Video: This Chuck E. Cheese party is going downhill fast. The first trailer is out for The Banana Splits Movie, which takes a classic Hanna-Barbera kids variety show and turns it into, well, Five Nights at Freddy’s. Like, it isn’t even trying to hide it.
Warner Bros. has released the trailer for its strange adaptation of 1968’s The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, turning it into a Five Nights at Freddy’s clone where the robotic stars go haywire during a kid’s birthday party and decide to kill everyone — by which I mean the adults, because I’m pretty sure this movie isn’t going to maim, torture and murder a bunch of kids. Though maybe it will. Who knows.
The Banana Splits Adventure Hour was a live-action variety show starring a ragtag group of giant anthropomorphic animals: Fleagle the Beagle, Drooper the Lion, Snorky the Elephant and Bingo the Gorilla. The characters were designed by Sid and Marty Krofft, the folks behind H.R. Pufnstuf, and it was your standard 1960s children’s fare that looks pretty damn horrifying today.
It seems weird and kind of sad that the mockbuster version of the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie adaptation is coming out before the actual movie, which has been in the works for a while and seems nowhere close to actually getting completed. Five Night’s at Freddy’s creator Scott Cawthon told Polygon in 2018 that he had a script but threw it out because it wasn’t what he wanted to do. So now it’s back to the drawing board.
My question is: Why can’t the kids just push the robots over? Seems as though it’d be hard for them to get back up. It’d change from a schlocky horror flick into 90 minutes of watching robot animals roll around on the floor like turtles. To be honest, I’d watch that. Probably not this though.
The Banana Splits Movie debuts on Syfy in the US later this year, followed by a digital home release.