About

Bold Move Cotton, or "Bold Strategy Cotton," is an advice animal image macro series based on a screen capture of two sports announcers from the 2004 comedy film Dodgeball. The captions typically describe a controversial or risky course of action undertaken by an individual or group, followed by the sarcastic phrase “It’s a bold move Cotton, let’s see if it pays off.”

Origin

The original image comes from a scene in the movie Dodgeball in which ESPN8 sportscaster Cotton McKnight (played by Gary Michael Cole) announces that one of the finalist teams has forfeited the championship, to which his co-announcer Pepper Brooks (played by Jason Bateman) responds by calling the decision a “bold strategy” (shown below).

"It's a bold strategy Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for him."

On February 25th, 2012, a Quickmeme^[2] page titled "Bold Move Cotton" was created, which featured a screen captured image from the Dodgeball scene. In the first 16 months, the page accumulated over 680 submissions.

Spread

On April 19th, 2013, Redditor wingsofgod submitted an image macro to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[1] subreddit, referencing the police arrest of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (shown below, left). Within the first month, the post gained more than 16,500 up votes and 130 comments. On April 25th, Redditor toxicdelights submitted an image macro to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[5] subreddit, which joked about hitting the snooze button on an alarm clock while already late for an engagement (shown below, right).

On April 28th, Redditor splad posted a video clip of the Dodgeball scene to the /r/videos^[3] subreddit in an effort to correct image macros misquoting the word “strategy” for “bold.” In the following three weeks, the post received upwards of 680 up votes and 50 comments. On May 19th, Redditor oldswarlz submitted an image macro about a black minister who opened his sermon with a racial joke (shown below, left) to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[4] subreddit, where it garnered over 7,200 up votes and 100 comments in the first month. On the following day, Redditor Ruri posted an image macro referencing the often combative restaurant owners on Gordon Ramsay's reality television show Kitchen Nightmares (shown below, right).

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References