Dancing Banana
The Dancing Banana is a popular emoticon originally created by Trym Stene (Tierra), just as a fun animated .gif avatar for a Norwegian discussion forum Norsk FreakForum where it was used as an emoticon for the first time. By late 2001, the banana was already being used on several forums as a standard emoticon. Most of these forums would replace the typed text ":banana:" with the graphical image. As the popularity of the banana grew, hundreds of variations of the image had been created for forums or other purposes. These new images typically would have to be either uploaded or linked to, instead of replacing text. There is also a dancing pickle, muffin, carrot, apple, onion, taco, broccoli, Sonic the Hedgehog, Yoshi, Mario, Luigi, Mega Man, Link, and Coach Z, among many others. The Dancing Banana soon made its way to television shows and began to appear as an icon in pop culture.
Dancing Banana was featured in a Flash Animation, "Peanut Butter Jelly Time", created by Ryan Gancenia Etrata and Kevin Flynn posted onto the Offtopic.com forums in early 2002. On March 21, 2002, the Flash animation was posted on Newgrounds.com where the clip became wildly popular spawning a number of remakes, and became an Internet phenomenon. Based upon a song of the same name recorded by DJ Chipman of the Buckwheat Boyz, the best known version of the animation (usually distributed as a Flash clip) shows a highly pixelated animated Dancing Banana moving back and forth to the song's repetitive chorus. In some versions of the animation, the song's lyrics are displayed on screen.
- Ascended Meme: It was featured on Family Guy, leaving the internet for the TV for the first time.
- Fruit of the Loon: More like Loony Fruit
- Fundamentally Funny Fruit
- Rule of Funny: It's a Banana with arms and legs dancing away to the theme of Peanut Butter Jelly Time.