The Four Color Media Monitor

The Daily Wire reported veteran comedian Jerry Seinfeld says he regrets how a cartoon he voiced in 2007, Bee Movie, contained sexual content, at least according to him:

Jerry Seinfeld gave the commencement address at Duke University over the weekend and apologized during his remarks for the sexual content in his 2007 animated children’s film.

The 70-year-old comedian mentioned “Bee Movie” while addressing the crowd gathered in Durham, North Carolina, on Sunday. “I made a cartoon movie about bees you may have watched as a child,” Seinfeld said in a video clip that’s since gained traction on TikTok.

“If any of you felt slightly uncomfortable about the sexual undertones in the relationship between Barry B. Benson and Vanessa, the florist who saves his life, I would like to apologize for that now,” he added. “I may not have calibrated that perfectly.”

Over the years, there’s been a lot of conversation about the nature of the relationship between Seinfeld’s character, a bee, and his human co-star, Vanessa (voiced by Renée Zellweger).

This isn’t the first time Seinfeld brought up his regrets about the relationship in “Bee Movie.”

“I apologize for what seems to be a certain uncomfortable subtle sexual aspect of the ‘Bee Movie,'” he said during a 2021 appearance on The Tonight Show. “[It] really was not intentional, but after it came out, I realized this is really not appropriate for children. Because the bee seems to have a thing for the girl, and we don’t really want to pursue that as an idea in children’s entertainment.”

Wait a minute, is he saying the screenplay's like an allusion to bestiality?!? Or because the notion the insect could end up stinging isn't very appealing? Or, because he feels it alludes too much to that old figure of speech, "the birds and the bees"? I don't know, but I think Seinfeld's failing to recognize certain differences between fiction and reality, in one of the most classically cliched instances in entertainment and literature discussions.

Still, depending how you view this, what he says is probably a lot more than can be said for how Disney's been handling their PR when it comes to the cartoons they're now making that emphasize LGBT ideology. For all we know, when it comes to that, Disney, and many other woke studios will probably never apologize for angles that could be far more blatantly written than what Bee Movie features.

I looked at the restored commenting section on the news page, and some of the readers said, for example:

Stop apologizing, just let the people theorize what was going on. How many other children's movies have adult undertones?

But even more eyebrow raising was this one:

How about he apologize for the antisemitic undertones?
(If you don't know the connection search for "giant bee Nahoul")

I looked up what's spoken about on search engines, and Memri had articles about how the figure spoken of was a Hamas propaganda indoctrination concept. If Bee Movie contains anything antisemitic as well, maybe that's what Seinfeld should really be giving a mea culpa for? Now, here's another comment:

Only if you are an uberpervert would you have thought that. I watched this several times with my kids and I never thought anything of the sort.

And:

What??? Then you're talking to gutter minded people, not us. Me and my family never felt that way when we watched it. So dumb.

On that, I wouldn't be surprised if the "sexual undertones", or whatever they were, were pretty mild compared to some of the more heavy-handed ideas passing for that in recent years in woke animation productions. Which begs the query: why is something that could be built on heterosexual viewpoints being apologized for, in contrast to something that could be built on homosexual viewpoints? It's just plain bewildering, and suggests Seinfeld is - surprise, surprise - a leftist who's decided to go with the woke flow and all but disown past products while not doing anything to improve new ones. I appreciate Seinfeld's support for Israel, but that doesn't make his apologia for something that could be tame in sharp contrast to modern PC acceptable. Nor does it improve artistic quality in what's to come, for as long as there's an animation industry, let alone an entertainment industry.

Labels: animation, history, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, politics