Remember The Time The Original Doctor Dolittle Threw His Seal-Girlfriend Off A Cliff?

Cinema is all about those moments of awe; when your jaw drops, and you stare upwards at the screen, disbelieving at what is going on in front of you. Think that final shot of The Searchers. The head-twisting in The Exorcist. The elevator doors opening in The Shining. And of course, Doctor Dolittle yeeting his seal girlfriend into the ocean.

Okay, sure, so the last example isn’t as well known as the others. But that’s changing, in no small part thanks to the work of Katie Stebbins, a film writer who shared the unbelievable scene from 1967’s Doctor Dolittle on Twitter.

That film doesn’t have the best reputation — and for good reason. It’s overlong, boring, and aimless. It pretty much bankrupted the studio that made it: made for a then-staggering budget of $17 million, it recouped a measly $9 million from American audiences, despite being nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

But amidst those interminable 152 minutes of sheer, saccharine drudgery, there is a sudden and brief flash of joy.

See, halfway through the film, the titular Doctor stumbles across a circus seal named Sophie. Sophie hates her life, and longs to return to her family in the North Pole. Determined to help her, Dolittle disguises her as a washerwoman, sneaks her out of the circus, and takes her to the ocean.

And then this happens.

doctor doolittle is *the worst*, yet it contains cinema's greatest minute pic.twitter.com/nZRgY3Db9b

— ? Katie Stebbins ? (@_katiestebbins_) September 17, 2019

Listen, critics love to wax poetic about the things that a film “needs”. Writers assess mise en scène, cinematic language, thematic material. French New Wave hero Jean-Luc Godard, the darling of film studies majors the world over, says movies require nothing more than a “girl and a gun”.

But all that’s bullshit. In truth, all that movies require is a scene where an ageing Hollywood actor kisses his seal wife before yeeting her into the vast expanse of the ocean.