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

1. Bananaphone
2. Shake A Toe
3. The World We Love
4. Slow Day
5. The Changing Garden Of Mr. Bell
6. Naturally
7. Spring Flowers - Instrumental
8. C-A-N-A-D-A
9. Michael Row The Boat Ashore
10. First Peoples
11. Dee Myth - Instrumental
12. Cowlit Night
13. The Gorilla Song
14. Simple Gifts
15. Down By The Riverside
16. 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, 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. 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. 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 by Dave Teatro of The Friend Society 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 31, 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.

External links

• The Bananaphone Flash Animation
• Bananaphone album by Raffi
• Banana phone lyrics