When the animated Bee Movie was released in 2007, it landed like a honey-flavoured damp squib. To this day, no one is quite sure why hugely successful multimillionaire comedian Jerry Seinfeld wanted to make a film about a bee flirting with a human woman – but he sure did. And since around 2012-2013, Bee Movie has had virulent second life – in the form of memes.
They started out on Tumblr, of course, and were wide-ranging – pointing out such things as Seinfeld’s bee Barry asking human woman Vanessa (Reese Witherspoon); “ya like jazz?” And him lowering his sunglasses to look suggestively over them.
Things further exploded when someone uploaded the entire Bee Movie script to Facebook and people started having fun trolling each other with it. The memes don’t just involve Barry and Vanessa (although it is easy to understand why people fixate on their weird relationship), they also involve Vanessa’s fiance Ken (Patrick Warburton). One particular scene of ‘Guy’ reacting to Vanessa saying; “I’m helping him (Barry) sue the human race” is particularly well known.
In a recent interview with Patrick Warburton, ScreenRant asked him if he was aware of the Bee Movie memes and he replied; “Yeah [Laughs] So my kids will show that to me, because I’m not big on social media. But they will show me these things whenever they pop up. It’s fun that it had an impact, it’s fun that it landed. It’s fun that people laugh and appreciate this guy, Guy, that’s very insecure. A bee ruined his life, just ruined it.”
Some videos poking fun at Bee Movie have millions of views on YouTube, so you never know what’s going to go viral. Sometimes, the more unpopular a movie is, the greater chance of it getting a second life as a source of pop culture fascination.
If you’re maybe looking for a better option to entertain your family, check out our guide to the best kids movies.