Hepburn was a lawyer in Terre Haute, Indiana, "with ulcers and working on my first heart attack," he told Eyewitness News in a recent interview. He remembered going to Disneyland as a child, and so he thought: Why not move there? When it came time to retire from Disney in 2017, suddenly with extra time on his hands, Hepburn made the full leap into social media.
"When I retired," he said, "I still had a flip phone -- that's how much of a dinosaur I am."
His Instagram posts began with photos: lost of clouds, even more fountains, random trash on the ground, all with their own punchline.
A photo of a bottle of whipped cream on the ground has the caption, "Whipped cream makes dirt taste better." A chewed up tennis ball? "Tennis anyone?" A solitary discarded sandal? "Waiting for the other shoe to drop."
"I see things that interest me," Hepburn said. "Like one shoe. Where's the other shoe? There has to be a story here."
Soon the stories were coming from Hepburn himself, each one a selfie-style video, each with the same, slow-paced introductory line: "Hello. My name is Bob..."
"I might've had 60 people following me and I'd get two or three likes and that was fine," he said.
Bob Gurr, Disney legend and last original Imagineer still living, honored with special tribute
Bob Gurr, Disney legend and last original Imagineer still living, honored with special tribute
It was like that for years. But last month, something funny happened. Out of nowhere, one of Hepburn's old videos about a white dress shirt with button down collars started getting a lot of attention.
"Every time I would sign in and I would have 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 new followers," he recalled.
The video now has more than 1.4 million views.
"I spent a minute talking about button-down collars," Hepburn said, "and all of a sudden now over 1 million people have looked at that. I still don't know why."
As a follow up, he posted another video explaining his surprise at his sudden following. That video now has more than 3.5 million views.
Seventy-one-year-old Bob Hepburn from Terre Haute has gone viral.
"I've had to learn some of the generation Z slang," Hepburn told Eyewitness News us with a laugh, "like doomscrolling, and bed rotting. Oh, now I know what that is."
He's had a tough time explaining all of this to most of his friends.
"Most of them are not Internet savvy," he said.
And he assumes, given the fickle nature of social media, that he won't have to explain it much longer, but he's going to enjoy this unexpected ride however long it lasts.
"I'm sure it will fizzle and people will move onto the next big thing," he said, "but I will keep posting. I have enough stuff in my head that I can spend a minute a day talking for the next I don't know, hundred years or so. Not that I'll be around that long, but I'm gonna keep doing it."