Trivia / Super Monkey Ball

• Acclaimed Flop: Banana Splitz is fondly remembered by its fans as the series first attempt at Revisiting the Roots by attempting to recapture the magic of the first Super Monkey Ball, and is considered one of the best entries in the franchise for this reason. However, due to being a Vita game, it sold poorly, causing many fans to consider it one of the most underrated games in the franchise.
• Acting for Two: Banana Mania has four of the six main monkeys—AiAi, MeeMee, Baby, and YanYan— be voiced by Noriko Hidaka. GonGon and Dr. Bad-Boon are voiced by Partick Harlan in the earlier games and Kōichi Yamadera later on.
• Creator Backlash: The people at Traveller's Tales hated working on Super Monkey Ball Adventure, going as far as to say "never ever go back to that game again" when a member of a forum the developers go on suggested he might try it out again.
• Crossdressing Voices: AiAi, a male monkey, is voiced by Kaoru Morota, a woman. Starting in Banana Mania, both he and Baby are voiced by Noriko Hidaka.
• Follow the Leader: Several games tried to copy it, like Neverball, but none were as successful as Super Monkey Ball and Marble Madness.
• Kids' Meal Toy: In Summer 2003, around the time of the release of Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut, McDonald's released a set of six LCD handheld games. While the first five were based on the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, the sixth one was based on Super Monkey Ball.
• No Export for You: Super Monkey Ball Adventure was never released in Japan, presumably due to its negative reception.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Because of licensing issues, Sega had to replace almost all of Banana Blitz's music tracks^note the sole remaining track being Smooth Sherbet's level theme for the game's HD release.
• Sequel Gap: 2024's Banana Rumble is the first original title in the franchise since 2012's Banana Splitz, a gap of twelve years.
• Uncredited Role: The announcer’s voice in the Game Cube title was not credited. For a long time, it was assumed to be Patrick Harlan, who had also voiced GonGon and Dr. Bad-Boon, until 2019, when an investigation by Nick Robinson revealed the announcer to be Tokyo based voice actor Brian Matt.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally Master would have been a selectable difficulty with 100 stages in Monkey Ball, but the finished product has only one Master Stage and every incarnation afterwards has about 10 stages. Additionally, there would have been another difference between the scrapped Master difficulty and the other incarnations as rather than featuring original stages it would have featured many stages from previous difficulties, though if forced to load, it only goes up to stage 50 of it (Advanced Extra 5 or Polar Large).
  • According to some Early advertisements, the notorious Expert 7 of the first game was going to be moved to the master stages.
  • Touch & Roll had a port to the iPod classic planned; however, these plans fell though when developer Other Ocean realized that the hardware did not support perspective correct texture mapping, which completely broke the game's graphics. Luckily, Apple selected the company to be among the first third-party developers for the iPhone, and so they were able to repurpose their work to create one of the first games for the platform.

---