It’s not surprising, given that kind of social-media hegemony, that the awkward, arrogant, narcissistic naïf created 35 years ago by Rowan Atkinson (with help from the writer Richard Curtis) is enjoying his fourth or fifth life. A new animated “Mr. Bean” series, voiced by Mr. Atkinson, began in February on the children’s network CITV in Britain. (It follows an earlier animated series about a decade ago.) And on Tuesday, Shout! Factory released “Mr. Bean: The Whole Bean,” a four-DVD set with the 14 episodes of the original TV show.

Image The new “Mr. Bean” box set.

It was Mr. Curtis — who would later become the king of the British rom-com with “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually” — who suggested to his comedy partner, Mr. Atkinson, the idea of a purely visual piece in the style of the French master Jacques Tati. “The starting point, I remember, was where he said, ‘Why don’t we try and do a sketch about a man who can’t stay awake in a situation where you’re supposed to stay awake?’ ” Mr. Atkinson, 60, said recently by phone from London.

That was in 1979, and the sketch — which evolved into a scene of a man struggling to stay awake in church — was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Mr. Bean popped up onstage occasionally over the next decade while Mr. Atkinson appeared in the TV shows “Not the Nine O’Clock News” and “Black Adder.” Finally, in 1990, “Mr. Bean” made its premiere as a half-hour special that included the church sketch. More episodes appeared, a few per year, through 1995. Two feature films followed.

The character has remained steadily popular in Britain, with Mr. Curtis and Mr. Atkinson producing sketches for Comic Relief fund-raisers and Mr. Atkinson appearing as Mr. Bean in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. (The irregularity and small number of “Mr. Bean” episodes made the show hard to program on American TV in the days before viewers became accustomed to short-season British series. Episodes appeared during the 1990s on HBO and PBS, but it never gained the kind of following here that it did in the rest of the world.)

Bean sketches follow a formula: The character is placed in an everyday situation — taking a test, shopping, packing for vacation — that disintegrates into a cascading series of predicaments and embarrassments. Mr. Bean responds with both prancing panic and a manic ingenuity that nearly always backfires. The comedy comes equally from the slapstick contortions through which Mr. Atkinson puts his Gumby-like frame and the unraveling of Mr. Bean’s sang-froid in a welter of winces, recoils and popping eyes.