Donkey Kong's Jungle Vine: Banjo-Tooie Screenshot Analysis

Screenshot Analysis

Right, well, there are only but a few screenshots to Rare's next surefire hit, Banjo-Tooie, but these little gems already reveal much about the game. So, let's have a look, shall we?

So what if it looks like a leaf? Shut up.

Probably one of the best of the shots, the T-Rex spell, has a little something right next to the rex's foot. It is rather ambiguous, but our best guess is that it's a golden feather, used for invincibility in the duo's previous outing. It could also be anything from a banana to a yellow caterpillar. If it is indeed one of these items, it would confirm that Banjo and Kazooie grow MASSIVE when turned into the T-Rex, instead of their average size. Just imagine how big the level would have to be for that to happen! It boggles the mind!

There is one picture of Banjo and Kazooie walking up a wall, with plunger suction cups attached to the cynical bird's feet. This does its job to draw your attention away from the background, where an odd baddie lurks. In this picture zoomed 600%, you can get a fairly good look at what seems to be a one-eyed alien creature. Once again, we're probably a tad off, but it's the most likely thing we could deduce from this picture.

Kazooie bends seductively for a backpack catalogue.

This shot shows Banjo and Kazooie hanging on a ledge with an Easter Island statue and a nice, large temple. However, upon closer inspection, you'll see a lake behind the temple. Could this possibly be an entrance to another level? Probably not. But the lake is concealed very well in this shot, so it likely serves some difinitive purpose.

The 'Toxic Tower' sludge has come a long way.

This shot features Banjo riding in his own backpack. We have no idea how that happened, but that's not what interests us. In the background of the scene, there is a wall with the writing "Toxic Waste". Below it are the words "Oil" and "Water". Under them are brown and blue squares respectfully, as you can plainly see. Could these be used for some water mixing minigame or other such fun? I sure hope so. Dare I say.....perhaps a Banjo-Threely secret? No, wait, that one hasn't been confirmed. Nevermind.

Windows added for beak bomb target practice.

As this picture from the fabled Lava World shows, Mumbo has gotten a new design to his respectful place of residence. He now has windows, so don't expect Jiggies or Jinjos to show up in the empty sockets. His door also looks quite different, and the overall hut is much cooler. Perhaps there is a different design for each level, but if not, I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say that this skull rules.

Class Rodentia takes some serious abuse.

Here we see two 100% cotton screenshots thrown into the wash and jammed together. They each feature a rat-type creature with a shovel on his hand. There are two possible actions happeneing by the looks of these pictures. The first is that the playable character in the first shot is the gold statue and Mumbo is attacking the rat in the next. The other scenario is that the rat is actually a transformation, making the gold statue the baddie and Mumbo actually performing the transformation. Huzzah for ambiguity!

Salivous showers are a great way to start the day.

This shot is odd indeed The main feature, of course, is the giant sauropod drooling on Banjo. But if you look closer at the bear himself, something seems wrong with his body. The upper half of his torso is fine....but where are his legs? It almost seems as if he is growing tail in place of his legs. Maybe he is on his knees, but that still doesn't explain the greenish growth. Perhaps you can get caught halfway between species! This would be an incredible Alien Ressurection-esque way to combine attributes.

As stated elsewhere on the site, it is possible that Banjo-Tooie deals with time travel. Clues include the dinosaurs, the rapant lava, Roman ruins, the Easter Island stone heads, the fossils, temples, and finally this charming electric thing. Perhaps it is merely a floating electronic enemy guard dog of some sort....or perhaps it has a more profound use. Perhaps this electric doo-dad is actually a time machine which just transported Mumbo to his next destination. Perhaps not. But perhaps yes. And perhaps I should shut my face.

Getting a taste of fame with Mr. Pants in JFG, Loveday tries to insert his own image into B-T.

