Did Bob Marley Rip Off the Banana Splits?

"Dateline Paul Tatara" investigates.

I loved watching Saturday morning TV when I was a kid, but there wasn’t much to choose from.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I need to point out that there weren’t 278 channels of televised sewage being pumped into our living rooms back when I was a kid! My family’s Maganvox console picked up no more than three channels, and you could stare at the phone in the kitchen all day long without ever seeing anything but molded plastic

So you had to watch what the TV gave you.

In 1969, when I was six years-old, that meant Saturdays filled with “Scooby-doo,” “Hot Wheels” and “Harlem Globetrotters” cartoons, and a tasty little live-action confection called “The Banana Splits.” For reasons I can’t begin to fathom while watching it now, I was a big “Banana Splits” fan.

The Banana Splits were…um. It’s kind of hard to say precisely what the Banana Splits were.

Let’s see. There was some type of orange monkey (“Bingo”), a dog with his tongue permanently sticking out (“Fleegle”), an elephant with pink polka-dotted ears (“Snorky”), and a lion who habitually grabbed his tail and twirled it in little circles (“Drooper.”) They all walked on two legs and they could all talk, except for Snorky, for reasons that were never explained. They lived in a little clubhouse together, argued a lot, and were dumb as a bag of hammers. They were also a rock band that performed a song during each episode.

Hey! Wait a minute- I know exactly what they were! They were the Monkees, if you were to force the Monkees into plush animal costumes and write even worse jokes for them.

Here’s the first “Banana Splits” episode. Mercifully, it’s only eight minutes long. I don’t expect you to watch the whole thing, but good luck anyway.

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This, as you may have already guessed, is reggae giant Bob Marley. Marley was a brilliant songwriter, vocalist, and musician, and a worthy totem of Black righteousness and spirituality.

So I’m sorry to tell you that he lifted part of the theme song you heard at the beginning of that “Banana Splits” episode and inserted it into his own tune.

Or at least I think he did, and I’m not the only one who feels that way. Listen again to the “The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana),” but this time pay special attention to the “tra-la-la” part.

Okay. Now here’s Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier.” He wrote it in 1978, but it didn’t see the light of day until it was included on his surprisingly solid 1983 posthumous release, “Confrontation.” “Buffalo Soldier” is a terrific song, but for our purposes you need to *skip to the 2:13 mark*.

As the Shangri-Las once said, “Does this sound familiar?”

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Now, I have long felt that Bob Marley’s mystical prophet persona was just a tad bit overstated. This is not to besmirch Marley’s obvious genius or just as obvious commitment to the teachings of Rastafari. But he was a human being, and he functioned in the same world as everybody else.

Marley could intimidate people, he could definitely be sexist, and he liked his money, BMW, and string of beautiful women just as much as anybody else would while professing in interviews to care nothing about such worldly things.

You know, it was Jah Jah all day, every day- “I and I am rich in ways other than money.”

Just like John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Prince, Bono, Bruce Springsteen, and literally every other iconic musician, Marley played a character to some degree.

I’m not trying to be mean here. I only point this out because when the BBC contacted Marley’s estate in 2008 and asked them about the similarities between - and it’s hilarious to even type this - his song “Buffalo Soldiers” and “The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana),” the response was that Marley “was a serious man.” He never would have heard of the Banana Splits, let alone stolen music from them.

Well, you can be as serious as a hand caught in a meat grinder and still manage to look at a television. It’s completely possible that Malcolm X once watched an episode of “My Favorite Martian.” And, even though they were never broadcast in Jamaica, ever-human Bob Marley definitely had the opportunity to see “The Banana Splits!”

Come with me, then, as I examine this thing that’s not worth worrying about, but is still funny as shit. So let’s do it anyway.

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Imagine the kind of heavy music they play when gorgeous blonde yoga instructors go missing on “Dateline NBC.”

These are young Bob Marley’s visa photos. It’s a seldom-referenced fact that Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker, married her American boyfriend in Jamaica, then moved with him to Wilmington, Delaware in 1966. Bob followed her shortly thereafter, and even worked the assembly line and drove a forklift at the Chrysler plant for a few months while he was there.

Soon enough, Marley moved back to Kingston to continue with his music, but he returned to the states later on to visit his mom. One of those visits apparently happened in 1968, because one day in that tumultuous year (cue the heavy music) Bob Marley unexpectedly knocked on the Bronx apartment door of this man…

That would be Jimmy Norman, an R&B singer and songwriter who had written songs for Marley’s labelmate, Johnny Nash. Marley got Norman’s address from Nash, and surprised the musician with a visit when he hit the States.

Norman and Marley jammed for several days in Norman’s apartment, with Norman on piano and Bob on guitar. Norman actually taped some of the songs on reel-to-reel for posterity, or maybe just for the hell of it. Reggae archivist Roger Steffens has heard the tapes. He says the interesting thing about them is they’re popular songs without an ounce of reggae inflection to them. Steffens added that Marley was still finding himself as a performer at the time, and was open to trying out other kinds of music.

A-ha! If Bob’s ears were so open to other kinds of music during that visit to the U.S., “The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana),” would have certainly qualified!

Wikipedia tells me “The Banana Splits” debuted on NBC on September 7, 1968. So here’s my theory:

It’s a humid Saturday morning in the Bronx, 1968. Young Bob Marley, a little bit nervous and unsure of himself, climbs the creaky brownstone stairs, then tentatively knocks on Jimmy Norman’s door. Jimmy swings it open, and he’s not happy. Taken aback, Bob introduces himself, saying he’s friends with Johnny Nash. Jimmy looks the young man up and down, nodding slightly, then says, “Well, okay. Come on in. We can jam a little. Maybe you’ll learn somethin’. But you’re gonna have to be quiet for a few minutes. ‘The Banana Splits’ are comin’ on, and I’ve been waitin’ to watch that shit all week.”