According to all known laws of the film industry, there is no way Bee Movie should still be a thing. And yet, as citizens of the Internet know, Bee Movie has continued to fly around the Web anyway—because the Internet, like bees, doesn’t care what humans (and film critics) think is impossible.

All joking aside: the resurgence of Bee Movie is totally bizarre. The original film, a punny animated comedy starring and co-written by Jerry Seinfeld, earned mixed reviews and moderate box-office success when it was released in 2007. Then Internet jokesters began making Tumblr memes based on the film. Those memes slowly seeped out to other pockets of the Internet—but it wasn’t until this year that the movie inexplicably became inescapable online. From Bernie Sanders to Kim Kardashian West to actual real-life bees, no one could escape dumb jokes about this relatively arcane movie. A YouTube video titled “The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster” has been viewed over 15 million times. Fifteen. Million.

Even Seinfeld can’t ignore the movie’s second life as an Internet phenomenon. The comedian addressed the idea of a Bee Movie sequel at least twice this year, first during a Reddit A.M.A. in June. When asked whether he’d considered making a follow-up, Seinfeld responded with good humor and a bit of befuddlement:

I considered it this spring for a solid six hours. There’s a fantastic energy now for some reason, on the internet particularly. Tumblr, people brought my attention to. I actually did consider it, but then I realized it would make Bee Movie 1 less iconic. But my kids want me to do it, a lot of people want me to do it. A lot of people that don’t know what animation is want me to do it. If you have any idea what animation is, you’d never do it.

And at the end of July, the comedian rekindled the Bee Movie discussion himself on Twitter:

His tweet has accrued around 48,000 likes, 25,000 re-tweets, and 4,400 replies. Among those replies, one cautiously excited message is particularly striking:

The tweet came from @Seinfeld2000, the online persona of Jason Richards—which, he insists, is his real name, and not a mash-up of Jason Alexander and Michael Richards. For nearly four years now, Richards has been playing one of the Internet’s best and strangest jokes using this account. @Seinfeld2000 was initially a parody of @SeinfeldToday, a massively successful Twitter account that imagined premises for modern-day episodes of the hit sitcom. But Richards’s work gradually became more than a simple spoof. His tweets are intentionally misspelled, random, and often bewildering, filled with both absurd humor and unexpected pathos. And incidentally, they may also be the closest thing we’ll ever find to a “source” for the Bee Movie memes.

As the name implies, the account is technically meant to be Seinfeld-themed. But as Richards told Vanity Fair in a phone interview, it’s hard to sustain a high-volume Twitter page without eventually expanding beyond your original idea. So Richards started mining other Seinfeld-related works for material—including Bee Movie.