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Bananaphone is the name of an album released in 1996 and a humorous song by the children's entertainer Raffi, written in 1994. The lyrics describe a combination between a banana and a telephone, using many puns ("It's a phone with appeal!") and nonsense words like "bananular" and "interactive-odular".
Track Listing
- Bananaphone
- Shake A Toe
- The World We Love
- Slow Day
- The Changing Garden Of Mr. Bell
- Naturally
- Spring Flowers - Instrumental
- C-A-N-A-D-A
- Michael Row The Boat Ashore
- First Peoples
- Dee Myth - Instrumental
- Cowlit Night
- The Gorilla Song
- Simple Gifts
- Down By The Riverside
- The Shmenge Polka (A tribute to John Candy) - Instrumental
The Flash
The song was popularized as the soundtrack for a Flash animation named osakaphone.swf (http://www.google.com/search?q=osakaphone.swf+filetype%3Aswf), which features a wiggling Gundam in a banana suit being held by a Shift_JIS art rendition of the character Osaka from the manga/anime Azumanga Daioh. This animation first appeared on cookiethievery.com (http://www.cookiethievery.com/). The picture of Osaka, drawn in a style characteristic of 2ch, was from the 4chan forum, introduced by "Shii". The song used in the Flash is sped up from the original by +9 semitones, making it livelier and more humorous than the original.
A later Flash, bananaphone.swf, was made by combining the song from Bananaphone and the visuals from the Flash Badger Badger Badger (with Bananaphone additions); it can be found at lemonizer.com's list of mirrors (http://www.lemonizer.com/banana/). It was created by a user of the General Mayhem forums after the original Flash was posted there.
The Gundam "bananaphone" itself has now appeared elsewhere, although since it has no resemblance to a phone outside of the original Flash this is something of a misnomer.
The song also appeared in a bizarre animation (http://thefriendsociety.com/anim.php?id=bananaphone&w=550&h=400) by Dave Teatro of The Friend Society (http://thefriendsociety.com) involving spontaneous hemorrhages.
The sped up version of the song has been used as an audio gag on the Opie & Anthony Show on XM Satellite Radio starting the week of January 31st, 2005. Anytime a phone is mentioned during the show, one of the hosts plays this song in an effort to get it stuck in their listeners' heads.
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