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About Bananas

· ID: AboutBan1935

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This educational film traces bananas from tropical plantation to the American table and connects the fruit to health and athletics. It opens at sea with a ship deck, waves crashing on a rocky shore, and a person climbing a tall palm tree, then a train crossing a high metal trestle bridge into banana-growing country, where people wash large fruit baskets in a stone fountain and oxen and crowds move through a market street. Cultivation is shown through men swinging axes to fell trees, planting root stock, digging with long-handled tools, and irrigation water flowing over concrete channels, followed by harvest scenes of men cutting banana bunches with poles, carrying heavy loads through the grove, and loading fruit onto horses and canal carts. Transportation sequences depict steam locomotives and freight trains hauling the crop and workers carrying bunches across a dock to load a ship whose smokestack pours smoke as it sails across the water. Back home, a laboratory and domestic segment shows a scientist at a bench and a woman peeling a banana, pouring liquid into a bowl, and feeding a boy, with a bunch rotating on a stand and a banana peeling to reveal a waving cartoon character. The film closes with an athletics montage—runners, hurdlers, swimmers, tennis, baseball, basketball, and football players—linking banana nutrition to sport, before ending on a boy eating a banana and title cards reading 'THE END' and 'BANANA LAND.'

Subjects: 1930s athletes axe banana bunch banana plantation bananas basketball cargo ship cartoon character dock workers educational film freight train harvest irrigation laboratory market street nutrition ox cart oxen palm tree peeling banana runners steam locomotive swimmers trestle bridge tropical