Screen

From the big screen to the top text

A line from The Lord of the Rings, a smirk from 1971, a beer advert and a squinting cartoon. How film and TV became the internet's favourite raw material.

Film and television hand meme-makers something precious: a face millions of people already know, frozen at the exact moment of a very particular feeling. Pause the right scene and you have a character ready to say anything.

One does not simply

In The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Sean Bean's Boromir warns that “one does not simply walk into Mordor”, making a circle with his fingers as he says it. The gesture and the line became a template for anything that turns out to be harder than it looks.

One Does Not Simply: One does not simply eat one crisp.

Condescending Wonka

Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka, from the 1971 film, has a half-smile so politely superior that it became the internet's voice of sarcasm. The top line repeats someone's proud claim; the bottom line agrees with it in a way that means the opposite.

Not sure if

Fry from Futurama, squinting with deep suspicion, asks the questions we all ask: is this the real download button, or a virus? Is that a capital i, or a lower-case L? Two lines, both starting “not sure if… or…”, and you have one.

The adverts and the films nobody quotes

Not every source is a classic. The Most Interesting Man in the World came from a beer advert campaign that began in 2006 - “I don't always drink beer, but when I do…”. Conspiracy Keanu is a still from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), used for the strange theories that keep you up at night. Morpheus never actually says “what if I told you” in The Matrix, but the meme made everyone remember that he did.

And Kermit the Frog, sipping tea in an advert, gave the internet its favourite way of pointing something out while pretending not to: but that's none of my business.

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• Beyond two lines: panels, boxes and captions - Top and bottom text is only one way to caption a picture. The newer formats put words in boxes, beside panels or above the image - and you can make all of them here.