Ah, Saturday morning TV in the 1960’s. A sublime mixture of awful-to-pretty good cartoons. During the Summer of Love, 1967, Marvel Comics featured this centerfold ad for ABC-TV’s “America’s Best TV Comics”. The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man were being introduced, having not been a part of the syndicated Marvel Super Heroes cartoon series from the year before.
The Beatles first appeared as cartoon characters on US TV in 1965. I don’t know exactly how Brian Epstein cut the deal. It’s explained in a book called Beatletoons, by Mitchell Axelrod, that I have on order. I have a fondness for the cheaply-produced Beatles cartoons, but it’s been said that John Lennon, persistent curmudgeon that he was, disliked them. This photo of Lennon contemplating some layout drawings seems to back that up.
The third season of the show would be the last to include some new material. The video player has a healthy helping of ‘Beatoons’ from the second and third seasons. Use the scroll bar to see the playlist.
Two of the titles — Eleanor Rigby and Nowhere Man — were later animated again, with strikingly different interpretations, for Yellow Submarine. It’s hard to believe that some of the people who worked on the Saturday morning cartoons were also involved with Yellow Submarine, but you’ll find some fab bits of surreal creativity in there.
By 1967 the Beatles looked nothing like they had in 1964-65, yet their character designs didn’t change. The producer of the series, Al Brodax, more than made up for that with Yellow Submarine.
One of the animators was Ron Campbell, who sells new renderings of Beatles cartoons. In this video clip, Campbell is interviewed by Joe Johnson, who hosts the Beatles Brunch radio show.
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The ‘Yellow Submarine’ DVD is out of print. There are used copies on Amazon Marketplace.
I played all the cartoons for Molly, and hands down, she much preferred “Yellow Submarine,” and even cried at the end of “Nowhere Man.” She felt sorry for the litte guy, like Ringo did (Ringo is her fave Beatle, by the way). Now she wants me to buy it!
Actually, I’d used the James Blond joke myself, when the blog was only a few months old.
http://www.dograt.com/2006/12/29/blond-james-blond/
Yeah, the good old “Beatles” cartoons. The voices were all wrong; that alwasy bugged me, but who could resist? Plus, that guy should have been playing a trombone, not a trumpet, even though one was being played along with it in the background. Never mind. “James BLOND, HA!” Of course, John fancied himself a good artist, and that may have been the source of some of his disdain for the cartoon. I’m pretty sure he DID like “Yellow Submarine.”
So cute the Beatle’s cartoons!!