Flight of The Bumblebee - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• "Flight of the Bumblebee" was featured, along with other compositions by Rimsky-Korsakov, in the fictional 1947 biopic Song of Scheherazade.
• The radio program The Green Hornet used "Flight of the Bumblebee" as its theme music, blended with a hornet buzz created on a theremin. The music became so strongly identified with the show and the character that it was retained as the theme for the later TV series. This version was orchestrated by Billy May and conducted by Lionel Newman, with trumpet solo by Al Hirt, in a jazz style nicknamed "Green Bee". This particular version was later featured in the 2003 film Kill Bill.
• Comedian Spike Jones did a "Laughing Record" in the late 1940s, where the 'Flight of the Bumblebee is interrupted repeatedly by wild laughter and a sneeze by the Spike Jones and his City Slickers band.
• The instrumental rock band B Bumble and the Stingers had a top 40 hit, hitting No.21 on the Billboard charts, with "Bumble Boogie", based on "Flight of the Bumblebee", in 1961.
• Jennifer Batten´s 1992 record "Above Below and Beyond" includes a 1:03 min approx. "tapping only" version.
• Brazilian rock guitarist Tiago Della Vega established the world record as the fastest guitar player in 2008 playing a 320 beats per minute rendition of "Flight of the Bumblebee". This was subsequently broken by John Taylor of Colorado in 2011 playing this piece at 600 beats per minute.
• Violinist Oliver Lewis broke the record for the fastest performance of the "Flight of the Bumblebee", during a live broadcast of the BBC children's television programme Blue Peter, on 18 October 2010, playing the piece in one minute and 3.356 seconds.
• Canadian violinist Eric Speed broke the record for the fastest performance of the "Flight of the Bumblebee" again at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal on July 22, 2011, playing the piece in 53 seconds.
• The music inspired Walt Disney to have a bumblebee featured in a segment of Fantasia that would sound as if it was flying in all parts of the theatre. It was an experiment that ended up on the cutting room floor but anticipated the eventual invention of surround sound. However, in his film Melody Time, Disney included an animated segment using Freddy Martin's "Bumble Boogie", a jazz arrangement of the piece.
• Pianist Lang Lang played "Flight of the Bumblebee" in an encore at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco using an iPad and an app set to no fail tap mode.
• A segment of the song was used in the Michael Jackson song, "Breaking News".
• During their The Final Countdown world tour, the guitarist of Europe, Kee Marcello performed "Flight of the Bumblebee" as the climax of his guitar solo spot.
• The Canadian heavy metal band Anvil covered this song on their 1987 album Strength of Steel under the name of "Flight of the Bumble Beast".
• The American heavy metal band Manowar covered this song on a bass guitar on their 1988 album Kings of Metal under the name of "Sting of the Bumblebee".
• Another metal band from the US, Dream Theater, features this piece in the 1998 live album Once in a LIVEtime at the end of a guitar solo by John Petrucci.
• Acclaimed Indian violin exponent L. Subramaniam did an Indianized cover of the song, titled "Flight of the Humblebee" for his album Indian Express/Mani & Co.
• Hong Kong Cantopop singer, Hacken Lee has this song as a backbone of "阿李爸爸"，which is transliterated as Ali Baba, but the song is about Hacken being a father in his own family, of which erhu and piano both play the melody.
• The song was also featured in the movie Drumline starring Nick Cannon and Zoe Saldana.
• On the 1990 album Pornograffitti by American rock band Extreme (band), Nuno Bettencourt performs a version entitled Flight of the Wounded Bumble Bee.
• The song was featured in the 8th season episode "Nannies" of TV show "How I Met Your Mother".