Peanut Butter Jelly Time

~ the obituary ~

Two people made it and almost nobody can name them. Ryan Gancenia Etrata and Kevin Flynn, posting as RalphWiggum and Comrade Flynn, put the animation together in early 2002 and dropped it on the Offtopic forums. On 21 march 2002 it went up on Newgrounds, and from there it stopped belonging to anyone.

The song came first and separately. DJ Chipman, a Miami producer, had recorded Peanut Butter Jelly Time with his crew the Buckwheat Boyz, and it was a regional bass record before it was anything else. The animation is what made it globally recognizable, and the group got very little out of that. There is no evidence anyone ever paid them for the thousands of parodies, and the honest summary is that the internet took a song off a small Miami label and made it a permanent reference without asking.

What was actually in the file: a banana rendered at a resolution that looks like a mistake, two stick arms, a shuffle to the left and a shuffle to the right, on a loop, with the audio embedded in the same document. That is the entire work. It contains no punchline and no reference you need to have gotten, and it does not end. You could not explain it to somebody, which turned out to be a distribution advantage rather than a problem.

On the Turkish boards I was on around then, donanimhaber and frmtr, a signature was a piece of personal real estate and mine held a list of what was in my case, down to whatever graphics card I had talked myself into that year. That was the local currency. The banana belonged to the other signature economy, the English-language boards where the entire point of a signature was to make the page slower and more annoying on purpose. It reached here anyway, because a file that light and that free of meaning does not need a translator or a context, only a connection that can carry a couple hundred kilobytes.

~ the case file ~

~ how it traveled ~

The delivery mechanism was the point. A SWF could be embedded in a page or a post by anyone who could paste a line of HTML, and it would play by itself, forever, with no video site and no codec argument in the way. In 2002 that combination did not exist anywhere else. YouTube was three years away, and the alternative was a twelve megabyte AVI that half your friends could not open.

So it multiplied instead of spreading. People opened the file, changed the banana into something else, and posted their version, which is the Newgrounds habit generally and the reason there is no single canonical copy. It went into forum signatures, into email forwards, onto personal pages, and eventually into the parts of the internet where nobody had any idea what it originally was.

~ the television years ~

On 13 november 2002, eight months after Newgrounds, NBC put it in an episode of Ed. That is remarkably fast for 2002, when American network television treated the web as a place teenagers went rather than a source of material.

The one everyone remembers came on 20 november 2005, in a Family Guy episode called The Courtship of Stewie's Father, where Brian does the dance in a banana suit. Search interest for the thing spiked in december 2005, three and a half years after it was made, which is what happens when television reaches an audience that was never on Newgrounds. Merchandise followed. The banana had become a licensed property that no license covered.

~ the day it died ~

The death here is a choice and worth stating plainly. Adobe ended support for Flash on 31 december 2020, and on 12 january 2021 the player began actively blocking Flash content from running. Every copy of the banana embedded in a forum post going back nineteen years became a blank rectangle on the same afternoon, and there were a very large number of those posts.

Newgrounds kept its archive playable with Ruffle, which is an emulator reading the file rather than the file running, and that is a preservation project rather than a survival. DJ Chipman is still working. Somebody still holds a domain with the name on it. What ended is the specific object: a thing you could drop into a page, that played on its own, that anyone could copy without asking, in a format the whole web agreed to stop supporting on a scheduled date.

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