A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Spike the Bee

By Dave Shute

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

SPIKE THE BEE

By Jim Korkis

Spike the Bee is an appealing little character who appeared in a supporting role in several Disney animated shorts released during the 1950s. Since 2018, he has become a sort of unofficial mascot of the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival.

Spike’s Pollen Nation Exploration scavenger hunt was part of this year’s Festival, where guests could purchase a map and search for Spike around the park and then return their completed map for a prize.

Annual Passholders could pick up two complimentary magnets during the 2020 Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival. One of them was the Orange Bird. The other was “Donald Duck with Spike the Bee”. In addition, a cute Spike the Bee Sipper was available at The Honey Bee-stro and contained Honey-Peach Freeze.

The National Honey Board sponsors The Honey Bee-stro where it promotes the story of honey bees, honey and the importance of bees in the ecological system and the importance of protecting those bees.

In the cartoons, Spike has stung multiple times, meaning he’s a bumblebee, as honey bees can only sting once before dying. However, strangely, several of his cartoon adventures show him gathering honey suggesting he is a honey bee.

In recent years, the Spike character has reappeared in episodes of the animated series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (Goofy’s Bird, Minnie’s Bee Story, Mickey’s Little Parade) and in the Disney Channel Mickey Mouse short cartoons (Bee Inspired, New Shoes). In Bee Inspired, Spike continually disrupts Mickey from posing for Minnie’s painting. However, by the end, he saves Mickey from an angry swarm of bees.

Over the decades, I had the opportunity to interview some of the people involved with creating Spike, who was originally called “Buzz Buzz”.

Jack Hannah was an animator, storyman (with Carl Barks) and director of classic Donald Duck cartoon shorts.

Jack told me that when he became a director on the Donald Duck shorts “one of the first things I did was begin to find some foils for the Duck. There are only so many stories you can come up with for him, but if you have a strong supporting cast, that provides so many more interesting springboards for stories.

“To bring some variety to the Duck shorts, I tried to develop some interesting supporting characters. We used a bee character we called ‘Buzz Buzz’ a lot to antagonize the Duck. Probably the idea was that the bee is a menace with that stinger as a weapon and is much smaller than the Duck so it would be funny having the little guy battling a big bully. You can get a funny sound effect out of a bee. They can cuss you out with that little bee noise.”

That bee-talk was the work of Disney sound effects expert Jimmy MacDonald who always found unusual solutions to difficult problems like blowing through a rubber tube and rubbing on a taut rubber membrane stretched across an old wooden spool to create the bee sound.

Spike was not an aggressive menace. He was actually quite innocent and just did what a bee would instinctively do. However, if he found himself the victim of malicious actions, he had no hesitation to defend himself with his sharp stinger.

If not for the fact that Disney was getting out of the business of making theatrical cartoons in the 1950s, Spike might have ended up with his own series like Pluto, Humphrey the Bear and others.

He appeared in Inferior Decorator (1948), Bubble Bee (1949), Honey Harvester (1949), Slide, Donald, Slide (1949), Bee At the Beach (1950), Bee on Guard (1951) and Let’s Stick Together (1962). He has also made brief cameo appearances in other cartoons over the decades.

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Thanks, Jim! And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including his latest, Disney Never Lands, and about planned but unbuilt concepts, and Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew, which reprints much material first written for this site, all published by Theme Park Press.

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