Dancing Banana
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Dancing Banana (a.k.a. Peanut Butter Jelly, or Humpo the Banana) is a popular emoticon. By late 2001, the banana was already being used on several forums as a standard emoticon. Most of these forums would replace the typed text ":banana:" with the graphical image. As the popularity of the banana grew, hundreds of variations of the image had been created for forums or other purposes. These new images typically would have to be either uploaded or linked to, instead of replacing text. There is also a dancing pickle, carrot, apple, onion, taco, broccoli, Sonic the Hedgehog, Yoshi, Mario, Luigi, Megaman, Coach Z, and padlock ("lock this topic"), among many others. The Dancing Banana soon made its way to television shows and began to appear as an icon in American Pop Culture. The dancing banana originally featured in www.funfilesandsmiles.com along with the other 'dancing emotions'
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
"Peanut Butter Jelly Time" was a Flash animation that emerged in the early 2000s and became an Internet phenomenon. Based upon a song of the same name recorded by the Buckwheat Boyz, the best known version of the animation (usually distributed as a Flash clip) shows a heavily pixelated animated Dancing Banana (itself a well-known emoticon) moving back and forth to the song's repetitive chorus. The original version was made by Ryan Gancenia Etrata and Kevin Flynn from a thread on OffTopic.com. In some versions of the animation, the song's lyrics are displayed on screen.
Appearances in popular culture
- In the Family Guy episode "The Courtship of Stewie's Father", Brian attempts to cheer Peter up by performing "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" dressed as the Dancing Banana. This scene partially brought back the popularity of the dancing banana. It is also falsely credited for creating this phenomenon. Brian also wears the banana suit in the Family Guy video game in one section of the story mode.
- In the Ed episode "The Wedding," Jennifer Bradley shows Ed the "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" animation to try to cheer him up.
- TNA professional wrestler Alex Shelley is occasionally represented by crowd chants or crowd signs that read "Peanut Butter Shelley Time" as a play on both his name and the meme.
- In the MMORPG World of Warcraft, one of the Tauren male dance cycles is based on the Dancing Banana
- In one episode of The Proud Family, Penny babysits Dijonay's brothers and sisters. The kids put in a CD and start dancing to "Peanut Butter Jelly Time".
- Hot Topic sells shirts of the banana with the phrase "It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time".
- In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (video game), an unlockable costume for Irwin is a banana suit. Whenever Irwin does his 'Mojo Meltdown' in the banana suit, he assumes a pose mimicking the Dancing Banana's dance.
- On the January 31, 2007 episode of American Idol, contestant Sophat Peou sang the song while wearing a banana suit and doing the dance. He was disqualified less than 10 seconds later.
- In the Machinima video Frequency by Hollywood Halo, when used by humans the new weapon produces the Peanut Butter Jelly Time song, which is lethal to aliens.
- On Nickelodeon, Peanut Butter Jelly Time was used as a short piece of their commercial to encourage children to eat breakfast.
- The Tampa Bay Rays of Major League Baseball feature the theme song and a dancing banana
- The Banana and phrase "It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time" appears in Weezer's music video "Pork and Beans".
