Okay, the Weekend Contributor’s Well is once again dry, and I don’t have much time today to mess with this, so I thought I’d put up some Saturday morning cartoons for you all to enjoy. And these aren’t just any Saturday morning cartoons, these are vintage Beatle cartoons I happened upon while sinking down the rabbit hole known as YouTube. Enjoy and have a great Saturday!
“A Hard Days Night”
Here’s the very first Beatles cartoon. This one revolves around the song, “A Hard Days Night.” This aired on September 25, 1965. Two actors did the voices of all four Beatles. Paul Frees did the voices of John and George and Lance Percival voiced the Paul and Ringo characters. Frees also voiced the Boris Badenov character in the Rocky and Bullwinkle series, as well as many other cartoon characters through the years.
“Tomorrow Never Knows”
The first two seasons of the series was pretty much your standard cartoon fare, paired up with a Beatles tune of the week. But in 1966 as The Beatles music started taking new directions, so did the cartoon. This one for “Tomorrow Never Knows” is kind of trippy and I have a feeling the artists and writers were indulging in the same mind-altering substances as the Fab Four. The sing-along portion of this to, “She Said, She Said,” cracks me up! What parent wouldn’t want their young cartoon-watching kiddie singing the words, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”
“Strawberry Fields”
Now the cartoon goes into full-bore psychedelia. Well as full-bore psychedelic as a Saturday morning cartoon can go. The last line of this episode is a little bit of wordplay to the wise as John says: “It’s all in the mind, you know!” Especially if that mind is flying high on a whopping dose of LSD.
“Penny Lane”
By this time The Beatles had grown moustaches and stopped touring and they no longer matched their cartoon counterparts and the original series ended in 1967. The cartoon series was rebroadcast in syndication by MTV in 1986 and 1987. Originally The Beatles weren’t too fond of the series but in an interview in 1972, John Lennon said, “I still get a blast out of watching the Beatles cartoons on TV.” George Harrison said in 1999: “I always kind of liked the cartoons. They were so bad or silly that they were good, if you know what I mean. And I think the passage of time might make them more fun now.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Related post: MBIP Saturday Movie Matinee—Cool Hand Luke.
Ringo, I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah!
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