One short “Ratatouille” tribute became a networked creative prompt. Hundreds of contributors expanded it, Broadway professionals assembled a benefit production, and 350,000 people watched.
A song small enough to copy
In August 2020, New York teacher Emily Jacobsen posted a short comic tribute to Remy, the cooking rat from Pixar’s “Ratatouille.” The clip did not contain a plot, a full score or a production plan. It did something more useful for a collaborative platform: it gave other people a compact idea they could repeat, answer and transform. Playbill: creators behind the musical NPR report
Composer and arranger Daniel Mertzlufft expanded Jacobsen’s melody into an imagined Broadway finale. That arrangement made the scale of the joke audible: a tiny phone recording could sound like the closing number of a show that did not yet exist.
The platform became a rehearsal room
Creators began adding songs, harmonies, choreography, costumes, miniature sets, lighting concepts and poster designs. The contributions were made independently, often in response to one another, rather than commissioned through a conventional theatre hierarchy.
TikTok’s duet and reuse conventions made authorship visible while allowing one contribution to become material for the next. The result was messy and redundant—several people could imagine the same scene—but that openness let the project discover its strongest ideas in public.
A professional production preserved the trail
In December 2020, producer Seaview announced a one-time virtual benefit. Lucy Moss directed; Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley adapted the material; a Broadway cast and orchestra performed it. Crucially, the score still credited the online creators whose songs had built the trend, including Jacobsen and Mertzlufft. Playbill production and credits
The streamed production was available for a limited run beginning January 1, 2021. Disney permitted the one-time benefit performance, according to NPR’s report. That permission mattered because the creators were building with characters and a story owned by Disney and Pixar. NPR on the benefit permission
The audience became material support
Playbill reported that the virtual event raised $2 million for The Actors Fund and reached more than 350,000 viewers. The money supported entertainment workers during the shutdown that had emptied theatres and disrupted livelihoods across the industry. Playbill: $2 million result Los Angeles Times report
That outcome changed the meaning of the project. What began as participatory fandom became a piece of real cultural infrastructure: attention was converted into paid production work, a public performance and emergency support.
What the experiment actually proved
The project did not prove that every viral trend can become theatre, or that open collaboration removes the need for producers, rights clearance, editing and professional craft. It showed how those functions can enter later, after a community has already generated and tested a shared creative vocabulary.
Its durable lesson is less about one platform than about contribution design. A prompt that is easy to recognize, flexible enough to reinterpret and structured so credit can travel with the work gives strangers a reason to build together. The professional production succeeded because it assembled that energy without pretending it had appeared from nowhere.