I’m sorry to report that The Banana Splits Adventure Hour is being taken off the release schedule. As I reported a long time ago, the state of the masters for this show are a mess. You can blame me for this decision, but I advised Warner Home Video not to release them in their current condition and there isn’t enough money in the budget to remaster them.
I’ll explain what the rpoblem is, but if technical specs and minutiae bore you, you can skip the next three paragraphs.
After the initial two season run, NBC had all the film elements transferred to 2″ tape, also known as quad tape due to the fact that the broadcast video tape recorders used four rotating heads that crossed the tape vertically. Each of the heads laid down a portion of the picture each time it crossed the tape. This differs from your home VCR, which uses a helical scan system. In quad recording, if the four heads aren’t in perfect alignment, it will create color banding (different colored stripes) through the picture. We didn’t look at every episode, but a random sample found that two of the 18 hours had bad color banding. There’s no way to correct this after the fact. The quad tapes are long gone and all that exists now are 1″ tapes that have these flaws recorded in.
To further complicate this, NBC re-edited the original hours, which now include the Season 2 opening and closing, plus other Season 2 elements mixed in. These are the only hour tapes that exist. There are also 36 half-hours of The Banana Splits and Friends, which are essentially the original hour shows chopped in two… but not exactly. The quality of these is much better than the NBC revised hours, but they would require a lot of research and editing to put them back into the hour configuration. And even then, some of the Banana Splits bits would still be missing or have to be lifted from the inferior hour tapes.
The good news, though, is that there is a complete set of 16mm films that are in the original hour configurations. They also have about 80% of the 35mm film, but it’s all cut into separate elements. Again, all the film transfers and editing required to restore these shows properly is cost prohibitive.
Finally, don’t lose all hope. They need product and at some point in the future when technology improves further, the cost of restoration may come down and they’ll revisit this title.
In the meantime, there’s talk of filling the open slot with The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show. I stress that no decisions have been made, it’s just talk at this point. I also suggested again that they look into the much written about Alice in Wonderland or What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? and the Gene Kelly Jack and the Beanstalk.
None of this really bothers me. I’m allergic to bananas
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