I haven’t had a whole lot of time for movies since I started working. However, I do get a great deal of time to browse the internet. I’ve started tracking some memes, watching how they develop, and then try to trace the origin. When I was a kid I used to do this a lot before I went to sleep. I’d think of something, my mind would wander, I’d go crazy places in my head, and then I’d trace back through my thought pattern to find the original idea that bred the fantasy.
One of the ones that took me a while to track down was “Where’s your God now?” or the slight variation “Where is your God now”. This of course gets transferred into “Where is your *current meme* now?” It’s used as a caption to a picture of something horrible happening, or with a replacement god (ie. Ceiling Cat).
Well, it turns out, it’s from “The Ten Commandments” (1956). But the original quote was not god. It was “Where’s your messiah now, Moses?” Naturally the Moses was dropped in current memes, but I am curious as to how or why the collective changed “messiah” to “god”. Perhaps it’s just easier to spell.
The second one I cared to research today was “I wish, I wish, I was a fish.” This one seemed difficult until I found that the original was “I wish I wish I were a fish.” That immediately takes you to movie quotes for “The Incredible Mr. Limpet” (1964) This one does not seem to transform or get used as a caption, but is quoted quite a bit. Why? My best guess is because “fish” is one of those words that sinks in your brain, and it rhymes. One of my other amusments is reading the book “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish”, for much the same reasons, and it’s just an amusing book.
