The Dancing Banana is a popular Emoticon. By late 2001, the banana was already being used on several forums as a standard emoticon. Most of these forums would replace the typed text :banana: with the graphical image. As the popularity of the banana grew, hundreds of variations of the image had been created for forums or other purposes. These new images typically would have to be either uploaded or linked to, instead of replacing text.

Most people recognize the image from a Macromedia Flash animation of the banana dancing to the song Peanut Butter Jelly Time by the Buckwheat Boys. This animation, Banana , was created in early 2002 by Ryan Etrata. Etrata has since created other similar animations featuring the banana and/or other dancing foods. His second version of Banana is the most famous and has been placed on many websites, sometimes under the heading of Peanut Butter Jelly Time . Etrata also credits Kevin Flynn as the inspiration of the animations.

Some people believe that this animated image is actually a dancing pencil. Their argument is that the image is actually a video game Sprite (computer graphics) coming from the Sega CD game Wild Woody . Although they have a similar look, they are different characters. Wild Woody is a 16-bit character sporting a graphite top and a rubber bottom. Dancing Banana is a much simpler looking character with a stem on top. The characters are also curved in opposite directions.

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