Banana Splits ??? (Still planned for 2007?) (1 Viewer)

[Mark Y]

This is one of those double-edged swords. WB could release a compilation of the edited half-hour cutdowns tomorrow, just as a teaser to see if the show has enough market value to justify doing a release of the full shows. But the trouble is, who wants a "best of" release? I think I understand the corporate mindset behind things like the "Television Favorites" releases of shows like "F-Troop" and "Welcome Back, Kotter," but if someone really is a fan of one of these shows, what are they going to do? Hold out for a complete season/series set. If a Banana Splits "sampler" DVD came out, I'd buy it, just to cast my vote for there still being some demand for the show. But I'd be very disappointed if that's all they released.

I'd like to see "Hocus Pocus Park" released with some Season 2 stuff as extras. That would be cool.

 

[Mark Y]

I'd love to see the stuff come out...particularly the Season 2 material in any form, since other than a few edited and redubbed clips sprinkled into the old syndicated shows, I haven't seen that footage since I was 3 years old. I just wonder how that would all work. There are 18 one-hour shows in Season 1 (without breaks, they are around 48 minutes). Part of those 48 minutes are 10 minutes of Danger Island (split into two five-minute segments in syndication). Usually there's two cartoons (three if there's a "Micro-Venture"). I haven't timed those out, but I remember them seeming like they were a little longer than the typical 7-minute Hanna-Barbera cartoon short. Let's say they're 8 minutes. For the Season 2 material (not counting the songs since we're assuming they didn't do new ones) that would come out to (I'm guesstimating here) maybe 17 minutes of original Banana Splits footage in each of the 13 one-hour Season 2 shows. (Unless there was more old stuff used than what I know.) I think it would come out to much more than an hour for the entire season...the next thing would be, how would it all fit together? (This is all hypothetical, since there are no indications a DVD release is even still being considered.) If it did come to pass, I am imagining it would be like the "Huckleberry Hound" set, where they threw in a bunch of the interstitials as a DVD extra. I believe for the Splits, it's more than "interstitials" we're talking about here...but a similar concept and a similar situation in terms of the condition of the masters.

Bottom line is, I'd really like to see the show get its due on DVD eventually.

 

[Mark Y]

That sounds cool. I saw the characters at personal appearances several times when I was a kid, but this was all after the show was out of production. The majority of the times I saw them, they just had four people in costumes (which really didn't even look all that much like the costumes as seen on the show) dancing around while a tape of their album played. I didn't see them do any other bits, and they didn't speak, they would just gesture to you like the Disney characters.

 

[Scooter]

When I saw them, they were doing lip synched skits interspersed with an occasional song. This was during the height of the shows popularity.

 

[Mark Y]

Not any more!

For what it's worth...I just inadvertently stumbled upon this in the last few days, and it practically fell on me out of the sky...but anyway, we now know the Season 2 material really isn't "lost." WB has it, at least some of it. Good news is it (what I have seen if it) looks like it was filmed yesterday. Kinda bad news is that it's not in the form of the full shows, just individual segments (which is kind of what I figured anyway). Also, add "Goofy Gopher" as another recurring feature on the show which is missing from my list.

 

[Mark Y]

That would have been very cool to see (it sounds much better than when I saw them as a kid). I recently found a newspaper ad for a live performance of the Banana Splits from March 1971...it takes up over a quarter of a page. How odd...this was six months after the show went off the air. (Were the syndicated reruns airing that soon? They didn't show up in Chicago until September 1973.) It's headlined "First time in Cleveland."

 

[Greg Chenoweth]

I'm curious how you came across the second season material. I go by The Blue Hombre on the GAC forum, so you know that I am a kindred spirit on all matters Hanna-Barbera. Does the discovery of the material mean that there might be a DVD set coming out in the future?

 

[Mark Y]

That's you, The Blue Hombre? Cool!

As far as a DVD release of this stuff, I have heard nothing beyond what was being said last year.

But I will say this: all that information that Mr. Kress posted sounded like they had a mess of tape dupes and 16mm and 35mm film to work with. He didn't say the film had been transferred to a video format (which I guess it would have to have been, somewhere down the line). I don't know the technicalities of how they do this stuff...but what it would take to do that project, and do it right, would be for someone who knows the shows backwards and forwards to have access to the material. If it's already been transferred to some kind of video format, that's 75% of the job done. And for the first season, they have 16mm film prints of the complete shows (the original versions which were later syndicated internationally) and they have one-inch video master dupes of another version of the same 18 shows (but different edits of them, prepared for reruns late in the original NBC run). Season 1 would be a piece of cake. I'd even volunteer to do it myself for nothing, just to get the shows preserved properly if nothing else.

