Collect this original 1960s "Chiquita Banana Lady" hand-inked, hand-painted production cel!
This highly stylized animation art is an original, hand-painted production cel from Chiquita Banana commercials which aired in the late 1960s. The “Chiquita Banana Lady” wears a tropical fruit hat of bright red, dripping with succulent exotic fruits. Adorned with stylish dark sunglasses, her stylized garments are iconic geometric design (actually reminiscent of the Jetsons, with layered spherical shapes).
Framed in a classic gold gallery-style frame, with striking black matting, this iconic 1960s artwork is an irreplaceable collector’s item and a 1960s cultural zeitgeist. Framed size measures 15-3/8" in height x 12-3/8" width. The artwork is accompanied by its original Certificate of Authenticity from Classic Moments.
Styled on Carmen Miranda, a Portuguese-born Brazilian samba singer, dancer, Broadway actress and film star who was active from the 1930s onward, the Chiquita Banana Lady theater-only commercial shorts were actually voiced, through song, by Carmen Miranda herself. Nicknamed "The Brazilian Bombshell", Miranda is known for her signature fruit hat outfit that she wore in her American films. As a young woman, she designed hats in a boutique before making her first recordings with composer Josué de Barros in 1929. Miranda's 1930 recording of "Taí (Pra Você Gostar de Mim)", written by Joubert de Carvalho, catapulted her to stardom in Brazil as the foremost interpreter of samba.
In 1939, Broadway producer Lee Shubert offered Miranda an eight-week contract to perform in The Streets of Paris after seeing her at Cassino da Urca in Rio de Janeiro. The following year she made her first Hollywood film, Down Argentine Way with Don Ameche and Betty Grable and her exotic clothing and Lusophone accent became her trademark. That year, she was voted the third-most-popular personality in the United States; she and her group, Bando da Lua, were invited to sing and dance for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1943, Miranda starred in Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, which featured musical numbers with the fruit hats that became her trademark. By 1945, she was the highest-paid woman in the United States.
In 1944, the United Fruit Company (major producer of bananas) created a banana-woman character, Chiquita, whose fruit hat resembled Miranda’s. The “Chiquita Banana Lady” originally appeared in a series of four theater-only commercial shorts; Carmen Miranda sang the song which was the soundtrack for the animated short, designed to educate the American consumer about bananas, a then-still-exotic fruit. With the advent of television commercials, the image of the Chiquita Banana Lady proliferated into the mainstream, along with the Chiquita Banana Lady jingle (“I'm Chiquita Banana and I'm here to say. . .”); and the original animations became highly stylized.
This hand-inked, hand-painted 16 field production cel is a great addition for collectors of animation art, fashion illustration, or 1960s cultural artifacts!