Billy Magic and the internet’s unabashed enthusiasm for public transit

“

Americans only love the college 
experience because it’s the only 
time in their lives they live in a 

walkable community,” reads a viral 
January 2020 tweet. Ann Arbor fits 
the bill, hosting most campus buildings 
and housing within about a one-mile 
radius and offering free transit to 
students. I’ve always found pleasure in 
proximity. 

I like to imagine the buildings on 

campus opened up like Richard Scarry 
books to allow peeks into what goes 
on. Scientists bait lab rats a short walk 
from where swimmers count down to 
the Olympics a step away from where 
a mother delivers a baby a hallway 
across from where a loved one is lost 
to an incurable disease. Elementary 
schoolers learn addition a block from 
where frat brothers play daytime 
pong; a world-class map collection sits 
steps away from the spot where I once 
laughed so hard that coffee came out of 
my nose.

In a dense area like Ann Arbor, 

the marvelous and the mundane are 
neighbors, and you can catch peeks of 
them from the windows of the Blue 
Bus. What a joy it is to get around. 

Luckily, I’m not alone in my love for 

transportation. Bus sentiment varies, 
but a community of half-serious transit 
enthusiasts has risen up around an 
eminently meme-able transportation 
guru named Billy Magic. 

Residing among University of 

Michigan meme royalty like Reggie 
Bee and Big Flappo, Billy Magic has 
become an integral figure of freshman 
orientation in the nine years since the 

Michigan Transportation Musical was 
created. Breaking the fourth wall, Billy 
Magic looks straight into the eyes of the 
eighteen-year-olds packed into lecture 
halls and preaches a gospel of new 
urbanism.

“The masses… need to know that safe 

ride offers a variety of free and low-cost 
options for a ride home!” Magic says.

With 
its 
slightly 
censorious 

cheerfulness 
and 
ever-changing 

ratio of irony and sincerity, the video 
has built a cult-like obsession for the 
campus’s decidedly unsexy fleet of blue 
diesel buses. How did this happen?

Baby you can drive my bus

I 

tracked down the writer behind 
the 12-minute musical, a Brooklyn-
based director and social-impact 

storyteller named Emily Lyon. When I 
asked how the character of Billy Magic 
was born, she responded carefully. 

“I was staring at a blank page and 

realized that my script about the magic 
bus needed a guide,” Lyon told me over 
the phone. “And then Billy Magic just 
came to me.” 

She paused, deliberating. 
“I can’t attribute it to anything except 

… inspiration from the gods,” Lyon said.

The former Music, Theatre & Dance 

student 
had 
made 
informational 

PSA-style videos for the University 
before with a student-run production 
company called Filmic, but no project 
had been this big. Tasked with 
replacing the previous transportation 
video, Lyon knew she wanted to use 
humor.

She felt an obligation to preserve 

the endearing cringe-worthiness of 
the video’s precursor, a late-nineties 
production that was memorable for its 
lack of self-awareness. Lyon described 
it as a “run-of-the-mill PSA video” 

“But sort of dramatic, like D.A.R.E,” 

she said. “I loved it,.”

With that in mind, she and a team 

from Filmic let goofy ideas fly. 

“We were aware that this was a 

ridiculous topic, and our audience is 
teenagers who are dubious of content 
… we decided to play into it,” Lyon said. 
“Few people show up to orientation 
thinking, ‘You know what I want to 
talk about? Buses!’ … Except maybe 
Billy Magic.”

The video’s three days of filming 

were chock-full of improvisation. 
Boundaries were pushed. 

“We had a lot of fun with it … a lot,” 

recounted Lyon. 

Others agreed, including co-star 

Nick Skardarasy. I called him on 
the phone to discuss his reflections 
on the project nearly nine years 
after he co-starred as a kid — “The 
Kid,” according to the credits — to 
whom Billy Magic explained campus 
transportation. Skardarasy told me 
that the team had a good time. 

He also hinted that some scenes 

were cut on account of their suggestive 
content. One of those deleted scenes 
stuck with him for nearly ten years, 
and though he couldn’t tell me exactly 
what it was, he disclosed that it implied 
a sexual relationship between Billy and 
a bus.

As a creator, Lyon still has a knack for 

using humor to make dry but important 
topics palatable. I asked her what PSAs 
should be revamped to be funny, and 
her immediate response was “all of 
them.” Specifically, she’d like to see 
more jokes and gags in “Terms and 
Conditions” (the average American’s 
digital contracts would take 250 hours 
to read!). 

“One of my favorite quotes is this: 

‘Laughter is the sound of recognition,’ 
meaning that an audience that laughs 
is still with you,” Lyon explained. 

Meme page fame

T

here’s a contagiousness to Billy 
Magic’s pure and uncomplicated 
adoration 
for 
buses 
that 

catapulted the video to meme fame 
almost 
immediately. 
Skardarasy 

recalls freshmen pointing at him and 
approaching him after the video’s 
first showing in fall 2012; nearly eight 
years later, C.J. Eldred (who played 
Billy) was repeatedly asked to sign 
autographs on the Diag during a recent 
visit. Borderline evangelical zeal for the 
short film continues to this day. 

In the poll the Facebook group 

UMich Memes for Wolverteens used 
to determine its official endorsement 
for 2020 Democratic nominee for 
president, Billy Magic got 11.52% of the 
vote, coming in third place only behind 
Reggie Bee and Bernie Sanders. He 
later appeared in a meme captioned 
“AND WITH 100% OF PRECINCTS 
REPORTING, BILLY MAGIC HAS 
WON THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL 
ELECTION!” Meme page admin 

Zachary Wernet made the short film its 
own IMDB page. A Billy Magic design 
for wall art in Animal Crossing got 
over 450 likes. Seniors get graduation 
photos in front of M-buses in honor 
of the video, and the team behind the 
video even reunited to speak at the 
virtual 2020 graduation. A quirky 
12-minute informational video has 
made buses, of all things, inexplicably 
cool for almost ten years. 

Over the phone, Lucas Renno, 

renowned admin of UMich Memes for 
Wolverteens, recounted to me his first 
impression of Billy Magic. 

“I remember sitting turning to the 

girl next to me in the auditorium and 
saying ‘What the hell did I just watch?’” 
Renno told me.

In his opinion, the Michigan 

Transportation 
Musical 
is 
great 

because it tries just hard enough. 

“Too many big institutions try 

too hard,” Renno said. “They make 
communications that are obviously 
intended to be funny or ‘hip with 
the youths,’ and they fall flat on their 
face. It’s clear from the beginning that 
this video was written and directed 
by students rather than school 
bureaucrats.”

Planes, trains, not automobiles

The 
Michigan 
Transportation 

Musical isn’t the only corner of the 
internet where deliberately over-
the-top 
enthusiasm 
for 
public 

transportation runs free. 

10

Thursday, May 13, 2021
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
STATEMENT

BY ANNIE RAUWERDA, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR

Read more at michigandaily.com

Design by Brianna Manzor

