What cartoon has haunted me for 15 years?

December 27, 2007 10:50 AM

When I was in sixth grade many years ago, I passed out after gym class one day. When I woke up, I had vivid memories of cartoonish bananas dancing around a red pool of blood, chanting "E equals MC squared" over and over.

When I told people about it, they understandably though I was insane, but the scene has stuck with me to this day. I swear it was something I saw in a cartoon prior to that incident.

Can anyone help me find this cartoon?! Here's what little I remember about it:

1. It was likely on TV 13-20 years ago... I don't know if that was the first time it aired.

2. This particular scene had a solid black background.

3. There were many yellow bananas with arms, legs and faces lined up and dancing around, all chanting either various formulas or "E equals MC squared" in unison.

4. It's possible the words they were chanting appeared on the screen in white, scribbled lettering as they said them.

5. There was a puddle or river of red, which the bananas were either dancing along or around

6. The scene was one song long. The rest of the cartoon may have been equally trippy, but I don't remember it.

MetaFilter... please help me exorcise this memory.

posted by csimpkins to media & arts (6 comments total)

Sorry I don't know the answer, but if anyone does, it's this guy.

Straydog on 80scartoons.net

I am constantly amazed by his wealth of knowledge. And he responds fast.
posted by Ruby Doomsday at 11:21 AM on December 27, 2007

It sounds like it would fit in Donald in Mathmagic Land but I haven't seen it in a long time.
posted by drezdn at 11:22 AM on December 27, 2007

Chiming in to say that Donald in Mathmagic Land was my first thought, too.
posted by saucy at 12:16 PM on December 27, 2007

oddly, you didn't say you had any memory of the dancing bananas before the incident. i suspect that there never was a dancing bananas cartoon, instead, you somehow adopted a false memory of something that never happened. this is known as jamais vu "never seen", one of the lesser known sibs of deja vu.
posted by bruce at 12:19 PM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Wow awesome. If you can't find it, you should hire an animator to make this for you. Chat chat!
posted by beerbajay at 1:00 PM on December 27, 2007

Wow... very interesting. I think after all these years, you've helped me figure this out.

I checked out Donald in Mathmagic Land on YouTube. (Part 1 & Part 2 if you're interested)

I remember seeing that when I was younger. It's possible that what I saw when I passed out was something I came up with based on the Mathmagic Land toon. In fact, when I rewatched Part 1, I saw a few things that struck me as very familiar:

1. The general dark, eeriness tone of the whole thing.

2. A pencil with eyes and legs that shows up around 0:24. On seeing this, my recollection of the 'dream' was immediately clarified. I never saw dancing bananas... I saw dancing pencils. I'm guessing that my memory was altered sometime in 2001, when Peanut Butter Jelly Time was popularized.

3. There is a river that shows up around 0:39. It's not blood colored, but there ARE numbers floating down it. In my scene, the formulas being chanted were floating down the river.

4. Around 1:00, a strange geometric creature starts chanting out the digits of pi.

5. And the kicker, at 1:47 a tree pans by the screen that has E=mc2 written on it in white lettering.

This has to be it. Amazing.

THANK YOU!!

As a side note... while poking around for this, I found way more trippy cartoons from back in the day than I remember. I need to go back and watch all this stuff again!
posted by csimpkins at 5:59 PM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]