When Hot Rod premiered in theaters on August 3, 2007, few predicted it would be one of the most groundbreaking comedies of its generation. Unfortunately for Hot Rod, those few were wrong: the film was both ignored at the box office and met with a shrug by critics. But much like Rod Kimble, the “terrible stuntman” Andy Samberg portrays in the movie, it remains unbowed and unbroken. Re-discovered years later on cable and YouTube, Hot Rod is obsessively shared and quoted by its legion of proselytizers—a certified entry in the new cult canon.

Hot Rod marked the first foray into feature films for former Bay Area high-school buddies Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer, a.k.a. the Lonely Island (their nickname for the post-college apartment they shared in Los Angeles). Their S.N.L. shorts propelled the venerable sketch series into the digital zeitgeist—and prompted Hot Rod producer Lorne Michaels to give them a shot at making this long-in-development project, originally intended as a Will Ferrell vehicle.

Samberg stars as the hapless Kimble, trying to live up to the legend of his deceased father (a former assistant to Evel Knievel) and win the respect of Frank (Ian McShane), his hateful stepfather. When Frank is felled by a medical crisis, Kimble is determined to raise the $50,000 needed for a heart transplant by attempting a “big-ass stunt”—jumping 15 school busses. “I am gonna get you better,” Kimble vows, “and then I’m gonna beat you to death.”

“We wanted to make stuff that people quote with their friends,” Samberg said. By this measure, Hot Rod is an enduring success—look no further than this 2015 Reddit thread for proof. In a conference call, Samberg, Taccone (who co-stars as Rod’s younger half brother, Kevin), and Schaffer, who directed the film, reflected on creating a cult favorite, going to the mat for Ebenezer Scrooge, and how good Ian McShane smells.

“Of course it’s cool. It’s awesome as shit.”

South Park scribe Pam Brady wrote Hot Rod’s original script, which “was maybe even crazier in parts than some of the things we added,” Taccone said. “But she was also incredibly generous. Our process in general is the three of us sitting in a room, banging our heads against the wall and trying to make each other laugh. Seth Meyers was a part of the writing process. We wrote a lot of it in Lorne’s office at the Paramount lot, which I believe—fun fact!—was Crocodile Dundee’s office as well.”

“We basically added a lot of surrealism to it,” Samberg said—including the forest punch-dancing Footloose homage, a that-escalated-quickly moment when a musical number degenerates into a riot, and bizarre product placement like the poster for the 1986 comedy The Whoopee Boys that appears in Kevin’s room. (Lonely Island actually screened Whoopee Boys for Hot Rod’s cast and crew; because they couldn’t find a copy on DVD or even VHS, said Taccone, “Paramount graciously supplied a 35mm print.”) Then there’s perhaps the movie’s signature moment when Rod and Kevin make up after an argument, excessively reassuring each other that everything is “cool beans.”

“That was a scene that was just not working,” Samberg said. “It was getting nothing [at screenings]. And I said, ‘What if we made it into a song?’”

“’Cool beans’ was created in the edit,” Taconne said. “The next screening, it was the most liked scene,” Samberg said. “I think it was also, to be fair, one of the more disliked scenes as well. But we knew we had something, because this clearly gets a reaction,” Taconne added.