Well, this is one of the more mysterious screenshots. It was rumored to be in a UK magazine as part of a naming contest. The reported description was that of a pig with a Game Boy Camera who takes pictures of fish. If this is true, that means that the transfer pak could be used somehow in conjunction with the camera (similar to Perfect Dark's removed face-mapping feature). Also, if you'll look at the surroundings of the creature, he seems to be underwater. Divers have used cages to prevent shark attacks. There is a shark in Banjo-Kazooie, and there also is a "Sharkfood Island" which must be raised to get one of the B-K / B-T secrets. Could this pig fellow send you on a mission to get pictures, then raise the island?

img src="foxmine.jpg" alt="The old 'Fraggle Rock' guy desperately tries to find work." align="left"> This guy is obviously a fox. He also appears to be an old mine prospector, consarnit! This theory is even further supported by the fact that there is a picture of Banjo in what appears to be a mine. While this handcar lacks the finesse of DK's minecarts, it is in a mine nonetheless. The Fox Prospector probably lives somewhere in this big, purple undergroundy place.

''Hey, look at me! Give me needless media attention! Look over here!''

It was rather obvious, but since people complained about it in Letters, I suppose we're obliged to analyze this set of shots. Anyway, it appears that on one shot Old King Coal is intact, and in the other he's missing his left arm. This leads us to the incredibly apparent conclusion that you must disembowl him (and possibly the other bosses) in a King Kut Out-style fashion. Also, the picture on the left is a solo one. Neither Banjo nor Kazooie are in it, which suggests that it's taken from his intro cinema. So, you get to cut up the king. Whee! Eviscerations for all!

In one of the shots, Banjo and Kazooie are hanging off a ledge, with a large hippo-ish creature looming above. Everything in the background is rather dark, so it was hard to notice that the hippo fellow was actually carrying a massive wrench. I can't imagine him helping the duo (or trio, now, with Mumbo) with those large, nasty teeth, so he probably is a drone who walks around clubbing things with the wrench, not unlike the cast of Taxi. And if you look in the bottom of the screen in question, there in fact seems to be another one. So, it's a drone.

Forgetting to pay his gambling dues, Mumbo mysteriously loses all his teeth.

Here we see Mumbo walking about in a nice, quaint town. But right behind him is his hut, in the aforementioned new design. However, unlike the lava one, this isn't red and molten rock-y. It seems that all his huts are more varied than B-K, to show the different levels' effects on bone-shaped rock. Or maybe we're spouting gibberish. You be the judge.

A lot more fun than that 3-hour Discovery Channel thing.

Okay, well, remember that nice, large picture of the feirce T-Rex transformation? Well, here's the same one, only it's a lot smaller and weak. Nintendo has confirmed that the Rex actually grows up through the course of the game. So does that mean that time will actually flow (night to day, etc.)? PERHAPS!!!

The name of some crazy British ballpark.

In this odd shot, Banjo is flying around in a U.F.O.-type object. It's got all kinds of flashy lights. Wheee!!! Anyway, he's flying towards this starry sign which says "Dodgem Dome". This may be a giant mothership of sorts, or even a place to play a sports minigame. AAAHHH!!! I just dunked my face into a pot of boiling water for no apparent reason! Ahem.

This picture of Mumbo lifting a train raises many questions. This is one of them. Mumbo is standing on a pad with his face. If you look closely, you'll see that it's a picture of Mumbo's B-K design, not his new B-T one. These pads will probably let Mumbo Jumbo perform some of his better spells, such as not only lifting trains, but larger objects like the deflated Hindenburg, Oprah at her plumpest, and several slabs of Elephant Seal meat.

Industrious cavemen build trailroad tracks out of sticks: Thousands perish.

Ahh, this one is incredible. We all know the odd picture of Mumbo lifting the train, right? Okay, not so out of the ordinary. But in the picture with the juvinile Rex, there are cave drawings in the background. The ones in the upper-left corner are too dark to really look at. But when they're lit up a bit, you can clearly see that one of these drawings is a train. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think trains were invented at the time people were making cave drawings. This means that the train is more important than we thought. If you've seen Back to the Future 3, you'll know that a train almost identical to the one Mumbo is lifting is turned into a time machine by Doc Brown. Since there is already substantial time travel evidence, could our heroes play the part of Marty McFly, haplessly travelling through time....BY TRAIN?

Well, here we see a lovely snow level. All Banjo games have had snow levels, so it's only right that the traidtion should be carried on to Tooie. Well, no one really cares about snow, as it was quite obvious that there would be a snow world, right? But I can guarantee no one anticiapted a Snowball Transformation! But hey, that's not all! If you look right behind the Banjo snowball, you can see something climbing up the rocks. It appears to be a ladder. If this is a ladder than the normal-sized characters can climb, imagine how huge this snowball must be! Perhaps as you go through the level, more and more snow packs onto the spherical forzen H₂0 thing.

