WAIT TILL YOUR FATHER GETS HOME, the only successful, animated sitcom in the 27 year gap between the FLINTSTONES and SIMPSONS, progresses to its 43rd regular episode...
When the Boyle household is set-upon by unusually troublesome bumblebees, who w…
WAIT TILL YOUR FATHER GETS HOME, the only successful, animated sitcom in the 27 year gap between the FLINTSTONES and SIMPSONS, progresses to its 43rd regular episode...
When the Boyle household is set-upon by unusually troublesome bumblebees, who were they gonna call to nip the problem in the bud? Well, the always awesomely incompetent Don Knotts, of course! Like Phyllis Diller and Don Adams, Knotts was an alumni of Hanna-Barbera's Saturday Morning NEW SCOOBY-DOO MOVIES.
For once, Harry's Boomer kids weren't completely wrong. Just a little ahead of the curve. Today we make considerable effort to reclaim and move bees rather than exterminating them, as they are indeed a valuable (and somewhat decimated) agricultural resource. The bees on this show were behaving rather oddly. Bumblebees (and honeybees) are generally pretty harmless, unlikely to fly across the yard to sting you for no reason. (Unlike their hellspawned cousins, Yellow Jackets, who will hunt you halfway across the continent to attack with little provocation!)
This episode may have been inspired by the Killer Bees scare of the '70s. Africanized hybrid bees are drastically more aggressive and dangerous. 'Wingnut' neighbor Ralph's conspiracy theory that the commies had bred attack bees south of the border and sent them up into America wasn't far off the mark... I don't know that it was intentional, but the Africanized bees were indeed developed in South America, escaped, and have been working their way north. But, despite the '70s scare, they weren't actually documented in the US until the mid-1980s. The colder Winters and desert expanses have limited their spread in America.
From January 1974.
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