About

Weed Eater, also known as In The Future, Entertainment Will Be Randomly Generated, is a meme started from a 2003 VeggieTales episode where a robot randomly generates "Weed Eater" as the punchline for his jokes. As the quote and clip aged, internet users saw how accurately the show predicted absurd zoomer humor. The clip and quote from the show first received attention on Tumblr in 2015 but later spread to YouTube and Reddit, where screenshots of the robot saying "weed eater" were used in image macros.

Origin

On May 20th, 2003, the 19th episode of the first season of VeggieTales called "The Wonderful World of Auto-Tainment!" aired on TV.^[1] The episode centered on the main characters, Bob and Larry, passing through a void into the future. At one point in the episode, Larry tells Bob, "In the future, entertainment will be randomly generated." To prove this point, Larry introduces Bob to a robot named Ventrilomatic who goes on to make the joke, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" and then randomly generates the punchline, "Weed Eater."

The "weed eater" clip from VeggieTales first received attention on April 28th, 2015, in a Tumblr^[2] post made by the blog beefbronson. The post stated that "people don't realize that [VeggieTales] predicted the existence of shitpostgenerator 12 years ahead of its time," in reference to ShitpostBot 5000. The post received roughly 143,100 notes over the course of six years (seen below).

Spread

On January 30th, 2016, YouTube^[3] channel Tibees uploaded the original clip from the episode, titling it, "Veggietales predicts modern internet humour." The video (shown below) received roughly 13.8 million views over the course of five years.

The "weed eater" clip started receiving the most amount of meme attention on Reddit starting in early 2019. On April 16th, 2019, Redditor^[4] johnsaysthings posted Tibees's YouTube video to the subreddit /r/videos. The post received roughly 1,500 upvotes over the course of three years. Redditors started making "weed eater" memes inspired by the /r/videos repost. Redditor^[5] MoneyMan193 was the first to do so, posting a meme to /r/dankmemes on April 16th, 2019. Their meme (shown below) received 27 upvotes in six months.

Starting in July 2019, the "weed eater" clip started being used in YouTube Poop style videos with most of them centering on the "In the future, entertainment will be randomly generated" quote, to make a joke at the absurd internet humor of the late 2010s and early 2020s. YouTube^[8] channel THICC Johnny posted a video (shown below) on July 18th, 2019, that received roughly 4,100 views over the course of three years.

This trend started up again more notably in February 2020. YouTube^[6] channel Nestoons posted the first video of this trend on February 6th, 2020, editing in the A Man Has Fallen Into A River In LEGO City viral video to replace the robot saying "weed eater." The video (shown below) received roughly 7,600 views over the course of a year and a half.

On March 28th, 2020, YouTube^[7] channel Lessons in Meme Culture uploaded a video titled, "How VeggieTales Predicted Meme Culture," which reviewed the VeggieTales clip and gave it more attention on the platform. The video (shown below) received roughly 867,600 views over the course of a year and a half.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References