The nostalgia machine has turned the childhoods of people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s into big business, but anyone younger than that has largely been left behind by the Funko Pop! industry for one simple reason: Stuff that kids liked in the ’80s and ’90s is super cool, but older stuff is sometimes weird and lame. Take, for example, the work of Sid and Marty Krofft, who pioneered a style of TV based around putting people in weird animal costumes that died out almost immediately once animation became cheaper and easier. Now, one of those shows is coming back, but since nobody cares about kids TV from the ’60s and ’70s, it’s being turned into a fucked-up horror movie for Syfy.
The lucky characters getting this revival are The Banana Splits, stars of the Banana Splits Adventure Hour, and a press release implies that they’re murderers now. The new horror movie version of The Banana Splits will air on Syfy at some point this year, and it concerns a little boy and his family who attend a taping of the Banana Splits TV show where things “take an unexpected turn” and “the body count quickly rises.” If we had to take a guess, we’d say that it sounds like Syfy took an unrelated pitch and brought in The Banana Splits when it realized that it was cheaper and easier than designing a whole new group of animal characters, but for all we know this will end up being a faithful resurrection of the Banana Splits canon. Surely someone out there is eager to see what Bingo, Fleegle, Snorky, and Drooper are up to.
The Banana Splits horror movie was written by My Super Psycho Sweet 16’s Jed Elinoff and Scott Thomas, and it was directed by Level 16’s Danishka Esterhazy.