Welcome back, traveler! If you’re not sure why you’re here, then please check out Part One of Me, You, and Meme Reviews: The Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer.

If you know why you’re here, then you already know what’s coming your way. We’ve looked at the Hutzler Banana Slicer, fawned over the funny reviews, but lamented the lack of quality, informative, and actually helpful reviews.

But just to brush us back up on everything, let’s have a quick review.

SO. A banana slicer, an implement so unnecessary, that humorous reviews have run rampant across its Amazon page. Reviews like this little tickler:

Not bad, eh? It’s darling. But does it tell you if a Hutzler is right for you? Does it tell you if it’s worth the fiver it’ll set you back? Does it come anywhere close to being as effective an endorsement as this concise review?

Here is a sweetheart in a red cowboy hat, telling you that this product made a difference in her life. That’s the kind of review that might actually sway someone who is on the fence about this particular product. At bare minimum, a funny reviewer should know that you don’t always have to play the part of the clown:

What we have here is some funnies, but also some self-awareness. That okay, okay, these reviews are a bit of hogwash, but that they’re fun, and we can all have fun with this, as long as we call a spade a spade.

Now, as pocket jokers, we at Review Party Dot Com know what makes reviews good, bad, and ugly. We know what makes them funny and what makes them fall flat. And with that said, here are the meme and real reviews of the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer, based on actually purchasing and using said product. Per usual, we will start with the fake and move on to the fact.

On the Eastern face of K2 it was a carabiner, keeping our team in tandem for the final leg of our ascent. In the Australian outback, a measuring implement, as we surveyed the metes and bounds of the arid red landscape. In Brazil, at the Festa do Peao de Barretos, it was a substitute belt buckle, providing a fading champ one last ride in the sun.

I’ve seen it be many things in my time – a drying rack for swamp-soaked socks, a spaghetti serving-size separator for starved Italian troops, a ladder for my dear Lilliputian friends – but I have yet to behold each of the Hutzler’s 571 applications. And so my travels continue.

For three months, the Hutzler and I joined a zydeco band, replacing a washboard player who had as fierce a taste for alligator as alligator did for him. I descaled fish and scraped ice from windshields in the Yakutia Region of Siberia for spare rubles and blood sausage. It was only when, having sieved the sands of Kiribati in a fruitless search for Captain Cook’s treasure, my second cousin, once revived, suggested we adjourn to the island settlement of Banana. And there, my eyes were opened.

My trials, travels, and journals of methodology had all led up to this moment; and like a proud father standing before his prized bird, carving knife in hand, I looked at my motley assemblage and impressed upon the Hutzler its final, true use. As I doled out perfectly uniform banana slices to each member of my party, I had but one thought: the Lilliputians are gonna shit!

Five Stars

Longtime listeners, and those with refined taste, might just recognize the style of J. Peterman being echoed in this review. That was the intent anyway. If you missed that, well hopefully you still enjoyed it. And come on, watch some Seinfeld or something!

Now, to the real review; strap in for this one.

The pulley, the lever, the inclined plane. I guess man’s simple machines are too simple for our time, and the remedy to this is a series of wedges, all connected and united in the task of segmenting a banana into upwards of 18 slices. Or, a pointless piece of plastic pretending to outmaneuver a knife in its own game.

If I told you the invention of the Hutzler 571 was tied to Hitler, would you be surprised? It’s true! Company founder Lothar Hutzler fled Germany after the Nazis came to power, establishing Hutzler in the United States in 1938. The war meant that metals were hard to come by, hence Hutzler’s early innovations in plastic kitchen products, including plastic cookie cutters, which is all this banana slicer really is anyway. Hitler! World War II! Banana slicer! Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be! I just told you!

Obviously, I am in the “just use a knife” camp, and in fact, I’m thinking about jumping over to the “use a mandolin” camp, that way you can choose the size of your slices depending on what you need and the mouths you’ll feed. But this is a review of the Hutzler, so let me spare no detail in describing its efficiency and efficacy.

It works. Of course it works. It’s a banana slicer and it makes bananas into sliced bananas.

But do you know what else it does? NOTHING.

Unlike a knife which, aside from cooking, will unlock any number of parcels, paint cans, or plastic packaging, unlike a mandolin, which will slice everything from cucs to zuccs to carrots, the banana slicer is a one trick pony in a kitchen that is built on versatility.

“Think of the children!” you cry! How about you think of the plastic cutlery you brought home with your Wendy’s baked potato and chili. Pop the knife through the cellophane (ooh, see how easy that was for a knife?) and let the kid go to town. Instead of spending time online looking for a solution to your dire unsliced banana problem, sit the kid down for five minutes and have them cut through Play-Doh, or find a video to help you improve your own inept knife skills.

Hitler!

Two Stars (and a bonus star for the yellow twist ties which matched the yellow of the Hutz).

Simple as that! A knife, a mandolin, these are tools with many purposes, many uses. You cannot hold a Hutzler to someone’s throat and steal the still-warm Levi’s 501s off their sorry butts. You just can’t, and that’s why knives win.

Get this thing if you want, but know that you deserve better. Unless you’re making banana pudding for a crowd of 20, don’t do this to yourself. Don’t let it sit in the bottom of a drawer for ten years, forgotten until you finally move. It’s just not needed.