From ‘Blue Beetle’ to ‘BeetleBorgs,’ here are the best movies and TV shows featuring our favorite winged insects

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 Image via Saban Entertainment 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 Image via Universal 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