FTA: The Dickies - The Banana Splits Theme

In praise of the world's most versatile fruit and most surreal 1968 children's TV theme song

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

ONE BANANA

Bananas and sour cream.

If you’d asked me at age 5 to name my favorite food, that would’ve been my answer, no pondering needed.

I would eat it every day. For breakfast. For lunch. For dinner. For dessert. Not all on the same day — I wasn’t a weirdo kid. I ate other things too. Pancakes, hot dogs, grilled cheese. Normal stuff. I’m just stating the flexibility of bananas and sour cream.

My mom would take a solid yellow banana — no brown spots, no hint of green — remove the peel and slice it into a dozen or more bite-sized segments, then toss them in a cereal bowl with several dollops of Daisy Brand® sour cream. The ratio of sour cream to banana (if I was aware of ratios at that age) would ideally be one-to-one.

It’s a ratio that I continue to use today but with Greek yogurt, blueberries, and granola instead of banana and sour cream.

Whenever I’m at a Starbucks, a cafe, or a take-out store that sells pre-made yogurt “parfait,” they never get the ratio right. It’s always way too much yogurt or way too many blueberries. Or too much strawberry goop, or whatever viscous jelly is used to emulate fresh fruit. It’s one reason why I gained fifteen pounds while working as a video editor in downtown San Francisco pre-pandemic. Every morning on my way to the office I would choose to purchase a muffin or coffee cake instead of the yogurt parfait, both as a moral and a political statement, my small action to combat the offensively uneven ratios.

Sure, sitting in front of a computer screen for 8–10 hours a day probably played a pivotal role in my body thickening. Still, I would rather blame the evil corporate ratio-destroying machine than my own dietary and fitness habits. (Thankfully I’ve moved on to full-time dog walking and cut back considerably on the buttery, sugary stuff.)

Photo by Daniel Cabriles on Unsplash; also, a perfectly balanced parfait except for the kiwi which does not go with yogurt at all

By the 6th or 7th grade, I began to develop a distaste for sour cream. I no longer wanted it associating with my bananas. Also, I stopped spreading it atop my potato pancakes. I definitely didn’t want it in or on my burritos. I don’t recall this change of taste having any bullying origins or being connected to any traumatic incident (The Sour Cream Incident: in theaters this Friday!).

The most likely culprit of my sudden anti-sour cream stance? Receiving a lactose intolerance diagnosis after months (years really) of gastrointestinal distress. Cramping, bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation — the whole kit and kaboodle. I was advised to avoid eating dairy.

In 1980 you’d have better luck finding the holy grail than a 12-year-old boy who was willing and able to cut milk, pizza, ice-cream and cheese from his diet. Soy milk was years from becoming a grocery staple and was only found in hippie co-op markets for twenty bucks a pint.

My best guess is that I stopped eating sour cream as a token sacrifice to the altar of lactose intolerance. Which then evolved into a genuine dislike.

TWO BANANA

If you had asked me as a young adult to name my favorite fruit I would have answered “banana!” without hesitation. Although I’d excised sour cream from my diet, I most certainly did not cut bananas out.

In fact, my banana eating ways only expanded as I got older. I no longer demanded that the peels be solid yellow without a hint of green. I was okay with a couple of small soft spots. A dozen or so irregularly shaped brown freckles? Not my ideal preference, but I’d eat it as long as it held relative firmness.

Ripening beyond that? Let’s make some banana bread!

Photo by Teo Do Rio on Unsplash

In my freezer you will always find a bag of super-ripe sliced bananas. I often use them for smoothies but their most important role is as conductor ingredient for my banana breads.

I’ve got a half dozen banana bread recipes dog eared in cookbooks such as Laurel’s Kitchen, Secrets of a Jewish Baker, and a variety of Moosewood volumes. I have several more banana bread recipes bookmarked on Epicurious.com and Eating Well.

Lactose intolerant like me? I’ve got three wonderful dairy-free recipes. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity? Let me call up a rice-millet-buckwheat flour recipe you will love. Want to limit fats? Well, you should probably stay away from my banana bread, but I do have a great low-sugar recipe that uses ground flaxseed and ground oats that is tasty and gives a wonderfully false sense of heart-healthiness!

Just don’t ask me to add nuts. Nuts are to be eaten on their own, not inside of bread. Chocolate chips, though? Most definitely.

THREE BANANA

If you were to have asked me what my favorite TV show was when I was four years old, I don’t know what my answer would have been, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t The Banana Splits Adventure Hour.¹

This surreal, live-action children’s show from the minds of Hannah Barbara and copious amounts of acid only aired for three years, between 1968 and 1970. (The first season was directed by Richard Donner of Goonies and Lethal Weapon fame!) I’m pretty confident my parents didn’t put 2 or 3 year-old me down in front the the TV to watch The Banana Splits. But it was the late ‘60s: anything is possible.

