vizzini, has a number of quotable lines that can leave anyone confused, serving as the perfect reaction image. This is why Vizzini’s catchphrase “Inconceivable” led to the creation of a new meme, You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means. This also happened to about half of his lines from the entire movie, including a more recently trending meme, You Fell Victim to One of the Classic Blunders.

The Shining (1980)

This movie is quite different from the other two but is famous in the meme community nonetheless. This visually driven film tells the story of Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy, and his psychic son Danny as they are snowbound alone in the haunted Overlook Hotel, leading to Jack losing his sanity and trying to murder his family. This is perhaps one of Kubrick’s most famous movies, and it has earned a high reputation among film critics and audiences alike. Of course, this means meme fans are here to put their own spin on it. As anyone who uses the internet can tell you, anything profoundly upsetting or depressing is instantly hilarious, since we’re all dead inside anyway. This is why the climax of the movie, in which Jack corners Wendy in a bathroom and breaks in the door with an ax, proclaiming “Here’s Johnny!” became a famous meme.

Edited photos of the “Here’s Johnny” scene, as well as captioned edits of many other scenes from The Shining have recently seen a resurgence in popularity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, since quarantine has us all feeling like Jack: about ready to snap at any given time. Turning into an ax-wielding psychopath suddenly seems a little too relatable to everyone who’s been spending months on end interacting only with their siblings, cousins and the Domino’s delivery guy. At least now you have three movie suggestions to waste your quarantined time on instead — there's no shame in drowning your sorrows in memes like the rest of us.

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