One Day in Austin That Changed Everything
Elijah Wood + a Scooter = Magic
Despite my jokey ways online, I’m actually quite miserly with my own laughs. It’s just how I was paved.
But when something gets me, it really gets me. So on that fateful day when I saw the most quintessential 2018 Austin photo humanly possible pop into my Twitter timeline, I was reduced to a quivering mass of hysterics by an exquisitely-timed shot of Elijah Wood, ciggy perfectly dangling from his maw, riding a Lime scooter in Austin and looking like how God would forge an “Austin Hipster” if he took requests.
Almost immediately, “Scooter Elijah” became my favorite meme by a wide margin, and Wood, often (charmingly) marginally photoshopped in, found himself everywhere on my page from weather commentary to current events takes to Steiner Ranch swinger “jokes.”
But something that had so effortlessly captured the zeitgeist of this unique moment deserves a deeper dive.
And, thanks to a recent Stuck With Evil MoPac Podcast chat that I had with talented Austin screenwriter/Elijah Wood photographer C. Robert Cargill, I was offered a privileged peek inside that magical, fateful day in Austin.
It went something like this:
Back in September of 2018, Cargill was at Fantastic Fest with Elijah Wood (who Cargill had become friends with when Wood lived in Austin in the 2010s) and the subject of scooters organically came up amongst them, as the ubiquitous, tipsy people-movers had recently taken over every road (and many sidewalks) in Austin.
“The Limes and Birds had just hit, and everyone is kind of marveling at them . . . and Elijah’s like, ‘I kind of want to try one,’” said Cargill with a wry grin. Little did Cargill know that he was about to be a witness to a seismic event in Austin cultural history.
And he just started scooting around on it, and so my buddy’s riding by on this fucking weird ass scooter and I just snap a picture of it…and he was being really goofy about it at the time so he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and he had the hipster mustache at the time, you know he was all in.
Cargill continued: “And he just started scooting around on it, and so my buddy’s riding by on this fucking weird ass scooter and I just snap a picture of it…and he was being really goofy about it at the time so he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and he had the hipster mustache at the time, you know he was all in. And so, I snapped a picture and when he got off the scooter and came over, I was like, ‘oh dude, check this out.’ And he laughed and I was like is it cool if I post that on Twitter, and he goes ‘go for it.’”
Cargill added: “And so, I post it on Twitter and within 5 minutes someone had turned it into a meme that says, ‘Somebody does not merely walk into Mordor.’ From that moment it was its own thing and went off and had its own life. He literally got interviewed on The Tonight Show and got asked about it…it was literally between movies at The Drafthouse.”
As I noted in response to Cargill’s story during the podcast: “It was the perfect photograph for a moment of time in Austin, Texas.”
What are your favorite Scooter Elijah Wood memes and moments? Toss them into the comments, below.
I, too, remember when hilarity ensued and continues.