Inspired by HwaGoose
I just learned about the entire original story of Maya the bee today.
The original is based on a book from 1912. The first movie is from 1925 and actually just a black&White movie without any sounds that just contains footage of real bees (you can find it on Youtube).
In the original book a lot of the friendly characters who become friends of Maya don't even exist but instead the author brutaly describes how other insects murder eachother while Maya is a whitness of this.
Oh and the author of the book ended up as a nazi too
at later on in the 70s a German producer got his hands on the book and decided to produce a less fucked up version of it as a kids cartoon. The show's idea was at first sold to a US-company but later on a Japanese production team created the show for the German market where it was first aired in 1975 and later on aired with multiple dub-versions around the globe
