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In 2007, culture as we knew it diverged into two categories. For the rest of recorded history, there would be the time Before Bee Movie (“BBM”) and the time After Bee Movie.
It’s hard to believe we’ve already marked 15 years to the day—November 2, 2007—when Jerry Seinfeld and DreamWorks Animation debuted their magnum opus. A decade and a half ago, Renée Zellweger looked at a script in which she’d play a woman falling in love with Jerry Seinfeld as a bee and said, “Sure, why not!” It’s the bizarro cultural artifact that birthed a thousand memes almost a decade after its release, a miraculous black-and-yellow hallucination.
And speaking of hallucinations, Bee Movie is also the production that gave us Jerry Seinfeld zip-lining off a hotel roof in a bulbous bee costume—a late-2000s pop-culture moment seared into my memory with the same intensity most reserve for those photos of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears partying together in that car.