Charmy Bee

Charmy Bee (チャーミー・ビー, Chāmī Bī^?) is a young mobian bee and a member of Team Chaotix. He debuted in Knuckles' Chaotix, and was missing from the games for a few years until Sonic Heroes.

Personality[]

Charmy is hyperactive and scatter brained mobian, and not too bright. Being a child, he would rather play than work, as shown in the Chaotix' first level of Sonic Heroes, when the team is receiving their first mission at the beachy Seaside Hill, he's hovering around singing "Sea, sea, sea". However, he is also the most friendly and optimistic of all the Chaotix members. Due to his age, he is not as skilled a detective as Vector or Espio, but he is nonetheless valuable to the team. It is possible he is also greedy like Vector, as his and Vector's eyes had dollar signs in them when their client was willing to pay them.

He shows a deep respect, even admiration, for Shadow in Shadow the Hedgehog.

Abilities[]

Charmy, like many other Sonic characters, can run at high speed, but is mostly known for his flying ability, as he is the flight character in Sonic Heroes. He can use his stinger as a method of attack when he is alone and has the abilities to somehow warp between large flowers, helping him and his friends to get around obstacles and complete their missions more quickly. In the game, if the team does not get all of the items by the time they finish a zone, Charmy can activate a flower and take them back to the beginning of the level. He also has acute hearing and is good at finding lost objects. Like other flight members in Sonic Heroes, Charmy can use Thunder Shoot, where he charges his friends with electricity and kicks them at enemies. Though he doesn't seem to excel at it, Charmy also plays drums during the "Chaotix Recital" Team Blast.

Background Information[]

When Charmy was originally designed, he was portrayed as a teenager, as his age as of Knuckles Chaotix was 16. However, Charmy was portrayed as a 6-year old from Sonic Heroes onward. SEGA has not given much explanations for this continuity flub (it should be noted, however, that his age was not given in the original Japanese manual, but rather added for the releases outside of Japan). Because of this, the Egg Grape treatment was meant to cause him to act like the scatterbrained funny-kid he now is in the games. However, he already had his Sonic Heroes design by StH #138.

Appearance[]

Charmy Bee is a black-and-yellow striped mobian bee. His design initially mirrored that of the early video games; he wore a black flight helmet with red trim and goggles, white gloves, and white and red sneakers. His shoulders were red. He typically had a single black stripe on each antenna, though this varied between artists. With the release of Sonic Heroes, his character was reintroduced with a new design and the comic followed suit; Charmy now wore an orange vest with a bee emblem on the left, white and orange shoes, and white gloves cuffed with black. The red shoulders became black and the antennae now sport three black stripes each. Like many in the early days of the comic, Charmy was given light blue eyes; these later changed to gold.

Charmy is generally smaller than average in height; while more consistent in later years, early on his size would vary wildly from one appearance to the next. To explain this inconsistency, he was said to have the ability to change between his normal size and a much smaller mode for flight; however, this itself was inconsistently used and later largely ignored as his game redesign better established his height.

For a period of time, Charmy was drawn without his helmet; however, he was drawn with the same red trim of the helmet around his eyes, usually taken as a mistake in the interpretation of the design. Many other bees at the time were given the same odd treatment. For his coronation, Charmy wore a red cape, red boots, white gloves with wide cuffs, and a small crown. He retained the cape in a later appearance. For Bunnie and Antoine's wedding, he wore a tuxedo jacket and red cummerbund.

Trivia[]

In the US Manual of Knuckles' Chaotix, Charmy was labeled as being 16 years of age; however, with the release of Sonic Heroes, his age has been retconned to 6. It should be noted however that the Japanese manual for Chaotix didn't list an age for Charmy, as it did for the other characters.
His size changed greatly from Chaotix, where he was very small, to Sonic Heroes, in which he was approximately the size of Cream (smaller than other Sonic characters, but far larger than previously proportioned).
In his Season 2 appearance in Sonic X, Charmy is the only Chaotix member who doesn't get to introduce himself to the audience before the commercial break. The card shown for his character stats shows his reaction to this.
Charmy is the first (and currently only) anthropomorphic insect in the entire cast of the series (he has a family in the Comic series though).
Charmy has not been a playable character since Sonic Heroes, a game released in 2003.
During the cutscene that took place before the Egg Hawk battle in Sonic Heroes, Charmy acts as if he's never met Robotnik before, which contradicts the events that took place in Knuckles' Chaotix. This may be because Espio referred to him as Doctor Eggman, but Charmy may have remembered him as Doctor Robotnik.
So far, Charmy is the only member of the Chaotix not to appear playable without the rest of his team (Espio appeared in Sonic the Fighters and Sonic Rivals 2; Vector appeared in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, its sequel, and Sonic Free Riders).
Charmy has proven, despite his small size, he is actually very strong because he can lift both Vector and Espio and remain in flight.
In Sonic 3D Blast, a unnamed Badnik bears a resemblance to a giant-headed Charmy.
Charmy is one of the few male characters to wear clothes other than the usual gloves and shoes.
Charmy is seen to have a small bee badge on his jacket.
Charmy seems to be so scatterbrained, he sometimes can't remember what to do. In the DS version of Sonic Colors, Charmy seems to have forgotten that he was sent on a job and was too focused on the rides.
Charmy is the least used member of Team Chaotix in Sonic games.