The world of Flash animations on the Internet provides interesting meeting-places. My son and I bonded one day over the Badger animation, one I find weirdly compelling. Those badgers are so doughty, and the menace in their world is drawn with a sinister rhythmic whimsy: “Snake!” As way leads on to way, there’s a charming soccer version of the Badger animation. And I’m confident there’s more where they came from, had we but world enough and time.

One badger-morphed animation leads the pack, though: Bananaphone. (Thanks to Larisa for this recommendation.) Gundam banana meets badger, all set to music that’s insanely catchy. Far too many people on this campus could sing along to “Cellular, Modular, Interactive-odular.” Next year it’ll be so 2005, but for now, it’s the Burma Shave of the University set. We can all play in its happy world.

I recommended that happy world to a colleague with young children. Several days later at a department retreat, he reported that the animation was sinister, bloody, and threw several f-bombs around that his kids remarked on. My colleague is a specialist in the avant-garde, so on one level he was mightily intrigued by this radical short film and not terribly worried it had warped his children forever, though he was clearly also puzzled that his mild-mannered Renaissance colleague would recommend such a thing to him to share with his kids.

I was puzzled too, since the Bananaphone I had seen and recommended was nothing like what he described.

A moment on Google solved the mystery: a search turned up the most common Bananaphone, but it also turned up a South-Park-style revision of the animation in which a character suffers spontaneous hemorrhages because he can’t get the song (in its original Raffi incarnation) out of his head. I don’t care too much for this bitter bloody version, myself, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for kids, though it does have its own strange interest.

Here’s the real interest for me, however. No longer will I casually say “oh, just Google on x” when I’m recommending Flash animations. They mutate too quickly. I’ll send a link instead. I’ll link to the Wikipedia, too, since to my delight and wonder I found that it has a Bananaphone entry that explains the origins and derivations of both Bananaphone animations. Astonishing to find the encyclopedia keeping up with the mutations–or perhaps that’s simply the relative perspective of an observer on another, slower train (i.e., me). Ah, red-shift! Ah, humanity!

Links to the fun stuff on Ian’s House Of L33t Pancakes.