I enjoyed to be a boy (had I seen the Banana Splits before)

Today I saw and heard The Banana Splits for the first time and now I feel officially betrayed of my childhood!

O.K. I have seen pictures of four costumed characters in small buggy-cars but I have never seen part of the show, which originally aired from 1968 to 1970 in the USA.

I guess that North American readers of this blog will see this as just another nostalgia post, but since I never saw this Hanna-Barbera production, I felt like I had opened a door to another dimension.

Who said that M-TV spoilt us with split-second cuts and non-sequitor-editing? This show is so frantic and fast-paced like nothing you would have expected to be shown fourty years ago in a children´s program.

I mean, I felt drugged out of my mind just watching a few minutes of it! It´s a bit like watching the Marx Brothers on LSD, in colour, while flying through an amusement park.

Back then some critics and politicians in Germany saw the end of western civilisation in programmes like Sesame Street (they predicted that "normal" kids would be corrupted by the "glorification" of the "ghetto-life")! Of course I love Sesame Street and they had their fair share of "tripping" too, but compared with the Splits, the Henson troupe came across like a bunch of nuns on a sunday.

So, as a novice I picked up the wonderfully shoegazing anthem "I enjoy to be a boy (in love with you), which was apparantly available as a flexi-disc in Kellogs Cornflakes only, and some other stuff which slipped my burned out mind.






If some of you have seen it back in the day, please share your memories.
I am especially interested how it was received by the target audience (whoever that was: tripping teenagers or actual kids?) did it cause a fuzz with the parents? Why is not available on DVD?