Bananamanrama

In 1983, Bananaman -- at the time appearing in D. C. Thomson's weekly humour anthology comic Nutty -- made his onscreen debut in a series of animated five-minute shorts on Children's BBC. As explained in this interview with Steve Bright, who co-created the character with artist John Geering and wrote many of the scripts for the comic strip over the years, the animation executives had originally thought they'd make a series about a more iconic character such as Dennis the Menace or Desperate Dan, but during a focus group at the publisher's headquarters they happened to catch sight of the relatively new Bananaman and decided they'd rather focus on him; hence, the Big B became the first DCT character to appear in animation less than four years after his strip debuted.

The shorts were repeated many, many times on the BBC over the years, and in late 1998, during one of the final runs, someone at the Dandy (where the crime-fighting hero had resided since the Nutty ended in 1985) had the bright idea of adapting the TV episodes into comic strips to tie in, beginning with issue #2975, dated the 28th November 1998:

The Harbour of Lost Ships, helpfully labelled as the very first one.

The publisher had gotten a lot of mileage out of Bananaman's status as a TV star over the years, and it's possible someone at the BBC tipped them the wink that these were likely to be the final broadcasts and the adaptations were intended as one last hurrah. (In the event, they would be reprinted circa 2007, tying in with the series' DVD release.)

The House on Hangman's Hill. (You can click the links in these captions to go to the episode on YouTube, if it wasn't clear.)

Although John Geering had drawn original stories for the Bananaman Christmas annuals and Summer Specials that were prompted by the character's onscreen fame, he had no known involvement in the TV series, and it's interesting to see him bring his unique and flamboyant style to the scripts.

Auntie's Back in Town has General Blight and one other significant sequence cut from the adaptation.

Whilst events are often cut or condensed to fit them into two pages, with superfluous characters being removed entirely, the dialogue is taken verbatim from the episodes wherever possible (although changes were prone to occurring in the most edited-down stories, Geering sometimes changes the emphasis of certain lines to fit in better with his versions of the characters, and the strip has some stronger punchlines in some cases).

The Night Patrol: As we'll see, perhaps not the episode that best translates to print.

In spite of the faithfulness to the dialogue, Geering doesn't seem to have always felt the need to follow the character designs for people or, er, spiders who only appeared in the TV series and weren't taken from the strip:

The Web of Evil

The penultimate repeat run of the Bananaman series had begun on the 3rd of November, but frustratingly, since the shorts were only five-minute filler, the Radio Times did not specify which episode was shown. As the adaptations jump from series to series each week, it seems unlikely there was any direct correlation between the repeats and which episodes were featured in the comic; I'd welcome any information on what exactly was shown in '98 and '99, but it doesn't seem a high priority.

Lost Tribe of the Tapiocas

I don't have a complete collection of Dandys from this period, but I'm extremely pleased to say that via a mixture of Comic Vine, YouTube videos, and eBay listings where the uploader has taken a photo of literally exactly the page I need, I have been able to reconstruct the whole picture:

