"Have you seen my childhood?"---Michael Jackson.
This is not how you celebrate 50 years of a children's cult classic.
The Banana Splits hit the half-century mark last year, and, assuming the rights to the series are split between Sid & Marty Krofft, who designed the characters, and Hanna-Barbera/Warner Bros., someone green-lit a DTV that will premiere on SyFy later this summer before being released on DVD.
In a left-handed homage to the series, Bingo, Drooper, Fleegle, & Snorky have been reimagined as homicidal maniacs who kill parents to keep the kids for themselves. The voice actors are trying to approximate the voices of Allan Melvin, Paul Winchell, & Daws Butler, all of whom have passed on since the original series ended in 1970. Judge for yourselves with this trailer, effendis.
Many thanks to Steven Dolce, a frequent contributor to Saturday Morning Archives, for reminding me to discuss this potentially scandalous, nightmarish scenario.
After reading a wacko reimagining of Wacky Races a couple of years ago, nothing surprises me anymore.
My personal take? Someone decided that after Mister Rogers got the biography treatment not long ago, with no warts to speak of, they needed to needlessly deconstruct the Splits, who last were seen in a fresh set of shorts on Boomerang about a decade ago.
Being a Splits fan from way back, I am offended at the very idea, of course, but, as I noted, I'm not surprised someone would take this tack. I've read of comparisons to Five Nights at Freddy's. As we are in an era where Archie Andrews and his friends were repackaged in a warped soap opera mashup of Twin Peaks & Saved by The Bell in order to succeed in primetime, it should surprise no one that the Splits, who made their TV debut the same year that Archie did (1968), would be similarly twisted.
20 comments:
Funny that you should mention Five Nights At Freddy's, because as I understand it, Warner Brothers initially passed on a Five Nights At Freddy's movie and so another studio picked it up. WB must've felt like they had missed an opportunity and so they decided to produce their own Five Nights with a costumed mascot property that they already own.
I wish that WB had created original characters for this, as I wouldn't want a kid's first exposure to the Banana Splits to be a SyFy horror schlock fest where the Splits are presented as demonic killer mascots. Why not get permission to use the animatronics from Captain Andy's River Town, since no one remembers those characters?
However, this Asylum wanna be flick is rated R, so a decent parent isn't going to expose their kids to something like this anyway.
I'm not feeling this either, Hobbyfan, that's why I tried to give the Splits a proper tribute on Twinsanity before this thing hits the airwaves. I'll put a link here, if that's cool. If not, apologies, and don't hesitate to remove it.
https://twinsanity.co/2019/05/03/nerdvana-respect-the-splits/
Seriously, what the what, Warner Bros.? Did the Showbiz Pizza Place band want too much money??
Or, as a certain 70's icon we all love would say, guys, real spacey.
Silverstar, I read your tribute piece on Twinsanity, which is how I first found out about the movie. Steven posted a note on the movie in responding to an unrelated topic over at the Archives. The articles I read online before posting had referenced Five Nights at Freddy's as an inspiration for this deconstructive knockoff.
If you can find it, there is a Banana Splits-Suicide Squad 1-shot that came out two years ago from DC, and it'll calm your senses......
I think the reason why WB wanted to adapt this innocent kids show into an R rated adult comedy horror film is so they could make a Banana Splits for older audiences.
This was something that [adult swim] did with the Samurai Jack revival. Samurai Jack may have had and adult edge to it, but it was still a kids show at it's core (the first 4 seasons that is). The 5th season on the other hand was targeted at an older audience. Also, Silverstar claimed over at Saturday Mornings Forever about SJ being less toyetic which is false because the first 4 seasons of SJ DID have toys. If you go to Google Images and type in "samurai jack toys", you will know what I am talking about. In 2002, when SJ was in it's second or third season, the popular fast food joint known as Subway made 5 toys based on this show. Here is proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdr6OzkE-9A https://www.google.com/search?q=samurai+jack+toys&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiI1r64hu7iAhVBwVkKHfOyDJgQ_AUIESgC&biw=1280&bih=610#imgrc=Oa9A6npyVq1UmM:
Also in 2018, a company called USAopoly made a Samurai Jack board game which is based on the 5th season.
