In the classic animated Disney film The Jungle Book, Baloo the bear grabs a banana and then pulls down the entire tree so that Mowgli, the human child, can grab a banana for himself. When he opens the peel, he sees that there’s nothing in there.
That doesn’t happen in real life, right? It’s just a cutesy thing they did for the movie?
If you look closely you’ll se that what happens is that the actual banana remains with the bunch when Baloo let’s go of the banana-plant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08NlhjpVFsU
Still not something that would happen in real life though, unless someone cut through the skin at just the right spot, and even then it wouldn’t just fall open in Mowgli’s hand.
Right. The peel is attached too tightly for it to come off so cleanly while leaving the banana intact on the tree. Neither are bananas going to fall off the bunch (as near the end of the scene) unless they are really over-ripe.
Since the question has been answered, a fun trick to do, if you are seriously easily amused, is thread a needle with very fine thread. If you’re careful, you can pierce the banana skin and use the thread to slice the banana internally, a bit like keyhole surgery. If you take care to place the puncture points on the black bits of the skin, they’re not that noticeable. The hilarious result is that when your victim peels his banana it’s already sliced!
Note that I was shown this trick when I was about seven years old, and haven’t used it since. It’s possible that it’s not as awesome as I remember.
When I was a young kid watching cartoons I didn’t believe that banana peels would really cause you to trip for some reason so I laid one out on the kitchen floor and took a step onto it, boy were those cartoons accurate.
That one is definitely true-it’s the one about stepping on the end of the rake and having it pop up and hitting you in the face that’s absolutely guaranteed not true. Go ahead and try it!
The question is why banana peels became such a widespread trope for “things people slip on”, as opposed to various other slippery objects, which are arguably more likely to be lying around where people walk. I read somewhere that banana peels were sometimes used as cheap shoe polish (and surprisingly to me, Google confirms that is still apparently a common practice). This have led to an association in people’s minds between banana peels and shoes.