I don't really want to say how I stumbled upon the clips. I'd recommend going to a popular site where people post video clips, and type "Banana Splits second season" into a search engine. If you get my drift. I've only been able to see a few of them, and I have no idea how much of the material exists. But who knows, it could all be there. I still believe if I hadn't looked up those airdates and TV Guide writeups for the shows on microfilm a few years back (and then happened upon the scripts) and posted that info on my website, this stuff would still be lying there in obscurity and internet sources would still be saying they only did one season.

In the hypothetical (and seemingly unlikely) event that WB does eventually revisit the idea of doing a DVD release for the show, probably all that could be done with the Season 2 material (like some other folks have suggested) would be to add them as bonus material. That would be fine, but my concern would be if they could get it all into one set and keep the project manageable. Given the reality of the marketplace, this show probably could not sustain more than one DVD set...and I think it would be a big priority (as such things go) to get the Season 2 material out, given that it hasn't been aired since its original network run. (If it means double-sided discs, so be it.)

It would be really cool if the full shows could be unearthed from somewhere, or at least some written record of what segments were in which shows in the second year. That would be something...after all, the original color Season 1 "Flintstones" opening and closing were found, and that had been written off as lost.

If you watch the Season 1 half-hour cutdowns on Boomerang, those were recreated using 35mm material. From what Earl Kress wrote on his blog some time back, he said all the 35mm is in separate segments, not full shows. I'm inclined to think a lot of those segments were raw footage, before the actual original shows were even assembled (as opposed to being cut up later on). I note some of the song segments don't have the chroma-key stuff in the backgrounds and stuff like that. But it's easy to see why they went with that footage...the quality is practically flawless. Too bad no one thought to reassemble the original one-hour shows back in the early 1990s when they did those.

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

Assuming they had a guide map, I don't think reassembling the shows would be that big a deal, the biggest hurdle would be getting everything located and transferred. Assembly can be done in the digital domain.

Although I'm sure there would be a few upset if the shows weren't exactly as aired, I don't think the majority of people interested in this show would be unhappy if the majority were well presented - I certainly wouldn't be able to remember every last detail of a show I watched while that young - but it would still be interesting to revisit the show I enjoyed so much as a child.

 

[Mark Y]

As it now stands, it would be possible to do a great Season 1 set, since every episode from that season exists complete in 16mm. There also is a set of revised one-inch tapes with the Season 2 opening, closing and bumpers substituted. Each one has two Kellogg's billboards with the four main characters (from Season 2), one at the top of the show and another in the middle. There also are periodic commercial bumpers with Goofy Gopher and Banana Vac. All of that could serve as DVD bonus features. It would be great to see them restored from 35mm footage, but I wouldn't complain if they just used the 16mm shows as is.

Well, maybe someday...in the mean time, I am looking forward to "Pebbles And Bamm-Bamm." I enjoyed that as a kid and I recall one of my classmates being called "Schleprock" back in junior high or high school...

I note they're going with a few "bonus cartoons" on that set, which actually aired on "The Flintstone Comedy Hour." I hope that's just a "teaser" for a full release of that show...but here we go again...do the full one-hour "Flintstone Comedy Hours" exist? (I saw a 16mm print of one on ebaY not too long ago.)

 

[Mick Tees]

I would like to see this series come out in 2008....

I'm not too optimistic from what I read about Rhino and the Sid & Marty Krofft venture but wouldn't it be nice if someone like the Australia company could pick it up like they did Season 3 of My Favorite Martian?

 

[Mark Y]

I was just gonna say, 2008 will be the 40th anniversary of the Banana Splits (and not only that, it's also the 50th anniversary of Huckleberry Hound)!

Then I remembered that all this stuff gets handled by WB's "kids" division (even though "kids" will probably have zero interest in it), and they seem to have a "phobia" about mentioning the age of stuff aimed at "kids."

Would be cool, though. (But all indications are that both properties are pretty much dead in the water. Hope I'm wrong about that.)

 

[James_S]

I am hoping your wrong too, no offense.

I was thinking that it had to be close to the 40th anniversary was coming very soon. Well let's hope...