Water Monke / Searching For The Sea Banana
Submission 39,301
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About
Water Monke / Searching For The Sea Banana refers to a video of a CGI monkey swimming underwater through a school of fish, which originates from a 2003 advertisement for Donkey Kong Country on the Gameboy Advance. The video, as well as a screenshot from it, became the subject of memes in mid-2020 on subreddits like /r/ape, YouTube, and Reddit.
Origin
Sometime prior to the June 9th, 2003 release date of Donkey Kong Country on the Gameboy Advance, an advertisement for the game began airing on TV featuring a CGI ape swimming underwater, followed by a voiceover saying, "Only in Donkey Kong Country." (Shown below.)
On July 25th, 2020, iFunny user MrReaperX09[1] posted an image macro featuring a screenshot of the swimming monkey and the bottom text, "SEARCHING FOR The sea banana" (shown below). It is one of the earliest known appearances of the meme on the web.
Spread
The image was reposted to /r/okbuddyretard[2] by obafu on July 31st, 2020, garnering over 630 upvotes in just under 3 months. On the same day, it was reuploaded to Instagram by clippy_is_epic[3] and itwiistyy.×.[4] On August 5th, Redditor long-pee-pee uploaded a meme featuring the image of the monkey next to the baby from the cover of Nirvana's album "Nevermind" to /r/ape,[5] garnering over 400 upvotes in 2 months (shown below, left). This is one of the first posts to specifically refer to the monkey as "water monke." On August 17th, Redditor Jimbo 4699 uploaded a meme using Water Monke, garnering over 410 upvotes in just over 2 months (shown below, right).
The meme continued to circulate around Reddit, with video edits popping up on YouTube as well. On August 12th, YouTuber Soulty uploaded a Sanctuary Guardian variation of the meme, garnering over 17 thousand views in just over 2 months (shown below, left). On August 16th, a video of the water monke swimming set to the Super Mario 64 song "Dire, Dire Docks"[6] was uploaded by AI, garnering over 384 thousand views in a comparable length of time (shown below, right).
On September 10th, Redditor santa-clawz uploaded a video edit of the Water Monke video to /r/Memes_Of_The_Dank, garnering over 12 thousand upvotes in just over a month.[7]
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1] iFunny – SEARCHING FOR The sea banana
[2] Reddit – Sea moment
[3] Instagram – Sea banana
[5] Reddit – Water monke
[6] YouTube – Dire, Dire Docks
[7] Reddit – Water monke
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