Despite being mostly known by its sole NES release as Stinger in the U.S., the TwinBee franchise remains part of Japanese pop culture at large and has gone through quite a lot of crowning moments of awesome through the years.
- According to this video
about the history of TwinBee, the Gradius and TwinBee arcade games were actually developed at the same time by Konami to ensure they'd end up with at least one hit videogame of the two. What's awesome is that their gamble paid off and both works ended up becoming major successes in the 1980s. - The enduring nostalgic popularity of TwinBee persists in Japan to this day even though the last game for the series was released back in 1998 (or 1995 if you're talking about the last Shoot 'Em Up made). Why? It's because of all the anime, radio dramas, cameos, and related media Konami released or approved of for the franchise.
- There's a TwinBee aircraft that exists in real-life! Designed by Joseph W. Gigante in 1965, the United Consultants or UC-1 Twin Bee was supposed to be an update on the existing Republic Sea Bee amphibious aircraft. With its name, wide nose, and large front window, it's not a gigantic leap to believe that Konami game developers probably took inspiration from this specific plane in making the first TwinBee game.
- The Japanese commercial for Pop'n TwinBee was indeed pop'n. They didn't need to go that hard on the commercial, but they did with its CGI TwinBees and WinBees as well as its rotoscoped dance moves for Light and Pastel.
