Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 6, 2001, Britney Spears, at the peak of her it-girl pop powers, delivered one of the most electrifying and gabbed-about numbers in MTV Video Music Awards history — one that not only solidified her status as the 2000s’ reigning pop princess, but established her equally sinuous co-star as a member of reptilian royalty.

Showcasing a sultrier, more sophisticated sound on the Neptunes-produced “I’m a Slave 4 U,” Spears strutted onstage at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House with a seven-foot albino Burmese python draped around her dainty shoulders, looking like the ultimate in-control snake-charmer. But that was just a testament to her professionalism at the time — because she was actually deathly terrified of her scaly co-star, according to that evening’s veteran python-wrangler, Mike Hano.

“She was extremely, extremely scared at first. I was very impressed with the way that she was able to just focus and force herself to do what she needed to do,” recalls Hano, a former vice president of the New York Herpetological Society. “She’s from Louisiana, and there are several types of venomous snakes down there and people do get bit sometimes. So, when I first showed up for the first rehearsal day, she was very frightened.”

Spears did have some reason to be concerned. Hano, who didn’t initially realize when he was hired how elaborate the “I’m a Slave 4 U” production would be, explains: “Britney Spears is pretty small — and she was going to be dancing with [the python]. She had to position the snake on her shoulders by herself and dance around, and then she had to hand it off to a third person. … It’s easy to screw up that kind of thing. You know, it gets wrapped around your arm and doesn’t want to let go. It could have been really risky, because that was a live performance. One take.”

Hano calmly notes that Spears’s snake was a “relatively young animal” and not fully developed, and that the Burmese breed is usually “pretty mellow” and “pretty handleable” when raised in captivity. But two years before the 2001 VMAs, it had become illegal to keep Burmese pythons as pets in the New York City area, so he still had to obtain a special permit from the NYC Department of Health in order for one to be used during Spears’s MTV performance.

photo courtesy of MTV/YouTube

“The bad thing is [Burmese pythons can get] tremendous, and most people have no business keeping one, because they get big enough to kill you easily. And it’s not that they mean to kill you; it’s usually a so-called accident, a feeding response, where they think that they’re constricting a prey item,” Hano explains. “Once they’re wrapped around something, they can’t even see what they’re wrapped around. All they know is [the object they’re wrapped around is] warm and it’s struggling — so, the snake keeps squeezing. There was an incident back in the ’90s where a young man, I think about 19 years old, right here in New York City, was killed by his pet Burmese python.”

It’s no wonder that Spears — who was the same age as the above-mentioned unlucky python victim, just 19, when she performed at the 13th annual MTV Video Music Awards — was skittish when it came time to rehearse with the python. So, it was imperative to Hano that he spend some quality one-on-one time with her, to put her at ease. However, in order to do that, he had to get past her entourage.

“They had some person who I guess was supposed to be my ‘handler’ or whatever, my liaison, and they had me sitting in the audience area,” Hano remembers. “So, I’m just waiting until they’re going to need me, and I told this guy several times that I would like to have a few minutes alone with Ms. Spears, so that if she had any questions or concerns, she could speak to me in private. And if she’s going to be holding the snake, she could try it away from everybody watching — just me, her, and the snake. Sometimes with that kind of thing, if [an inexperienced-with-reptiles performer is] a little uncomfortable, they can hold the rear part of the snake’s body while I’m holding the front part of the body, and as they get more comfortable with it, they can gradually move to the point where they can hold the snake on their own. That’s the way that I prefer to do it. Why would you want a hundred people watching you, if you’re scared and you might be a little embarrassed? And I told this guy that a couple of times, ‘Give me a few minutes alone with her, especially if she’s scared.’ I don’t think she had ever handled a snake before.”

Hano was eventually granted his request for private meeting with the pop starlet, although the ensuing encounter was explicably awkward. “They didn’t even let me speak to her before. This is my first time face-to-face with her — and I’m holding this python! And all of a sudden, she’s not ready to do that. I could see that she was uncomfortable. But [the liaison] gave me a few minutes — and it only took just a very few minutes — where she was able to sit with me on the sidelines and realize that it’s not a big deal to hold a snake. So, we did the rehearsal that day, and then it was either later that day or the next day that I got a call from the agent: They wanted to do an additional rehearsal with the snake, just so that she would get very comfortable with it.”

On the second rehearsal day, Spears “said something to me about how she ‘broke out in hives’ everywhere that the snake had touched her during the rehearsal — which is just really not possible,” Hano chuckles. But in the end, she was “very professional, very focused. I remember a couple of times when the director said, ‘OK, everybody take five’ and basically everyone walked offstage, she [stayed onstage] by herself. You could kind of hear her counting: ‘One, two, three, four…’ She kept practicing her moves by herself, without the music playing. You could tell that she was a really hard worker. And she did fine. She did great.”

