About

"I'm Doing My Part!" is an exploitable image macro and GIF taken from a military recruitment commercial within the 1997 film Starship Troopers. The GIF and image are widely used as a reaction in both serious and ironic contexts to illustrate that individual actions are contributing to a larger movement, trend or cause.

Origin

Starship Troopers takes place in a future with a heavily militarized government, which is illustrated by interstitial sequences showing news broadcasts, propaganda and other media from within the universe of the film. One of these is a military recruitment commercial (below), which features a group of young men and women standing in formation, who each turn to the camera and say "I'm doing my part!," beginning with a young woman played by Mylin Brooks-Stoddard and ending with a child in uniform played by Travis Lowen.^[1]

The earliest recorded example of the scene being used as a meme was on June 1st, 2013, when Imgur^[2] user galebourn created a GIF from the scene using altered subtitles that made references to The Flintstones and I Like Turtles. As of 2021, the GIF has received over 1.8 million views and 4,000 upvotes on Imgur, as well as being shared on numerous other sites.

Spread

The meme was widely used in an array of different contexts throughout the 2010s and early 2020s but most consistently appears in relation to online social movements. As an example, on December 13th, 2018, Redditor BillyBoiHere used an example of the meme (seen below) to show support for PewDiePie in his "Great Subscriber War." The meme received more than 1,000 upvotes in one month on both /r/PewDiePieSubmissions^[3] and Memedroid.^[4]

On September 20th, 2019, Redditor Kev_heisen90 created an example of the meme (shown below) in support of the plan to storm Area 51 that day. The meme received more than 1,800 upvotes in less than a day before voting was disabled.^[5]

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References