Movies and television programs exist on a spectrum. On one end, there is content with lots of beetles – The Mummy Returns, for example, and that one scene from The Ant Bully. These shows and films are what scientists call “good” thanks to their high concentration of beetles. On the other end of the spectrum, you have stuff without beetles, like Yesterday and all of the Transformers movies where Bumblebee was a Camaro. These are all bad, and the people responsible deserve to be punished.
But that’s not why we’re here. This isn’t a courtroom. It’s a place of celebration. As the world spends its weekend enjoying the premiere of Blue Beetle, let’s take a look at some of pop culture’s greatest beetle media.
Big Bad BeetleBorgs
Kids in the ‘90s loved few things more than martial arts choreography in color-coded costumes. Unfortunately for most producers, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers had already called dibs on the lowest-hanging fruit, origin story-wise. Anyone trying to get some skin in the game would need to come up with something as simple and easy for kids to remember as “giant disembodied head in a tube tasks his robot butler with bringing five strange teenagers to his house in the mountains so he can dress them up, give them robot cars, and tell them to fight monsters sent by a lady on the moon.”
Luckily, Big Bad BeetleBorgs had just the straightforward narrative for the job: “Three kids go into a creepy house and free a spirit impersonating Jay Leno, who grants their wish to become beetle-based superheroes from some comic books that they like, but they also accidentally bring the villains from the comics into the real world and have to fight them, and also there’s a vampire and a mummy and a Frankenstein in the house, and also one of the kids changes into a different actor halfway through the series and the show really bends over backwards to try to explain it.”
Honestly, even bothering to rehash it feels redundant, like putting another Uncle Ben death scene in a Spider-Man movie. Everyone remembers the origins of the BeetleBorgs. The point is, for 88 exquisite episodes airing between 1996 and ‘98, there were super beetles fighting monsters on the Fox Kids Saturday morning television block. Truly, Millennials are the greatest generation.
The Mummy franchise
There’s a lot to love about those first few Mummy movies. If you were young enough when they came out, they were probably the first chance you ever had to see the inside of a guy’s eye sockets while he screamed about a man taking away his tongue.
Even better, The Mummy taught kids an important lesson about keeping your hands in your pockets. Like Aladdin and that live-action Jungle Book and literally every other movie up to that point featuring a big pile of treasure, it hammered home the fact that you shouldn’t touch big piles of treasure, especially if you’re not the main character. This time, however, youngin’s got some extra tough love, and were informed that sticky fingers – whether used to pry ornamental blue gold bugs off the wall or to drag sacks of gold out of a cursed tomb – would get you eaten by hypercaffeinated beetles from the inside out.
The Mummy Returns took it one step further and informed us that the same thing would happen if we ghosted our significant others while they were hanging off of a cliff. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor taught us nothing but the lesson that you shouldn’t make a third movie if the majority of the cast refuses to come back, and is therefore not a part of this list.
A Bug’s Life
Like Shark Tale and Road to El Dorado and Aladdin and Rango and Over the Hedge and Mulan and gosh, like, half of kids’ movies, A Bug’s Life is a story about a hero who lies about who they are, then learns to not do that anymore through the power of the friendships they forged by lying. Unlike all of those other examples, at the end of this one, you get to see Kevin Spacey getting eaten by birds. Have you ever wanted to watch a rhinoceros beetle speak in the voice of Brad Garrett from Everybody Loves Raymond? Of course you haven’t. No one has. It’s a weird thing to want. It’s in the movie anyway.
James and the Giant Peach
Stories by Roald Dahl were some of my favorites growing up, probably because they were evocatively disgusting. It’s always been one of the hardest things to translate to the screen – the way that you could almost smell Trunchbull on the page, how you could feel the rotten breath of the Grand High Witch on your skin when you read about her turning the narrator into a mouse.
More than any other adaptation, James and the Giant Peach captured Dahl’s sense of the grotesque. The jerky animation, bizarre character designs, and sticky wet set pieces make the movie deeply uncomfortable to watch. Then again, “deeply uncomfortable to watch” was also how my babysitter used to describe me.
The short version: James and the Giant Peach is weird, but it’s also the only movie you’re ever going to see where Miriam Margolyes plays a 4-foot-tall ladybug, or where a French spider with Susan Sarandon’s voice sings to a little boy about eating bugs.
Speaking of eating bugs:
The Lion King
We’ve talked a lot about the ‘90s so far. It was a time when childhood was synonymous with grossness. Nickelodeon reigned supreme thanks to its willingness to lean into armpit jokes. Ninja Turtles only existed because of mutagenic sneeze. And for one perfect moment, Disney got off its high horse and inspired a generation of kids to eat bugs.
There is, perhaps, nothing so indicative of the shift that Disney’s experienced over the last 20 years than the fact that they used to make cartoons that were unsettling on purpose. When Timon and Pumbaa bit into the thorax of a granny smith beetle, you knew that every frame was specifically designed to make you go “gross, do it again.” When they do the same thing in the CGI remake, it just makes you want to call Jon Favreau and see if he’s doing okay.
Beetlejuice
It’s not a stretch if you remember that the titular character really does turn into a cockroach at one point, or that, like bed bugs, Jeffrey Jones technically counts as the sort of thing you’re allowed to spray for if he gets into your house.
Herbie Goes Bananas
A lot of people probably would have told you that the premise had run its course by 1980, and that four movies about a rapscallious Volkswagen getting into tomfoolery was about three too many. Those same people would, in all likelihood, take a lot of pleasure in knowing that Herbie Goes Bananas is widely regarded as the worst movie in the Love Bug franchise. Those same people can go cry in their pie. Sure, it’s no Herbie Rides Again – very much the Empire Strikes Back of the series – but it’s a charming little adventure, and I applaud director Vincent McEveety for putting in a heck of an effort. You try following Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. It’s not an easy gig.
Caveman
It’s not universally appreciated, but Caveman has its moments, and Ringo Starr really gets to show his range. As movies in the category go, it’s better than that awkward Paul McCartney cameo in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and easier to recommend to mixed company than the George Harrison parts of Life of Brian.
Krypton
So here’s my thinking:
Did I watch Krypton? No. Did you watch Krypton? Statistically, probably also no. So what we’ve got here is a Schrodinger’s Cat situation, where we know that the SyFy series chronicling the history of Superman’s alien ancestors probably featured characters with names like Jor-El, Kal-El, and Zor-El, but there’s no way to be sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was no character named Beet-El.
Anyway, I quit.