Peanut Butter Jelly Time
A pixelated banana, dancing. A frantic novelty song, repeating. Together they conquered the early-2000s internet through sheer absurdity, until someone in every room could yell "IT'S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!" and everyone else would groan on cue.
In 2001 the Buckwheat Boyz, a Miami novelty-bass act, released a hyperkinetic track called "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" that might have vanished without a trace. Then, in early 2002, animator Ryan Etrata posted a pixelated dancing-banana GIF to the OffTopic.com forums, someone set it to the song, and the two fused into a single unstoppable object. It spread the way things spread before "meme" was a household word — forums, email chains, AIM away messages, sports jumbotrons — places a dancing banana had no business being but showed up anyway.
By mid-decade it was entrenched enough for television to bow to it: a Family Guy episode that aired November 20, 2005 recreated the whole bit, banana suit and all, and a season-nine episode later brought it back for an encore. The memory that lingers is saturation — a four-year stretch when the joke should have died and simply refused to, and the specific joy (or dread) of hearing that first "It's peanut butter jelly time!" kick up one more time.
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