Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Peanut Butter Jelly Time



This Dancing Banana animated GIF started it’s life as an emoticon (an icon denoting an emotion, like a smiley face ☺) on message boards.

But the Banana made its real leap to internet stardom when Ryan Etrata had a brain wave. He created a flash animation featuring the Banana dancing to an incredibly catchy song called ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ (written by The Buckwheat Boyz). Watch it here.


Fame!
The Dancing Banana soon made its way to television shows and began to appear as an icon in American Pop Culture. In an episode of the TV show, The Family Guy, Brian tries to cheer up Peter by performing "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" dressed as the Dancing Banana. The Banana and phrase ‘It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ also appears in a Weezer music video Pork and Beans.


As the popularity of the Dancing Banana grew, hundreds of variations of the image were created including dancing strawberries, carrots and video game characters. This site features an updated 2006 version of Peanut Butter Jelly Time.

9 comments:

Tamara said...

Your blog has been a real pain - it wouldn't let me open it the past two days.

So glad that's over now ;-)

So, really, where do you get this stuff? And why haven't you covered Vernon Koekemoer yet?!

Kit said...

Sorry about that, not sure what's up with it.

I search the net a lot - much more than I should... that's why these memes fascinate me - you'll see something on one website, and then someone else mentions it on a totally unrelated site.

Vernon is coming soon... Have you seen the new Nando's ad with Chuck in it? I like it, but personally I think it's quite a risk for Nandos - I bet 90% of their Target Market watches that and goes 'huh?' - it's a very small percent of South Africans who surf enough to get the in-jokes.

Anonymous said...

Best...blog...evar!!!1!

Tamara said...

I think Chuck's fairly mainstream these days, after the Isuzu billboard that said, "Chuck drives an Isuzu" and all the publicity.

I think advertisers often forget that Joe Soap isn't as fringe as they are though. Especially you copywriters and designers ;-)

Anonymous said...

Where do you find your subjects? Message boards? Newsgroups?

Kit said...

I surf a lot. Some of these things (like Chuck Norris and Lolcats) will appear in my inbox. Others I'll find on random sites. I surf things like digg and reddit. There's always something interesting. I generally don't visit too many message boards - the memes I discuss normally start on a message board like 4chan and then become more mainstream.


Tamara: Yeah, I guess Chuck is pretty mainstream these days. But I actually think that most advertising people are too keen to do 'fringe' stuff - we're connected to the net all day, but we forget that 93.5% of South Africans don't have access to the Internet.

And then if you take in to account that people like my mom or my boss are online all day but still don't have a clue about Chuck Norris, you start thinking that it's only a few people who get it - it really is an in-joke! And that's what makes that ad so enjoyable for me, because I know my mom will watch it and go 'WTF' (although not in those words, my mom doesn't swear much) but I get it, and appreciate it.

Anonymous said...

I hear what you're saying about *chan. Explaining all those injokes would be a board in itself. (enter ED) But whatever I surf like mad too and you got me with one of your entries (McCain)as well so you can never tell who knows which injoke. I figure that I'll probably learn a thing or two before this blog is done so I'm glad for it.
PS does DO NOT WANT count as lolcats or is it its own meme?

Kit said...

Sorry for the late reply. I got a bit busy... Got to learn to set some time aside for my blog.

Good question... At first I would have guessed that DO NOT WANT is just a submeme of LOLcats - but then I looked it up - it seems it's really a whole meme on it's own. So, that's what I'm going to cover next!

Anonymous said...

PEANUT BUTTER JELLAAAY