“Well I, for one, welcome our new (bacony, or whatever) overlords.” Where did this phrase originally come from? Thanks!
It was an episode of “Futurama.” The news lady (or was it Morbo?) said it, when announcing some take over. I forget who the overlords were in that episode.
The Simpsons did it first and started the trend.
Whoops…looks like I was off base with my Futurama ref.
It was actually The Simpsons, not Futurama. Specifically, the episode where Homer becomes a space shuttle astronaut.
The Simpsons. There was an episode in which Homer Simpson rides the space shuttle, and in his incompetence, he breaks open an ant farm. News cameras, intending to interview him about his “common man” experience in space, instead see ants that appear to be gigantic because they’re close to the camera. Springfield newscaster Kent Brockman says, “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.” and a meme is born.
There’s a poster on this board called Hail Ants whose user name derives from the same joke.
Blast, I should have known I wouldn’t make it first. Well, at least I gave lots of detail.
Here I am, nearly 19 years late answering this one. Although perhaps not the “most original” version of this phrase, the earliest version I know of is from 1977 where the phrase “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords” was used in the film version of H.G. Wells’ short story “Empire of the Ants” which can be found at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_H.\_G.\_Wells\_(Atlantic_Edition)/The_Empire_of_the_Ants
Note that the phrase “insect overlords” is not found in Wells’ story.
Does anyone remember that “Overlord” was the code name for the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II, not to mention the name of a movie from 1975.
The word itself dates back to Middle English.
The Overlords were also the benevolent invading aliens in Childhood’s End (1953).
Are you sure you actually heard it said in the movie? I just looked at a transcript of the movie and it’s not in there.
There are also plenty of sites out there saying that while The Simpsons line is probably inspired by the story or movie, that line is never said in the movie.
I also just searched the subtitle. The move does not contain a single instance of the words “welcome”, “insect”, or anything containing “lord”.
However, now that this exists as an assertion on the internet, it will be absorbed by the AI data scrapers and regurgitated as a confident answer in future chatbot conversations.
I, for one, welcome our new chatbot overlords.
I believe in the same vein, it was a common Shakespeare phrase. In MacBeth where the forest appears to be moving towards his castle, one of the soldiers says “I for one welcometh our new tree ent overlords.”
Or that “overlord” was a crossword puzzle answer shortly before D-Day, along with other code words relating to the Normandy invasion, resulting in the arrest and interrogation of the man who created the puzzles?