Tra la la, tra la la la, tra la la, tra la la la nope.

There has been a question simmering in the back of my mind for some years now that frankly teeters on the edge of unanswerable. We all have fond memories I'm sure of Saturday morning cartoon that for the most part are more or less unwatchable when you return to them 30 years later, but my burning question is this: why in the name of all that is holy did they schedule such random foreign cartoon shenanigans at 5 o'clock in the morning on Channel 4? Think about it; have you ever watched Ovide Video without having to sneak downstairs in what felt like the dead of night and sit a foot from the TV on super quiet so you didn't wake your folks? You've probably never watched Ovide Video full stop, but it sat in esteemed company in the wee small hours of the weekend mornings. Sharky and George, The Smoggies, Gobots desperately hanging on the coat-tails of the infinitely superior Transformers, Rock Lords hanging on the coat-tails of Gobots (monsters that transformed into... you guessed it: rocks. The toy line was inspired) and for some reason 60s throwbacks like Batman, The Monkees and... The Banana Splits.

I can't say I was a fan of The Banana Splits but I was certainly aware of four dubiously biologically inaccurate anthropomorphic safari animals flapping around stereo-typically day-glo 60s psychedelic sets and slap-sticking for all their furry little butt's worth. You want a decent pub quiz question, just ask someone to name two of them, let alone the whole quartet*. You'd be forgiven for being a little taken aback to see a rebooted movie floating around the hallowed shelves of DVD stores across the country as recently as last year. This is no ordinary reboot though, rest assured. 

My initial reaction was of course a derisory snort at what seemed to be yet another pointless reboot of Some Beloved Thing from Yesteryear. My snort slowly became an intrigued hmmm upon reading the blurb on the back of the DVD to find that this was no ordinary cash grab on a probably lapsed intellectual copyright, no indeed. This was the absolute genius move of taking a kids show from the 60s, planting it firmly in more modern and cynical times and turning into a horror movie. Now I use the term genius fairly loosely here, because they idea was inspired. The execution(s), not so much. 

The premise is about as maniacal as you'd  expect; the Banana Splits are still a thing, a dysfunctional family get tickets to a taping or their randomly obsessed young son's birthday, while the newest network exec cancels the show and the now fully animatronic Splits suffer a glitch in their software upgrade that turns them into murderous rampaging robotic dick-bags, because of course it does. There's family drama injected haphazardly along the way to make it seem like they had more inspiration than having a stoned-off-their-gourds conversation about how terrifying the Banana Splits are if you analyse it for more than a few seconds and wouldn't it be cool if they, like totally became axe-wielding psychopaths. Just like I suspect the writers were, everything here is just a tad half baked.

Horror movies nowadays are for the most part just an exercise in how much claret you can spill in as inventive ways as possible, which is either brilliant or tedious depending on whether or not you escaped adolescence. This movie is no exception, albeit it a failed exercise; you might have thought of a million and one juicy ways to gloriously dispatch the entirely expendable cast in a television studio full of props but we're sort of stuck in no man's land: for every oversized lollipop impossibly jammed down someone's oesophagus there's  a guy who just gets run over. OK, it's by a giant furry elephant in a bright green beach buggy, but still it's a road traffic accident, not a creative, well thought-out and devious murder plot. There are huge inconsistencies in logic as well. Why saw a guy in half and then just leave his girlfriend sort of cowering there as you wander off? Why set fire to a guy's face with an improvised spray can flamethrower but let him live to trot off and warn the others? Shoddy plotting is the answer to both of those erstwhile rhetorical questions , but even within the universe of The Banana Splits it makes little actual sense. Less sense even than the kid's favourite turning against his cybernetic brethren to heroically rescue said urchin in a tight spot, although this does lead to an unintentionally hilarious and terribly shot fight seen between the elephant and I think he's a monkey? Lord only knows, LSD is a helluva drug.

I can't really be too mad at it though, because it was at least entertaining for it's comparatively short run time. It's absolutely chock full of horrible cliches, including but not limited to the mother of the main family turning from meek doormat to ultimate badass when she catches her husband cheating with his assistant, a literal mad scientist, an evil TV exec and a functioning substance abuser masquerading as a jolly presenter. They set things up for a sequel, which if isn't the very definition of hopeless optimism the I have no clue what is and pretty much everyone who deserved it, got what was coming to them. Cynics amongst you (welcome to the club, esteemed brothers and sisters) might make comparisons to the bafflingly popular 5 Nights at Freddy's video game from a few years bakc, whose fan base wouldn't stop rattling on about how absolutely pant-shittingly terrifying it was (which carries about the same weight as the dullards who keep proclaiming whichever tedious Netflix horror movie is so scary they couldn't finish it). I can only imagine that fan fic has already been written and is just waiting for some gullible idiot to part with enough cash to release it on the unsuspecting public as the next on-demand classic.  Ahem. Banana Splits isn't all that bad, but calling it good might be a disservice to the word good; at least the fanbase doesn't make me want to murder my own face wiht an oversized comedy mallet.


*Snorky, Drooper, Fleegle, Bingo. Now you know.