Ol' Reliable

About

Ol' Reliable or La Vieja Confiable in Spanish, refers to an exploitable object labeling still-image taken from Spongebob Squarepants in which Spongebob presents a box labeled "Ol' Relable" and inside is a jellyfishing net. In the exploitable edits, the net is replaced with a clichéd phrase or image representing something a group of people will often use in certain situations.

Origin

The screenshot comes from the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Nature Pants," which aired September 11th, 1999.^[1] Of note, this is the same episode that features the stills that sparked Tired Spongebob and Savage Patrick. In the scene, Spongebob, having elected to live in nature, gives his jellyfishing net named "Ol' Reliable" to Patrick (shown below).

Spread

On March 10th, 2011, League of Legends player JunSupport posted a thread in MobaFire imagining "Ol' Reliable" as an item in the game.^[2] In late December of 2016, an example in which "ol' reliable" was replaced with a hand and paired with the caption "when your girlfriend isn't in the mood" spread on multiple platforms; for example, a December 11th, 2016 tweet by Shittheldam gained 25 retweets and 72 likes (shown below, left). A similar version was posted to /r/BikiniBottom on August 13th, 2017, gaining over 340 points (shown below, right).

Over the following years, the format grew more popular as other phrases and objects replaced the net in the template. On January 27th, 2018, Redditor Gorman_Fr33man posted a joke that gained over 4,500 points (shown below, left). On October 14th, 2018, WorldStar Hip Hop's Twitter account^[3] tweeted an example created by @Tayksintern, gaining over 470 retweets and 2,300 likes (shown below, right).

The template continued to see use in 2019. Some popular Reddit posts using the format that year have included a post in /r/anarcho_capitalism that gained over 400 points (shown below, left) and a post in /r/simracing that gained over 550 points (shown below, right).

La Vieja Confiable

Around May 2019, a Spanish version of the "Ol' Reliable" meme template, known as "La Vieja Confiable" was popularized by Latin American internet users. For instance, Memedroid user^[4] @Damian373 posted the still image paired with the overlay text in Spanish "When your mom doesn't cook anything for you" and an instant lamén meal inside the case. The post (shown below, left) garnered over 298 reactions in four years. Twitter^[5] user @DPMChile used the meme to comment on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram being offline on October 4th, 2021. The post (shown below, right) garnered roughly 34 likes and 5 retweets in two years.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References