Biography
In the late 1960s, a generation of preteens interpreted “free love” as embraces from their mothers and associated “getting high” solely with the effects of sugary breakfast cereal. For these viewers the Banana Splits embodied the era’s defining currents of psychedelia, pop art, and pop music. Although the group functioned, like the Archies and Josie & the Pussycats, as a promotional vehicle for anonymous session players, its distinctive achievement lay in importing the sensibilities of acid culture into network children’s programming. Camera angles, dreamlike scenery, and disorienting visuals drawn from underground cinema allowed the series to translate the Summer of Love into Saturday-morning fare. Comparable in its subversive design to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse two decades afterward, the program simultaneously expanded young imaginations and loosened conventional thinking, an effect whose reach has endured.
Joseph Barbera, the Hanna-Barbera partner responsible for the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear, and Scooby Doo, originated the concept. In 1967, Lee Rich of Chicago’s Leo Burnett Agency, acting on behalf of Kellogg’s in Battle Creek, Michigan, invited Barbera to develop a Kellogg’s-sponsored vehicle. Rich envisioned a conventional hour-long Saturday-morning series; Barbera proposed replacing animation with actors in outsized puppet-style costumes. When Barbera later presented the completed plan to Burnett personnel, Kellogg’s executives, and NBC programming chief Grant Tinker—who would later lead the network—he reinforced the pitch by introducing a performer inside a Yogi Bear suit, securing immediate approval.
The resulting format echoed the Monkees at one further remove. Its tone of high-spirited slapstick derived from the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, while its saturated visual style recalled the cover imagery of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The four costumed characters formed a pop quartet—rhythm guitarist Drooper the lion, lead guitarist Fleegle the dog, keyboardist Snorky the elephant, and drummer Bingo the monkey—and inhabited a single mod apartment in the manner of the Monkees and the Beatles in Help! Each episode interwove comedy sketches, animated segments, the live-action serial Danger Island directed by Richard Donner (later of the Superman and Lethal Weapon films), and musical numbers. Twenty-three bubblegum tracks were recorded for the show, one of them contributed by Barry White. Decca released twelve of them on the 1968 album We’re the Banana Splits, whose theme “The Tra-La-La Song” entered the Billboard Top 100; Kellogg’s simultaneously offered an eight-song double EP obtainable only with two cereal box tops and fifty cents.
During the 1968–1969 season the program captured an unprecedented 65 percent share of the Saturday-morning audience. The following year, however, new episodes were produced without altering sets or backgrounds, leading viewers to dismiss them as repeats; viewership collapsed, and NBC canceled the series in 1970. Largely dormant through the 1970s, the property reemerged in the 1980s when the Dickies recorded a punk version of “The Tra-La-La Song” and R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe cited the Banana Splits as a greater formative influence than the Beatles. The 1990s brought wider rediscovery: Liz Phair contributed her own reading of the theme to a compilation of Saturday-morning songs, while Cartoon Network placed the original episodes into regular rotation for fresh audiences.
Joseph Barbera, the Hanna-Barbera partner responsible for the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear, and Scooby Doo, originated the concept. In 1967, Lee Rich of Chicago’s Leo Burnett Agency, acting on behalf of Kellogg’s in Battle Creek, Michigan, invited Barbera to develop a Kellogg’s-sponsored vehicle. Rich envisioned a conventional hour-long Saturday-morning series; Barbera proposed replacing animation with actors in outsized puppet-style costumes. When Barbera later presented the completed plan to Burnett personnel, Kellogg’s executives, and NBC programming chief Grant Tinker—who would later lead the network—he reinforced the pitch by introducing a performer inside a Yogi Bear suit, securing immediate approval.
The resulting format echoed the Monkees at one further remove. Its tone of high-spirited slapstick derived from the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, while its saturated visual style recalled the cover imagery of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The four costumed characters formed a pop quartet—rhythm guitarist Drooper the lion, lead guitarist Fleegle the dog, keyboardist Snorky the elephant, and drummer Bingo the monkey—and inhabited a single mod apartment in the manner of the Monkees and the Beatles in Help! Each episode interwove comedy sketches, animated segments, the live-action serial Danger Island directed by Richard Donner (later of the Superman and Lethal Weapon films), and musical numbers. Twenty-three bubblegum tracks were recorded for the show, one of them contributed by Barry White. Decca released twelve of them on the 1968 album We’re the Banana Splits, whose theme “The Tra-La-La Song” entered the Billboard Top 100; Kellogg’s simultaneously offered an eight-song double EP obtainable only with two cereal box tops and fifty cents.
During the 1968–1969 season the program captured an unprecedented 65 percent share of the Saturday-morning audience. The following year, however, new episodes were produced without altering sets or backgrounds, leading viewers to dismiss them as repeats; viewership collapsed, and NBC canceled the series in 1970. Largely dormant through the 1970s, the property reemerged in the 1980s when the Dickies recorded a punk version of “The Tra-La-La Song” and R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe cited the Banana Splits as a greater formative influence than the Beatles. The 1990s brought wider rediscovery: Liz Phair contributed her own reading of the theme to a compilation of Saturday-morning songs, while Cartoon Network placed the original episodes into regular rotation for fresh audiences.
Albums
Singles