Well, in the picture of Banjo being chased by a two jelly-like creatures, there are a few oddities. First, (not shown here), one of them is menacingly wielding a giant frankfurter. Now, a tad more strange than that, is the fact that the other is holding a four-petalled daisy. No big deal, right? Well, don't be stupid. In the ending sequence to Banjo-Kazooie, Mumbo was drooling over the Posh Spice-esque version of Gruntilda, and offered her the IDENTICAL FLOWER! AAAAAHHH!!! Ahem.

Hailing a cab is very difficult without thumbs... and while flying.

Here, Kazooie is flying over the Dinosaur world without Banjo! Neat. Okay, anyway, if you look at the basic layout of the world, it seems very akin to that of Click Clock Wood. We know that it is very different in its entirety, but this screenshot shows a central area with a walkway around it (CCW's tree), and various pathways around the outskirts of the level. There is even a pond! However, there was no waterfall in the first outing. So... ahh... "reminiscent" is the word we'll use for comparing the levels using this shot. If we said the levels were identical, the Banjo-Tooie team would hunt us down and put our heads on stakes in front of Rare HQ as a warning to others who decide to call their games identical.

Mumbo sneaks a peek at realistically shaded breasts.

This is a picture from the intro movie to the game, when Gruntilda's two sisters, along with Klungo, Klungo, KLUNGOOOO (ahem) rescue her from under the rock. One of them is tall, one's fat and squatty (you can see her partially in this shot), and Grunty herself is skeletonized and near death. While this shot by itself would be a spectacle like no other, we can very faintly see none other than Mumbo Jumbo listening in on the conversation from Banjo's garden. Can't wait to see how this is incorporated into the cinema, eh?

Banjo has flashbacks to his old minesweeper days.

Here we see Banjo and Kazooie flipping somewhere in Mayahem Temple. More interestingly, though, are the tire tracks behind the duo. While we know there is a van spell somewher ein the game, the tracks appear to be too far apart for this. Perhaps we will get to drive something, rather than just turn into it? Maybe there's an enemy who drives around after Bird and Bear. The possibilities are endlessly limited.

This is probably one of the best subjects for the ol' shot analysis that we've gotten so far. This multiplayer shot pitted Banjo and Kazooie against Mumbo..... AND A GREEN BIRD!! We don't know what species it is, but more than likely it will turn out to be something along the lines of "Green Crested Breegull" (Kazooie being a Red Crested Breegull). Also, this bird is smaller than Kazooie. Banjo holds her as a rifle/bayonet, while Mumbo holds it as a handgun. This keeps getting more and more interesting.

Well, it SORT OF looks like an ice key...

Not really anything to analyze, we just thought that we'd reveal what this thing is before everyone went crazy guessing. It's an oil rig. In mere hours after these shots were released, we'd heard people guess that it was an ice key buidling and a giant sewing machine. Well, this massive gadget simply moves up and down, pumping oil from the Earth. Right-o.

''It's the Wall, brother! It's the Wall! Get down here, Wall!''

In this one shot with Cheato, we can see the image of a demon on the wall. This is very similar to the various ghouls and supernatural creatures that marked the walls of Gruntilda's Lair in Banjo-Kazooie. Just a coincidence, something carried over by the Rare team, or somehow a sign of the possible "one large game" theory with the B-K/B-T connection? We shall see.

Let's all play with our jingalings, shant we?

Here we have King Jingaling. Next to King Jingaling is either our old friend Toots, or somebody that looks exactly like him. While the species of Toots has been debated, it's possible that he's a baby Jinjo. Since he's with the king of the Jinjos, that makes sense. However, if it is Toots, where did his master Rubee go? Why did they split apart? Nobody knows but Jesus.

And now, a little something for the ladies...

Not much to analyze here, but just something to point out. As you can see from Targitzan's name, each boss will have a short "humorous" description about themselves underneath their names. This practice was done in Ocarina of Time, and other walks of life as well. The things that make you go hmmmm.