Even though The Simpsons originated before the creation of the first meme, the show is responsible for some of the most iconic and beloved memes in internet history. 

One of the netizen's all-time favorites is the snapshot of Homer Simpson disappearing backward into a hedge, his eyes wide open and his lips in a straight line. Borrowed from an episode in 1994, it’s generally used to express the desire to vanish from an awkward social interaction so seamlessly as though you never were there in the first place.

But before it became a meme, hedge travel was the idea of David Mirkin, who was the showrunner when the episode aired and still works on the show today. The Vulture Magazine team was lucky enough to speak with him about the inspiration behind it.

“Him coming through the hedges was based on my childhood behavior of walking through hedges in my neighborhood. I would pretend that I was dimension-hopping,” Mirkin says. “You can only do it a few times before you leave a hole, and so I did tens of thousands of dollars of damage to people’s hedges I’m sure.” This idea stayed with him until it made it onto The Simpsons season five, episode 16, “Homer Loves Flanders.”

He says he was nagging the animation director's team to make Homer’s motion as smooth and slow as possible for maximum eeriness. He largely contributes its popularity to the fantastic work the team did. “I’m really proud of it because I had to have the animators do that motion — both coming out and going back in — about five times to get it slow enough and detailed enough so that it felt right to me, because I wanted it to be a kind of a magical, creepy thing,” he shares.

The meme apparently caught fire in 2012 when a Tumblr blog posted the GIF with a blank background, which allowed users to swap the image of a hedge for literally anything else, like a wall of pizza or the galaxy.

Something that really surprised Mirkin about the meme is that it was completely taken out of context and used to express a totally different emotion. “What’s really interesting is the meme really has nothing to do with the way it was used in the show, because it’s not a retreat or an embarrassment, as it’s used — it was really just an ominous, threatening look and a very weird backing up while never breaking eye contact with Flanders,” he says. “So it’s great the way it’s been changed, but it’s not the original intention.”

The meme, at this point, has become so popular that it was even referenced on the show itself, making it a full-circle moment. It was the idea of the youngest writer, Cesar Mazariegos, who pitched the joke for the season 30 episode “The Girl on the Bus.”

“I was brand new. It was literally my first week,” he says. The internet went crazy for the reference-within-a-reference. “I’m showing it to my wife like, ‘Yo check this out, I pitched this like my first week there!’” he remembers, calling the experience “a pretty fun, cool way to get welcomed into the Simpsons fold.”