500 Cigarettes

Submission 519

About

500 Cigarettes refers to a scene from the science fiction show The Orville, from season 2, episode 11, titled "Lasting Impressions", in which the characters Bortus and his husband Klyden smoke cigarettes. After initially sampling them, they materialize 500 cigarettes using the ship's matter synthesizer. The scene became a meme on YouTube and Twitter / X in 2024 when video creators started reanimating the scene, adding different characters to the scenario.

Origin

On March 21st, 2019, season 2, episode 11 of The Orville titled "Lasting Impressions" aired on Fox^[1]. In one scene, the crew discovers a time capsule from the year 2015 that's filled with earthly pleasures like cigarettes. The characters Bortus and Klyden decide to manifest cigarettes with the matter synthesizer and try them. After smoking them, they summon "500 cigarettes" (YouTube^[2] upload shown below).

Spread

Although likely unrelated, comedian Connor O'Malley posted a YouTube^[3] video in March 2020 called, "SMOKING 500 CIGARETTES FOR 5G," which received over a million views in four years. Also, in February 2021, YouTubers^[4] Mad Brothers posted a video called, "Smoking 500 Cigarettes ! 😱😰," that received over a million views in three years (also likely unrelated to The Orville scene).

In 2022 and 2023, the 500 Cigarettes scene went viral on TikTok^[5] via Overstimulation Videos.

On April 24th, 2023, YouTuber^[6] Game Dealer posted a song that used the scene and its audio, gaining over 3,300 views in a year (shown below, left). On May 21st, 2024, YouTuber^[7] reducedtoclear posted a YouTube Poop in which Bortus and Klyden repeatedly order 500 cigarettes, gaining over 725,000 views in a month (shown below, right).

On May 28th, X^[8] user @Steal_your_shit reposted the aforementioned YouTube Poop, gaining over 1 million views and 35,000 likes in three weeks.

On June 6th, 2024, Redditor^[9] miscerte23 shared a video to the subreddit /r/shitposting that used a Yes Chad format to represent Bortus and Klyden ordering 500 cigarettes, gaining over 5,100 upvotes in 12 days (shown below).

The abovementioned video was reposted to X^[10] and Instagram^[11] in the following days where it went more viral.