A
Anonymous
Guest
"What does it do?"
"It doesn't DO anything. That's the beauty of it!"
You've heard it before, right? But where?
This quote (or is it?) has been puzzling a great many people on a variety of Internet forums for nearly two years. It seems that everyone who hears it is sure they've heard it somewhere before, but just can't quite remember from where. Is it from a movie, a TV series, a book? Nobody seems to know.
The question of this quote's origin seems to have first been asked in April 2003 on the Hatrack River forum, on Orson Scott Card's website, first here and then here . It quickly moved on to the IMDb boards but even the web's biggest collection of movie geeks couldn't crack it. It's now baffling the goons on the Something Awful forums.
There's a blog recording the ongoing research into this mystery.
Suggestions such as The Simpsons, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The 51st State, The Hudsucker Proxy, Futurama, Back to the Future, IBM commercials, Ender's Game, Clavin & Hobbes and more have been assiduously researched and have come up empty. The problem seems to be that whenever someone says "Oh, it's Homer, in that episode with his brother and the invention..." suddenly you CAN hear Homer saying just those lines. However many people have watched that episode and the mystery quote does not appear.
Various people have added things that they seem to be sure of, such as that the voices are speaking with British accents, the person answering the question is wearing a lab coat, or that the person asking the question is a woman. However none of this extra infomation seems to help track down the source.
Are we looking at a rogue meme, some kind of verbal virus that's loose on the web? The most engaging explanation I've heard it that this quote actually comes from a very popular movie, but that at some time in the past few years a time traveller from the future inadvertently altered our timeline in such a way that this movie was never made. This oh-so-familiar quote is all that remains in the collective unconscious, a ghostly echo in time.
"It doesn't DO anything. That's the beauty of it!"
You've heard it before, right? But where?
This quote (or is it?) has been puzzling a great many people on a variety of Internet forums for nearly two years. It seems that everyone who hears it is sure they've heard it somewhere before, but just can't quite remember from where. Is it from a movie, a TV series, a book? Nobody seems to know.
The question of this quote's origin seems to have first been asked in April 2003 on the Hatrack River forum, on Orson Scott Card's website, first here and then here . It quickly moved on to the IMDb boards but even the web's biggest collection of movie geeks couldn't crack it. It's now baffling the goons on the Something Awful forums.
There's a blog recording the ongoing research into this mystery.
Suggestions such as The Simpsons, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The 51st State, The Hudsucker Proxy, Futurama, Back to the Future, IBM commercials, Ender's Game, Clavin & Hobbes and more have been assiduously researched and have come up empty. The problem seems to be that whenever someone says "Oh, it's Homer, in that episode with his brother and the invention..." suddenly you CAN hear Homer saying just those lines. However many people have watched that episode and the mystery quote does not appear.
Various people have added things that they seem to be sure of, such as that the voices are speaking with British accents, the person answering the question is wearing a lab coat, or that the person asking the question is a woman. However none of this extra infomation seems to help track down the source.
Are we looking at a rogue meme, some kind of verbal virus that's loose on the web? The most engaging explanation I've heard it that this quote actually comes from a very popular movie, but that at some time in the past few years a time traveller from the future inadvertently altered our timeline in such a way that this movie was never made. This oh-so-familiar quote is all that remains in the collective unconscious, a ghostly echo in time.