Category: Music

Saturday Morning Beatles

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. How Brian Epstein cut the deal is explained in a book, now out of print, called Beatletoons, by Mitchell Axelrod.

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. 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.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PRUE BURY!

Happy birthday to Prudence Bury, my all-time favorite Beatles girl. After many years of curiosity and sporatic searching, I got serious about using the Internet to find Prue, and with the help of Lia Pamina I finally did. Prue and I began corresponding last year, and an in-person introduction is tentatively scheduled for this coming September.

Having wondered about Prue since seeing a 10th anniversary screening of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, I had built up a rather idealized image of her in my mind. I wasn’t prepared for how easily she breezed past that ideal, totally knocking me out with her charm, humor, warmth, and sincerity.

Independent of her Beatles connection, Prue Bury is impressive and accomplished, and she is the very definition of a true Class Act. It is my great privilege to know her in a small way.

78s4FR’s on YouTube

One of my favorite YouTube genres is of turntables playing records. It must be the ex-DJ in me. One of the best examples is from a woman in England named Liz, whose channel is called 78s4FR.

http://www.youtube.com/user/78s4FR

Here’s a sample. Stan Freberg’s superb parody of Harry Belafonte’s ‘Banana Boat Song’, followed by the equally great ‘Tele-Vee-Shun’.

Note for younger readers: Because a shellac 78 could hold only a few minutes of sound, record albums used to be exactly that — multiple discs in an album book. Later, vinyl LP’s could hold up to 30 minutes in mono, yet there were still albums. In a 2-disc LP set, side 1 was backed with side 4, and sides 2 and 3 were on the same disc, so they could be played in sequence on a changer. The arm on the changer held the stack steady. When playing a single record, with the arm in the position shown in the video above, most changers repeated the record.