OK, but I don't remember saying that, at least not verbatim. "Less toyetic" doesn't mean that no toys were made, just that the show didn't lend itself as easily to the kind of stuff that kiddos like to collect (i.e. Happy Meals and the like) as say, a Looney Tunes or Disney property would, and also that SJ didn't have a major toy producer like Hasbro or Mattel, backing them up.
This really isn't the same thing at all. Samurai Jack, while indeed at its' heart a kids' cartoon, was still edgy enough to resonate with an adult audience, hence its' successful 5th season on [adult swim]. This, by contrast, is a pretty cynical and cheap attempt to cash in on another now-hot property, in this case Five Nights at Freddy's. WB is compensating on the fact the studio initially passed on a FNIF movie, and are now trying to make up for it by using an old HB property that was lying which also coincidentally featured costume mascot musicians. Warner can (and has) tried to say that this is a reaction to the folks who were scared of the Splits as kids, but this is really just a cynical attempt at a cash-in.
*lying around. Sorry about that, my typing fingers don't work as fast as my brain, so I make a lot of typos and miss stuff.
You are indeed correct, Silverstar.
This has to be the first adult content from Blue Ribbon Content that I know of. Creepy to the max. For all we know, this could end up being a parody of those horror slasher films.
Blue Ribbon Content?
Yeah, a subsidiary of WB, better known for producing animated fare for CW Seed (i.e. Vixen).
Gosh, just when you thought the entertainment business couldn't get any more unbearable. Just because very few people talk about a certain show doesn't give you the right to reinvent it for a mature audience.
You'll notice some changes to the characters: Fleegle and Bingo have their feet swapped, Drooper has Snorky's eyes behind his glasses (hence Snorky's small dot eyes), and the noses were cut to have nostrils. I guess this was an attempt to make them different from the family-oriented 2008 versions that were based on the 1969 versions.
Also, I think I could make out the voice of Eric Bauza. You'd think as someone who's been working for Cartoon Network for years, he'd stand up for beloved intellectual properties.
Bauza may be the only "name" in the cast. I'd like to meet the jerks who wrote this, intended to be tongue-in-cheek, I'd imagine, and strap them to chairs, forcing them to watch reruns of some of the worst shows in cartoon history.
The fuuny thing is, the Banana Splits were never intended for adults in the first place.
Exactly.
Ironically, someone at WarnerMedia decided that DC couldn't do any more books that recast classic H-B characters in a different light, such as Mark Russell's acclaimed takes on the Flintstones and Snagglepuss. How are you going to re-grow a pre-existing brand that has been out of the public eye (i.e. Snagglepuss) if you won't let today's writers, who were fans themselves, offer their visions?
Do you know what's weirder than adapting a children's show into an R rated adult movie? Adapting an R rated adult movie into a TV-Y7 rated chidlren's cartoon. Back in 1986, the 1982 R rated adult movie Rambo was adapted into a short-lived TV-Y7 rated children's cartoon series called Rambo: The Force of Freedom which lasted for 65 episodes in syndication. Another weird thing is that when Mortal Kombat first came out in the day, Hasbro made children's toys of that franchise, which is also weird because the Mortal Kombat franchise was never intended for children in the first place.
Ah, yeah, I remember the animated Rambo, a Ruby-Spears production. Rambo was hot at the time, so of course someone is going to want to make a few extra bucks off it.
Mortal Kombat might've been meant for the college set, not elementary school kids, but it made money, such that someone decided it could be adapted into a cartoon, too.....
As well as live action movies.
What if they did a Banana Splits anime?
A Banana Splits anime would skew more toward the original concept of the series.
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