Issue	Episode adapted
#2975 (dated 28/11/98)	3.6 The Harbour of Lost Ships (original TX 11/02/86)
#2976 (dated 05/12/98)	3.2 Night of the Nerks (original TX 14/01/86)
#2977 (dated 12/12/98)	1.1 Bananaman Meets Dr. Gloom (original TX 03/10/83)
#2978 (dated 19/12/98)	2.6 The Night Patrol (original TX 19/12/84)
#2979 (dated 26/12/98)	None
#2980 (dated 02/01/99)	1.10 The Banana Kid (original TX 04/11/83)
#2981 (dated 09/01/99)	1.7 Destination Danger (original TX 24/10/83)
#2982 (dated 16/01/99)	1.3 Ice Station Zero (original TX 10/10/83)
#2983 (dated 23/01/99)	1.12 Tunnel of Terror (original TX 11/11/83)
#2984 (dated 30/01/99)	2.9 Double Trouble (original TX 29/11/84)
#2985 (dated 06/02/99)	1.6 House on Hangman’s Hill (original TX (20/10/83)
#2986 (dated 13/02/99)	1.9 Jaws of Steel (original TX 31/10/83)
#2987 (dated 20/02/99)	1.2 The Big Breakout (original TX 07/10/83)
#2988 (dated 27/02/99)	2.8 A Tank Full of Trouble (original TX 22/11/84)
#2989 (dated 06/03/99)	1.4 The Alien Planet (original TX 14/10/83)
#2990 (dated 13/03/99)	2.10 The Last Banana (original TX 05/12/84)
#2991 (dated 20/03/99)	2.7 Fog of Fear (original TX 15/11/84)
#2992 (dated 27/03/99)	None
#2993 (dated 03/04/99)	2.5 The Mummy’s Curse (original TX 01/11/84)
#2994 (dated 10/04/99)	1.8 Wall of Death (original TX 28/10/83)
#2995 (dated 17/04/99)	None
#2996 (dated (24/04/99)	1.11 Auntie’s Back in Town (original TX 07/11/83)
#2997 (dated 01/05/99)	None
#2998 (dated 08/05/99)	2.4 The Web of Evil (original TX 25/10/84)
#2999 (dated 15/05/99)	2.3 Trouble at the Mill (original TX 18/10/84)
#3000 (dated 22/05/99)	None
#3001 (dated 29/05/99)	2.2 Lost Tribe of the Tapiocas (original TX 11/10/84)
#3002 (dated 05/06/99)	3.1 Disaster at Devil’s Cove (original TX 07/01/86)
#3003 (dated 12/06/99)	3.3 The Snowman Cometh (original TX 21/01/86)
#3004 (dated 19/06/99)	3.4 The Pirate TV Station (original TX 28/01/86)
#3005 (dated 26/06/99)	None (original story ran, not an adaptation)
#3006 (dated 03/07/99)	3.6 Visibility Zero (original TX 18/02/86)
#3007 (dated 10/07/99)	None (original story ran, not an adaptation)

Visibility Zero was the final episode to be adapted.

The following episodes were not adapted (several of them, particularly some of the Series 3 ones, see Bananaman face a series of random events rather than a particularly coherent plot and may have been overlooked for that reason, others probably couldn't be streamlined into two pages, whilst Memory Lane is a clip show):

1.5 The Kidnap Caper

2.1 Mystery at the Old Mine; 2.11 Intergalactic Olympics; 2.12 Memory Lane; 2.13 The Final Orbit

3.5 Battle of the Bridge; 3.8 Battle of the Century; 3.9 The Peril of Ping Pong; 3.10 The Great Air Race; 3.11 Cavern of the Lost; 3.12 Clown Capers; 3.13 Banana Junction; 3.14 The Crown Jewel Caper; 3.15 Operation Total

For a random factoid which won't go anywhere else, the only undrawn Series 1 episode, The Kidnap Caper, adapts the last few panels of an early Nutty strip (issue #40) to use as its punchline; this is the only known moment of the series adapting even part of one of the comics (although there are certainly one or two isolated jokes and moments in the show that are similar to ones in the strip).

Disaster at Devil's Cove: Notable for its rather... simplified conclusion.

The 3007th issue of the Dandy broke the record for the longest-running comic in the world, surpassing the 3006 issues of Comic Cuts published between 1890 and 1953. The Bananaman strip in this issue was an original story (the one in issue #3005 will be explained in a moment); perhaps in part because of the special nature of the issue, but it may also have marked an intention to shift the strip back to original stories as the final repeat run ended at around the same time. That strip was the last regular Bananaman story drawn by Geering to appear in the weekly Dandy; he died on the 20th July.

However, in the 1999 Christmas issue, number #3031, a one-page Bananaman Christmas story appears. This definitely looks like Geering, and I am pretty sure it's new and was completed ahead of time -- a lot of strips tended to break their usual templates at Christmas, so those issues probably required more forward planning.

Beyond that, though, as was often the case when an artist passed away, he had a buffer of strips built up, and new stories by him continued to regularly appear in the Beano and the Dandy for another month or two after his death; Bananaman was not one of them, as he appears to have paused it to work on another project. Resultantly, there is a little more to this story, which is going to have to wait for another day.

* * *

I do have one more strip for you, though. You may remember that last year I looked at the 3000th issue of the Dandy, which saw nearly all the comic's regular stories infected by the Dandy Bug, does not have a Bananaman strip, but does include a warning that the Bug may return in future. I'd suspected this might have been the case, but there was a belated strip where Bananaman met the Bug in issue #3005:

It's curious that Geering's Bug doesn't match up with the design everyone else used: is it possible he'd finished this strip before the Bug's design had been finalised and it had to be pushed back because it didn't match the rest of issue 3000? Or maybe he just missed a memo somewhere?