The Banana Splits: Season 1 [DVD] [1968]

At this point in time, the appeal of The Banana Splits and Friends Show (1968), a Saturday morning kids program, hosted by four guys wearing oversized, padded, goofy looking, animal suits, would seem to be limited mostly to those familiar with the forty year old program. This could be why the series has yet to be released on Region 1 DVD. The Banana Splits, told corny jokes, engaged in some silly comedy skits, and performed in some musical video type numbers similar to The Monkees. The rest of their program consisted of a series of cartoons "The Arabian Nights", "The Three Musketeers", and "Micro Ventures", and the serial adventure "Danger Island".For those with some memory of it, watching The Banana Splits could be like taking a trip back to childhood times, when silliness and innocent fun, mixed freely with adventure, excitement, and hints of psychedelia. The show was a semi-structured romp, where you were never quite sure what might happen, but you knew it would be goofy and fun. The musical numbers, which ranged from funk and soul, to pop, and psychedelic rock, reflect an openness to many genres.The Banana Splits, were led by Fleegle, a beagle voiced by Paul Winchell. Drooper was a lion, and Bingo a gorilla. Snorky, an elephant, was the only member who did not speak, but communicated by making honking noises. While all the members wore a red helmet, Fleegle was the only one who did not wear sunglasses.The program originally ran for an hour, but was later repackaged into half hour segments for replay in syndication, which is the format that the program is presented in this release, with 36 episodes from Season One of the program, on 6 discs. An interesting feature available on the menu, is playing only the segments featuring the Banana Splits, and skipping the cartoons.Among the silly skits are those featuring the dancing messenger girls from The Sour Grapes bunch, the goofy Q&A of Dear Drooper, Fleegle conducting his extravagant music making machine, and the Banana Splits riding or racing, in their cool customized dune buggies.The animated features are actually quite good, with The Arabian Knights being kind of an action adventure series with a little magic thrown in. The Three Musketeers is historically based, but more of a straightforward action oriented cartoon, featuring Alexandre Dumas' three musketeers, and D'Artagnan, along with a young boy name Tooly. Only four episodes of Micro Ventures were produced, but it was a pretty cool series which featured a miniaturized family exploring nature.The serial Danger Island is particularly memorable for its strong characters, lively action scenes, and great incidental music. Shot in Mexico, and directed by Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon, The Goonies, Superman, the storyline consists mostly of an almost continuous series of chase scenes, fights, and escapes, as a group looking for the lost city of Tobanya, encounter opposition from pirates, and some very unfriendly natives. The action/comedy features a cast that includes Frank Aletter, Jan-Michael Vincent (Airwolf, The Mechanic), Rockne Tarkington (Black Samson), Kim Kahana, Ronne Troup (My Three Sons), and Victor Eberg. The DVD features the adventure complete adventure broken up into 36 parts.As one who resides in the USA, it was truly a delight to find this "long lost" program at Amazon UK, and revisit it after some 40 years, as the image quality is better than you might expect for a show from 1968. The cost was quite reasonable, and it was a blast viewing the animated features, and the conclusion of Danger Island. I have nothing but good memories about the show, which remains whimsical fun, and a warm nugget from my childhood to be remembered with much fondness, as the Banana Splits theme song occasionally plays in my head.

This product excellent to watch . I remember watching this as child on television.. The banana splits.

Good memories of childhood

Love it takes me back

Great return to childhood. Funny how you forget some items and remember others.Favourites are Arabian Knights 'size of a mouse' and the Three Musketeers (actually four - plus aspiring boy). However Danger Island is instantly fogettable and much of the lunatic antics of the Banana Splits themselves.Indeed my kids (10 and 14) may either be too old now or wary of the BS antics that i struggled to get them to sit long enough to enjoy the Arabian Knights and Three Musketeers - pearls dotted amongst the rest.Perhaps the dated more two dimensional cartoons are also less visually appealing to modern kids weaned on Pixar Studios cartoons. As for myself I am working my way through the collection of discs and over 13 hours of footage... All for one and one for all..................... Great value for money and a good talking point amongst fellow baby boomers

As soon as the theme music came on I was transported back to such happy times. It was wonderful to watch the cartoons (no cold, computorised animation here); The Arabian Knights ("size of an elephant" and Zazzoo the donkey)and the Three Musketeers along with the weird, non-animated Danger Island. The colours are brilliant, the characters are fabulous and wacky and the music is awsome and every child should get to watch it. They don't make shows like this anymore which is a shame. Banana Splits are up there with HR Pufnstuf and a must-see. I'm nearly 50 and I'm happy to have this series on my DVD shelf!! The Banana Splits - Complete Season 1 [DVD]

Fantastic. I watched this over thirty years ago and it was old then.Made from 1968 this manic childrens comedy show can only have been written in a time when LSD was viewed as being an aid to creativity.The banana splits themselves are ageless , the costumes will never be out of fashion because they were never in fashion. The humour ranges from slapstick to self mocking and my son found the same silly jokes as hilarious as I did years ago.A must see is "Danger Island" , a series within the show,with acting so bad and a plot so dire that I found myself rewinding the DVD to remind myself that production values could be so wonderfully woeful. It is so bad it is good.Aload of DVD'S in the one box , this is a great buy and within three to four episodes you will be singing along to the theme tune.

Very 👍 good

Great DVD! Brings back childhood memories. Be aware this is a Region 2 DVD. It will not play on a regular North American DVD or BD player. Picture and sound quality is very good for content that's over 50 years old and made for TV. This set includes 36 half-hour episodes of Banana Splits and Friends, which is the syndicated version of the 1-hour original show. But it's the only version I remember from my much younger days. Each episode includes :- footage of the Banana Splits being their crazy selves, interspersed with a cartoon short (alternating episodes of Arabian Knights and The Three Musketeers, so you get all 18 episodes of each cartoon series),- a segment of The Banana Splits "performing" a groovy pop song around footage shot mostly at Six Flags Over Texas theme park,- a segment of the live action Danger Island adventure series (you get all 36 parts of this somewhat silly cliffhanger series.A few things I learned upon researching and viewing this set was the Danger Island segment was filmed in Acapulco, is one of Jan-Michael Vincent's first screen roles, and the whole thing was directed by Richard Donner (the first Chris Reeve Superman movie and its much-maligned sequel and Lethal Weapoin, among many others). Oh oh Chungo!

I bought this as a present and have watched the episodes with my hubby. Great seeing all the old cartoons, Chungo on the Island, old silly jokes and messing about. Simply great.

Very funny

Ho comprato questa serie in inglese perchè ci tenevo tantissimo.Appena inserito il dvd da subito si sono presentati difetti sul play: il dvd si è fermato. Rimesso in play si sentiva ma non si vedeva. Quindi ho dovuto rimuoverlo e poi reinserirlo per farlo ripartire.Durante la visione poi ho notato un fastidioso difetto di ghosting, probabilmente dovuto alla cattiva conversione (malfatta) da NTSC a PAL.Insomma una delusione completa.Ho rimandato indietro il pacchetto e lo ordinerò direttamente dagli USA.

Wonderful childhood memories! So happy to have found this and yes, we can play it in the USA! I have an external DVD drive with VLC media player (for Windows 11) installed on my laptop. We can watch it with an HDMI cable connected to our smart TV.