I do remember, though, watching it when I was a straight-A stoner sophomore in high school. By the early 80s, The Banana Splits was considered a cult classic and rightly seen as appropriate only for marijuana smoking adults and hormone-ravaged teenagers. I have a vague recollection of it airing at midnight or 1 am, right after Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert. I was quite high back then, so any memories I claim to have should come with a warning to accept all “facts” with a grain of smoke.

The costumes and sets for The Banana Splits were designed by Sid and Marty Krofft, and the series’ sponsor was Kellogg’s Cereals (which I ate dutifully; as well as General Mills’ products: see below image). If you are under the age of 50, you likely will not understand the widespread influence Sid and Marty Krofft had on children’s TV programming during the 1970s. Shows like H.R. Pufnstuf , Land of the Lost, and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters were weekend morning boob-tube staples for simple-minded youngsters like me.

Check out this 1959 ad for free bananas! I found it while looking up “best cereal to go with bananas.”

In 2009, Land of the Lost was adapted into a movie starring Will Ferrell and Danny McBride which was pretty terrible. It was never going to be good; the budget was too high. The best hope for film remakes of low-budget childhood heirlooms is that they are so bad they become cult classics.

My favorite of the Krofft shows was Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. I was around the age of the youngest boy actor in the show and related to a kid finding a sea monster named Sigmund who was kicked out of his monster clan for refusing to scare people.

Note: after writing that last paragraph I decided to check if there are any Sigmund and the Sea Monsters episodes available on YouTube. There are. Without taking back what I said, I want to emphasize that Sigmund and the Sea Monsters WAS my favorite Sid and Marty Krofft series. Watching it again now is um….what’s the right word? Challenging. Yeah that’s a good word. Not even being stoned would make the show watchable. I think being an 8-year-old boy in 1974 is my only excuse.

Oh, and yes, the show was remade in 2016 as a kids’ series which can be streamed now on Amazon Prime.

The Banana Splits TV show was more memorable for its annoyingly earworm-laden theme song than the contents of the show itself. Which has been repeating ad nauseam in my head all week. I only have myself to blame for this as I was compiling a playlist on Spotify on bands and artists with fruit in their names (Fiona Apple, The Cranberries, Strawberry Alarm Clock, for example). And in my search, the Banana Splits theme song appeared. So I played it and it has since been repeating on a loop in my built-in cranial streamer.

Here’s the playlist I made if you want to see what other fruity bands and artists made my cut of favorites.

I probably don’t need to do a line-by-line dissection of the lyrics to the Banana Splits theme song, but I’ll share a few lines so you can see their appeal: (Get it? A peel? I’ll show myself out.)

One banana, two banana, three banana, four

Four bananas make a split and so do many more

Over hill and highway the banana buggies go

Come along to bring you the Banana Splits Show

It’s not the words that make up the bulk of the earworm portion of the song; It’s the “Tra la la, Tra la la la/Tra la la, Tra la la la,” that won’t let go. How can two little nonsense syllables cause so much sonic mayhem?

To illustrate the theme’s catchiness, the melodic pop heft of this song, I share with you two excellent covers, the first by The Dickies, and the second by Liz Phair with Material Issue.

I love them both; do you have a favorite?

FOUR BANANAS

If you were to have asked me at any time before writing the 3rd and 4th banana sections of this essay if they (the mysterious “they”) ever made a Banana Splits movie, I would have answered with a fairly confident no.

Well, oopsie!

When I said before that my least favorite Sid and Marty Krofft show (Land of the Lost) was the only one made into a movie? I hadn’t done my due diligence.

I don’t know how it took almost 50 years to make a horror movie version of one of these iconic Krofft shows. The Banana Splits Show in particular screams out “Meet The Feebles.”

Before he became famous for such films as Heavenly Creatures, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Beatles documentary series on Disney Plus, director Peter Jackson was mostly known for graphically violent puppet films. The Muppets were hedonistic, murderous crazies. Meet the Feebles is actually pretty subversive and darkly funny in addition to being bonkers.

I cannot vouch for the brilliance of The Banana Splits Movie though. I would guess that it’s probably on par with Land of the Lost. By the trailer, it looks like it hewed close to the low-budget ethos of the original TV show, which is the right approach. I will not watch it, though, because I do not want my innocent musical impressions of Bingo, Snorky, Drooper and Fleegle to be forever besmirched with gory, murderous violence.

Do we have to ruin all the great classic kids’ shows by remaking them as horror movies? Don’t get me started on what they did with Winnie the Pooh.²

I don’t know how this game is played, but if you want to get me a birthday present, here’s a clue!

• Do you remember The Banana Splits Theme song? What about the TV show, The Banana Splits Adventure Hour?

• What do you think of the cover versions by The Dickies and Liz Phair/Material Issue?

• What “fruit” bands have I overlooked for my playlist?

• Bananas and sour cream — match made in hell or heaven?

Thanks as always for reading- Steve

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Banana_Splits

2. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19623240/