Memeing Classic Movies: The Best Obscure Movies For Memes

There are lots of movies out there we don’t remember. Some of them are great but didn’t get the box office credit they deserve, while others were intentionally hidden from the public eye after giving millions of children lifelong night terrors after witnessing one single holiday premiere. Either way, these movies contain underappreciated meme material. Here are three of our favorite obscure movies great for memes you might not have heard of.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

This movie is a classic romantic comedy only a few film enthusiasts will likely remember. It follows Katharine Hepburn’s unstable character abducting a man on his wedding day and using a live leopard named “Baby” to win him over. This is not an effective strategy. Bringing Up Baby is incredibly underrated due to its age, but the jokes it contains are timeless and leave nearly unlimited potential for meme formats.

It has quotable lines that range from wholesome to irreverent to as insulting as they can get for a 1930s audience, and sometimes they can be all at once. Take, for example, one of Cary Grant’s best lines, “In moments of quiet, I’m strangely drawn toward you, but … there haven’t been any quiet moments.” Many scenes from this movie can also make great memes, especially because they involve characters blindly ignoring the actual live leopard in the background.

Office Space (1999)

Office Space is a movie that isn’t particularly well-known, but gives a viewing experience much like The Office. A dark comedy starring Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston and more, this film follows the lives of office workers whose lives spiral out of control as they give up entirely on work and wind up overthrowing the company. The movie itself never gained popularity despite great reviews, but one of the internet’s earliest memes, That Would Be Great, came from this movie, as well as Case of the Mondays and I Believe You Have My Stapler.

Office Space is what would happen if everyone in the standard American workplace got drunk and decided to burn the building to the ground. There are many more quotes in this movie that make great memes, from one character being constantly attacked for not reading a memo to another character’s stapler obsession. Plus, the constant popularity of The Office memes means any scene in this movie could serve as an intentional knock-off meme, even though it predates the famous TV show by six years.

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

This movie isn’t very well-known simply because Disney and Lucasfilm made the executive decision to pretend it never existed. This movie is absolutely horrible, and you will never, ever look at the Star Wars franchise the same way again. Half of the actors say they don’t remember filming it at all, random comedians appear as guest stars, and every five minutes the so-called “plot” is interrupted by space-themed music or a dance number. And just in case you were wondering, it has been confirmed as a canonical episode of Star Wars.

Everyone complaining about The Rise of Skywalker being the worst Star Wars movie is utterly wrong. Imagine watching a movie that spends more than half the runtime focused on Wookies screaming at each other, becomes animated halfway through and only sparks emotion when a Stormtrooper smashes a laptop belonging to Chewbacca’s human-faced son Lumpy. This is probably the funniest bad movie out there, and the popularity of Star Wars memes, quotes and reaction images make this movie perfect for bringing something unique yet popular to the meme community.

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