Patrick Warburton Insists That ‘Bee Movie’ Was ‘Basically’ as Good as ‘Seinfeld’
Bee Movie and Seinfeld actor Patrick Warburton firmly believes that both projects “succeeded” for the same reasons — and if you got a question, you ask the 8-ball.
Very soon after Jerry Seinfeld’s highly anticipated feature film screenwriting debut Bee Movie premiered on November 2, 2007, the buzz that surrounded the animated comedy thanks to its massive marketing campaign quickly died down, and the sting of its lukewarm reception began to set in for Universal Pictures. Critics and audiences alike expected a more clever and cohesive movie than what the tandem of the Seinfeld namesake and DreamWorks Animation created, and Bee Movie’s awkward, unfocused and unfunny plot failed to deliver a memorable experience beyond a couple of uncomfortable and unforgettable interspecies date scenes.
The box office return on Bee Movie landed just shy of doubling its budget, which is the generally accepted break-even point on such big studio films, and by the end of 2008, the public had moved on from Seinfeld’s animated feature about a talkative honeybee who changes the world while enjoying a dubiously sexual relationship with a human woman.
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Then, in the mid-2010s, Bee Movie started an unexpected second life as a meme on social media as Millennial “fans” collectively laughed at their long-forgotten memories of the time the guy who started the greatest sitcom in TV history made a $150 million movie about a bee who cucks Patrick Warburton.
Today, Warburton has equally fond memories of playing the fan-favorite mechanic and New Jersey Devils fanatic David Puddy on Seinfeld and losing Renée Zellweger to a jazz-loving insect, telling Vulture in a recent and desperately needed Bee Movie retrospective, “I think one of the reasons why Bee Movie has resonated is because it’s basically Seinfeld.”
“It’s always terribly satisfying when you see something have a life in the realm of art that appreciates throughout the years,” Warburton said of Bee Movie’s surprise return to the zeitgeist in the mid-2010s as meme-makers began posting the film’s entire script as their Facebook statuses and creating YouTube edits where the movie speeds up by one percent every time a character speaks the word “bee.”
Warburton claimed that the explicitly romantic relationship between Seinfeld’s character Barry B. Benson and Zellweger’s Vanessa Bloome was just a playful bit of veiled adult humor that many kids’ movies include for parents’ enjoyment, saying, “That’s what makes animation fantastic and fun — when it can be multigenerational. I can see how it really appeals to kids, and because there’s a lot of subtle other aspects of the film, it’s going to appeal to an older audience. It crosses bridges there.”
When asked how he feels about the fact that his character in Bee Movie, the arrogant tennis instructor Ken, loses his girlfriend to a bee, Warburton hilariously responded, “I’ve done worse.”
On the subject of Bee Movie’s similarities with Seinfeld, Warburton explained of the animated beestiality film that’s supposedly on par with the world’s greatest sitcom, “It’s clever. What does that mean? What’s clever? It’s filled with perspective. You have this fun and ridiculous story about something that’s almost a romance between a bee and a woman, which is somehow not perverse at all but very funny. I lean really well into clueless stupidity, dumb arrogance and a little bit of irony with my roles, and this touches that triad. You can’t just make somebody entirely an idiot.”
“Similarly, Seinfeld seems to have aged well,” Warburton segued, referencing Seinfeld’s semi-recent claims that the series is too edgy for today's hyper-sensitive TV-watchers. “Outside of whatever people might find ‘PC’ today or not, these were people that were very relatable to viewers. They had ridiculous human arguments and situations that still seem to play very well today. That’s a testament to Jerry’s humor and his creativity.”
Warburton further pondered of Bee Movie’s online renaissance almost a full decade after release, “This was something millennials saw early on in their lives, it had an impact as children, and then they realized it contained another layer as adults. Animated films, especially ones that work, you end up seeing more than once and you realize new things about them.”
Somehow, in the near-decade since Seinfeld’s animated comedy became one big meme, Warburton never picked up on the fact that the laughs were at Bee Movie, not with it. Seriously, people didn’t start posting Bee Movie memes in 2015 because they thought that the film deserved a reappraisal as a work of comic genius on par with Seinfeld — they turned Bee Movie into a joke because it’s a kid’s movie about a bee who fucks a human woman.
