It's Over 9000!

"It's Over 9000!" stands as one of the most enduring and recognizable anime-derived memes in internet history, transforming a single line of dialogue from Dragon Ball Z into a universal expression of extreme quantity or intensity. The meme's success demonstrates how translation errors, dramatic voice acting, and early YouTube culture could combine to create lasting cultural phenomena that transcend their original context.

The source material originated from episode 21 of Dragon Ball Z, titled "The Return of Goku," which aired in the United States on April 19, 1997, as part of the Ocean Productions English dub. In this pivotal scene, the character Vegeta, voiced by Brian Drummond, reacts to the protagonist Goku's escalating power level by crushing his scouter device and dramatically exclaiming, "It's over 9000!" The line represents a critical moment in the series when Vegeta realizes that Goku has achieved a level of strength that exceeds his expectations and threatens Saiyan supremacy (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

The "9000" figure itself represents a translation alteration from the original Japanese version and manga, where Vegeta states that Goku's power level is "over 8000" (八千以上だ, Hassen ijō da). According to the Daizenshuu 7 guidebook, the change to "9000" in the English dub was made to better match Vegeta's animated mouth movements, which were designed for the original Japanese pronunciation (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025). This practical dubbing decision would prove to have far-reaching cultural consequences nearly a decade later.

The transformation from anime dialogue to internet meme began on October 17, 2006, when YouTuber Weston "Kajetokun" Durant uploaded an edited video clip of the scene. According to Durant's later interviews, the video was originally created as "an inside joke for his friends, making fun of how Drummond phrased the English line to fit Vegeta's on-screen mouth movements" (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025). The clip emphasized Brian Drummond's particularly dramatic and emphatic delivery of the line, highlighting the intensity and near-comic exaggeration of Vegeta's reaction.

The meme's viral spread accelerated when Durant's friend Patrick posted the video to 4chan's /b/ (random) board shortly after its YouTube upload. Know Your Meme (2009) documents that "in the following weeks of October 2006, YouTuber Kajetokun's video quickly drew attention from the fans of Dragon Ball, inspiring a series of remix videos on YouTube, various image macros and demotivational posters on 4chan, as well as parody sites dedicated to the phrase on YTMND." This multi-platform dissemination established the meme's foundation across the major internet communities of the mid-2000s.

The cultural penetration of the phrase became evident through its linguistic adoption. The first Urban Dictionary entry for "over 9000" was submitted on November 21, 2006, defining it as "What the scouter says about Goku's power level" while illustrating its usage in the original dialogue context (Know Your Meme, 2009). However, the number "9000" soon evolved beyond its Dragon Ball origins to become internet slang for describing anything of impressive strength, quantity, or intensity.

The meme reached peak cultural significance in 2007, marked by several key developments. Most notably, 4chan moderators implemented a word filter that automatically replaced any mention of the number "7" with "over 9000," demonstrating the phrase's integration into the platform's cultural vocabulary and moderator humor (Know Your Meme, 2009). This technical implementation showed how deeply the meme had penetrated internet community culture, becoming part of the infrastructure of online communication itself.

The format's adaptability proved crucial to its longevity. The original Dragon Ball Z scene was transformed into a four-panel exploitable comic format, allowing users to substitute different contexts while maintaining the dramatic structure of power level revelation and shocked reaction. This template enabled countless variations across different topics, from video game statistics to academic achievements to everyday hyperbole.

The meme's mainstream recognition reached a notable milestone through an infamous incident on The Oprah Winfrey Show in September 2008. An anonymous internet user submitted a message to Oprah's show claiming to represent "an organization 'Over 9,000!' strong" in a context that prompted Oprah to read the message on air, believing it to be genuine. This incident, dubbed "Oprah 9000," demonstrated how internet memes could unexpectedly intersect with mainstream media, often with unintended consequences (Dragon Ball Wiki, 2025).

The phrase's cultural impact extended into official Dragon Ball media and beyond. Video games in the Dragon Ball franchise began incorporating the "over 9000" line as a deliberate reference to the meme, while other media properties included easter eggs and references acknowledging its internet fame. The 2020 game Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot notably excluded the reference, which critics considered a missed opportunity given the phrase's iconic status (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

Academic analysis of the meme highlights its significance in early YouTube culture and the evolution of remix culture. Derek Padula's book "Dragon Ball Z 'It's Over 9,000!' When Worldviews Collide" provides comprehensive analysis of the meme's cultural impact while examining the psychological elements that made the original scene so memorable and ripe for memetic transformation (Ultimate Pop Culture Wiki, 2025).

The enduring appeal of "It's Over 9000!" reflects several key factors in successful meme propagation: dramatic delivery that lends itself to parody, a simple numerical concept that can be applied universally, and timing that coincided with the growth of video-sharing platforms and remix culture. The meme established templates for anime-derived content that continue to influence internet culture, demonstrating how localization decisions and voice acting performances can achieve cultural significance far beyond their original commercial context.