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Interestingly, there was also a tiger in Spears’s jungle-themed “I’m a Slave 4 U” number — but even though it turns out that that big cat was handled by none other than future Tiger King star Doc Antle, most fans only remember that yellow python. Animal rights activists groups like PETA did condemn Spears’s VMAs performance at the time, but Hano recall the public outrage being more focused on the tiger back then. “And I sort of agree about that,” he notes. “Those animals are not really meant to be around pyrotechnics and loud music. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t be doing that with tigers. But with snakes it’s different, because they can’t see or hear or whatever.”

And so, Spears’s “I’m A Slave 4 U” number became iconic largely because of the leggy pop star’s legless dance partner. It has been referenced in pop culture many times since —Grimes’s “Genesis” music video, Kaley Cuoco’s epic Britney tribute on Lip Sync Battle, Witney Carson’s slithering tango routine on Dancing With the Stars, even a sci-fi/Jungle Book-esque animated short  that MTV commissioned to commemorate the 2001 VMAs’ 20th anniversary. And the golden girl herself has even shared fond memories, retroactively christening her golden co-star “Banana” in a 2012 tweet, and declaring this performance one of her all-time favorites in a 2023 Facebook post, even if she later claimed in her autobiography The Woman in Me that Banana — as the female python will henceforth be known for the remainder of this article — got up in her face and hissed directly at her mid-song.

Sometimes I wonder what this snake is up to these days… Anybody know where it’s at? haha http://t.co/cfKClrGe

— Britney Spears (@britneyspears) August 19, 2012

Hano isn’t sure where that moniker came from, because “Banana” was nameless at the time — “It can’t even hear you saying its name, you know!” he quips — and he certainly didn’t expect this Y2K-era moment to be so epic and enduring. While he was excited to work at the Metropolitan Opera House (because he had sung in a children’s choir there from 1976 to ’78, and had even shared the stage with Luciano Pavarotti at a televised 1977 concert special), he wasn’t well-versed in modern pop music, and wasn’t even aware that Spears was pop’s most mega megastar at the time. It was only when he returned home that evening with Banana, after the VMAs wrapped, that he realized he’d been part of MTV history.

“I actually took the subway on the night of the job — because how are you going to park down there? — so I just had the snake in a cooler,” Hano chuckles. “It was a half-hour later that I came out of the train station and walked into my building, and there’s all these kids hanging out on the front stoop. They all knew me, they knew that I had a bunch of animals, so they saw me coming and said, ‘Hey, did you see that VMAs thing with Britney Spears? She had a snake!’ The whole neighborhood already knew about this thing! And I’m telling them, ‘Yeah, yeah, I just did that job. I got the snake right here on my shoulder, in this cooler.’ … And then I actually took out the snake for them to check out. They could not believe it.”

Hano, who was just the wrangler and not the actual owner of the superstar snake, says that as of 2020, the original Banana was still alive and residing “somewhere in upstate New York,” although at an estimated age of 28, she is now “getting up there” in her golden years. (The average lifespan for a Burmese python is 20 to 25 years, but well-kept domestic pythons can live to be 30 or older.) However, Hano and Banana did collaborate again on Steven Klein fashion shoot for a W magazine September 2007 issue — when he was shocked to see how much larger the python has become. The Burmese python is one of the biggest snake species in the world, and Banana, who’d been about seven feet long and weighed about 25 pounds in 2001, had now more than doubled in length and quadrupled in weight.

photo courtesy of Mike Hano

“The snake had gotten much bigger, but the owner failed to admit it to me. And when I picked up the snake on the way to the job and realized how big it had grown, it was too late to look for another one,” Hano recalls. “Fortunately, at this job the models were completely covered in greasy black body paint — which I had also not been informed of! — so the decision was made to suspend the snake from the pipe structure behind them, instead of draping it on their bodies.”

There have been other changes, much more serious, since Spears’s landmark MTV moment. Just five days after this performance — Sept. 11, 2001 — New York City was a very different place, obviously. And Spears, who racked up 28 VMAs nominations and six wins over the course of her career (including the lifetime-achievement Video Vanguard Award in 2011), will probably never grace the MTV Video Music Awards’ stage again. (Her most recent VMAs performance was amlonst exactly a decade ago, when her comeback appearance was actually hyped by a promo starring a slithering Banana lookalike.) But Hano has fond memories of the VMAs, and he wishes Spears well, still impressed by the talent and work ethic he witnessed during their brief time together.

“As far as her professional career or career in entertainment, I have no thoughts or feelings about that,” states Hano, who hasn’t closely followed the #FreeBritney movement or Spears’s many ups and downs over the past 25 years. “But I’d say that she’s already accomplished an awful lot. I hope she’s able to get through that and enjoy her life. She’s worked hard and she’s had a lot of success, and she deserves to enjoy it. And if she does work again, I hope it’s just because it’s something she wants to do — not for anyone else, and not for money. She should be able to do whatever she wants to do.”

This is an updated story that originally ran on Yahoo. The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards will take place Sept. 27 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.