The Banana Splits Movie Prankishly Re-Imagined Lovable Costumed Characters as Remorseless Murderers
For as long as I can remember, my nine-year-old son Declan’s ADHD Hyper-focus has been on Five Nights at Freddy’s specifically and the surprisingly vast world of entertainment built upon the concept of the creepy detritus of our childhood turning evil in general.
The zeitgeist-capturing success of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game in 2014 kicked off a wave of movies and video games that took elements of childhood that are already unintentionally sinister and made them flat-out murderous.
These include the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine, whose villains are like Felix the Cat or early Mickey Mouse BUT EVIL!, My Friendly Neighborhood (Sesame Street BUT EVIL!) and Poppy’s Playtime (toys, BUT EVIL!).
On the cinematic front, there’s the surprise hit Meg3an, as well as the inept Imaginary, whose villain was a teddy bear BUT EVIL, as well as a trio of movies about children’s animatronics going crazy and murdering people.
Most notably, in terms of cultural visibility and financial success, at least, was last year’s adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s.
The Blumhouse production grossed a remarkable three hundred million dollars at the box office despite debuting the same day on Peacock and also sucking.
It was preceded by 2021’s Willy’s Wonderland, which was like Five Nights at Freddy’s if it had a sense of humor about itself, was funny, moved at a snappy pace, and was not twenty minutes too long.
Willy’s Wonderland was the movie Five Nights at Freddy’s should have been, but it was not connected to a billion-dollar video game phenomenon, so it grossed a fraction of the later film’s robust box-office tally.
Every video game and movie that I have mentioned so far features a fictional, off-brand version of something that exists in pop culture, with the notable exception of The Banana Splits Movie.
The Banana Splits Movie did not ask what it would be like if a band like the Banana Splits were to run amok and wrack up an impressive body count. No, they got the real thing.
The cynical hacks at Hanna-Barbera signed off on a grisly, R-rated horror comedy that prankishly transformed campy goofs from the Age of Aquarius into bloodthirsty, murderous monsters without consciences or remorse.
The Banana Splits Movie did not make The Banana Splits viscerally disturbing: it just acknowledged that what was posited as light-hearted family fun in the late 1960s is pure nightmare fuel.
The character design is the primary reason a G-rated show for kids could be turned into an R-rated horror movie for grown-ups. The characters are supposed to be bright, vivid, and fun. Instead, they’re ghoulish and unnerving.
The Banana Splits was one of the first shows to have a laugh track. Since it was a Hanna-Barbera production, the laugh track was deafeningly loud and assaultive. It laughed uproariously at what could very generously be called jokes but it also guffawed when nothing was happening.
The loud canned laughter only adds to the show’s air of painfully forced fun and frivolity, as does its over-reliance on Benny Hill Show-style sped-up film to fake the illusion that something is happening when it’s really just frenetic movement with no purpose beyond killing time.
The Banana Splits Movie belongs to the curious subgenre of animatronics-based horror. It posits the band that haunted children’s dreams for decades, not as costumed characters but rather as advanced animatronics created by an eccentric inventor who loses control of his curdled creations.
The Banana Splits talked, but their lips never moved because, again, they were anonymous performers in costumes and not genuine animatronics.
You can’t make an animatronics-based horror movie without animatronics, however, so for the purpose of the movie, they’re played by actors in costume who try to fake being animatronics by moving in a stilted and robotic fashion.
Does it work? Not really. I like the look of Five Nights at Freddy’s and Matthew Lillard’s scenery-chewing turn as the villain, but what I really like about it are the animatronics.
Blumhouse had enough money for massive, advanced, and convincing animatronics built by the gifted folks at the Jim Henson Creature Shop. The Banana Splits Movie can’t compete with its bigger-budgeted doppelganger in animatronics, but it can compete in every other aspect.
The Banana Splits Movie takes place in an alternate reality where The Banana Splits Show was not canceled after a few seasons and occasionally revived but stayed on the air for decades.
Finlay Wojtak-Hissong stars as Harley Williams, a boy inexplicably and unbelievably obsessed with the Banana Splits. As a birthday present, the boy’s loving and supportive mother Beth (Dani Kind) gets him tickets to see what turns out to be the final show, much to the annoyance of his judgemental and cold father Mitch (Steve Williams), who would rather be doing business or cheating on his wife than endure the Banana Splits’ kitschy shenanigans.
The family is joined at the taping by Thadd (Kiroshan Naidoo), a would-be influencer whose clout and power exist only in his imagination, his hipster girlfriend Poppy (Celina Martin), and Jonathan (Keeno Lee Hector), an obnoxious stage dad aggressively promoting his talentless daughter.
Despite the show unrealistically getting good ratings, a snobby executive cancels them because he wants shows that are young and hip, whereas The Banana Splits Show is “old and stupid.”
When Drooper, a sunglasses-wearing lion with a pronounced Southern drawl, learns from Stevie, The Banana Splits Show’s token human, that the show has been canceled, something in the band’s software update goes haywire.
Banana Splits band-mates Drooper, Fleegle, Snorky, and Bingo eschew family-friendly entertainment in favor of indiscriminate slaughter.
Stevie, a sneering asshole who needs to get drunk to endure the gauntlet of humiliation that constitutes his professional life under the best of circumstances, is the first to go. The wildly unpopular cast member is killed with a giant lollipop by Drooper.
The audience members who won a chance to meet the Banana Splits after the show soon find themselves in terrible danger of losing their lives in grisly but not terribly creative ways.
Five Nights at Freddy’s avoided gore and explicit violence to earn a family-friendly PG-13 rating, which would allow kids to see a movie based on their favorite video game.
The Banana Splits Movie, in sharp contrast, received a very hard R. The screenwriters clearly considered the myriad ways in which human bodies can be destroyed.
This warped re-imagining goes heavy on gore without ever being particularly scary. The film similarly embraces the campy ridiculousness of its premise and the costumed ghouls at its center without ever being more than intermittently funny.
To give the prankish horror-comedy faint praise, it is considerably better than Five Nights at Freddy’s, in no small part because it’s twenty minutes shorter and ten times grislier. Yet it’s not as much fun as Willy’s Wonderland.
So, if you’re keeping score, my ranking of movies from the past five years where children’s animatronics go crazy and start killing people is as follows:
Willy’s Wonderland
The Banana Splits Movie
Five Nights at Freddy’s
The Banana Splits certainly has an element of novelty going for it, but novelty can only take a film so far. They may not be vicious murderers, but the original incarnation of The Banana Splits is still creepier than the bloodthirsty lunatics found here.
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