The Simpsons' Bumblebee Man Is Based On A Real-Life Mexican TV Star
"The Simpsons" is arguably the best American TV show of all time, a long-running masterpiece of the medium that has forever changed TV and animation. Part of why the series has managed to remain popular after so many decades and even have a resurgence in quality recently (it's true, "The Simpsons" is still good, I swear!) is the show's characters and world. Springfield feels very much like a real, breathing place full of memorable individuals. Indeed, there are so many noteworthy personalities on the show that we once ranked the best one-off "Simpsons" characters and still had to ignore dozens of them. The series can even support episodes where the main cast is nowhere to be seen and they still end up being some of the best "Simpsons" episodes ever.
Among the many excellent and memorable characters that populate Springfield is Bumblebee Man. While he may appear to be little more than another racially insensitive caricature like Apu on the surface, he is really much more than that. In fact, Bumblebee Man is specifically a reference to arguably the most beloved figure in Latin American pop culture.
In their book "Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons," Mike Reiss and Mathew Klickstein explain that Bumblebee Man was inspired by the prominence of Mexican television on cable TV in Los Angeles. The most popular show that aired on most of those channels involved a guy in a superhero bug costume, and he is a hero so iconic he is now technically a part of the DC Universe. This, of course, is El Chapulin Colorado.
Ay, ay, ay!
In "The Simpsons," Bumblebee Man is also known as Pedro Chespirito, the star of a sitcom on Channel 8. Both the channel and the name are references to the late Mexican TV actor and icon Roberto Gómez Bolaños, whose pseudonym was Chespirito or "Little Shakespeare."
The actor was best known for two characters. There was El Chavo del Ocho ("The Kid from Number 8"), a sitcom about an orphan kid in a low-income neighborhood full of colorful characters — the Channel 8 where Bumblebee Man works is a reference to this. Then there is El Chapulin Colorado or "The Red Grasshopper," a superhero sitcom that parodied the genre by having its titular hero be clumsy and weak, fighting not with powers but with a golden heart.
El Chapulin Colorado was hugely popular across Latin America and was even featured as a major plot point in the "Blue Beetle" live-action movie's post-credits tag, which paid homage to the first Latino superhero.
As for Bumblebee Man, the Spanish dub of "The Simpsons" was unable to translate the Spanish jokes, of course. Instead, Bumblebee Man spoke only Spanish, his jokes mostly focusing on his over-the-top Mexican accent and the fact that he wore a giant bee costume.