An adorable children’s show is getting rebooted in the most unexpected way possible. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Syfy are teaming up to bring back the characters of The Banana Splits Adventure Hour for a special movie. This one definitely won’t be for the young ones, though. Instead, The Banana Splits film is going to take everything people loved about the program and turn it into a horrifying, bloody movie that’ll give fans of the original countless nightmares.
The trailer for the scary flick dropped today, much to the delight of the Internet, and it starts out innocent enough, as a boy’s family treats him to tickets to the eponymous kids’ show. What should have been a nice birthday treat for the young fan quickly turns into a battle for survival, though. The body count rapidly rises, leaving the protagonists to fight for their lives against sinister characters Bingo, Fleegle, Drooper and Snorky.
The film stars Dani Kind, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, Romeo Carere, Steve Lund and Sara Canning. It’s being directed by Danishka Esterhazy and written by Jed Elinoff and Scott Thomas. Their inspiration for the macabre project obviously comes from the thirty-one episodes of The Banana Splits Adventure Hour that aired between 1968 and 1970. Where those two men came up with the gleefully wicked idea to warp the beloved program into something so treacherous though is anyone’s guess.
This may not be the long-awaited Five Nights at Freddy’s movie that everyone wants, but it’ll certainly do for now. As the video game franchise continues to set the wheels in motion for an eventual feature, it seems likely that others will continue to use the premise of a seemingly innocuous group of children’s characters that like to torture people. It’s certainly an idea that worked for Child’s Play, which is both being rebooted in theaters and in the midst of being developed as a TV series for Syfy.
It remains to be seen if The Banana Splits can become as iconic as those other projects, but it definitely looks like something that folks aren’t going to want to miss. Just don’t expect it to be anything like the source material.
