The Beatles

The Beatles cartoon has become beloved and notorious for its production values: wonderful songs used as a backdrop for cookie-cutter stories and shoddy yet funkylicious animation that fits the time period these shorts were made. I've only ever seen this cartoon through bootlegs; and that's another thing, this cartoon has NEVER seen an official release on home video formats. There aren't even official VHS tapes of the show. You can only get bootlegs on eBay or YouTube if you're lucky. This show is like The Star Wars Holiday Special of hard-to-get television 'gems' that we're still waiting to be released on DVD.

This show has The Beatles, and the real stars of the show are really the songs themselves; it doesn't matter what context they're played in, they're always good tunes to listen to. Now Apple Corps, King Features Syndicate and company, can we PLEASE get an official DVD release of this nugget of television animation history?

I recall only bits and pieces of the show and would love to see it again on TV. It probably is dated but would bring back a lot of memories. I remember the scene where the Beatles were performing in the Roman Coliseum and the beat was causing it to fall apart.

I remember several of this show's episodes because it replayed on Teletoon in Canada (I think, it might've been the Family Channel). Anyways, the cartoons were very Monkey-esque, that is they usually ended up in some sort of a jam or situation, but then they sang a song and everything worked out well. I realize that it's silly to describe the Beatles' cartoons as Monkey-esque, because the Beatles predated the Monkees, however that seems like the most apt way to describe these cartoons. They were NOT very good. They typically invoked rarer songs that really didn't get a lot of airplay (not the hits). For the longest time I understood that the Beatles actually voiced themselves, however this apparently was not the case. They don't really voice themselves in 'Yellow Submarine' either, except in the live-action epilogue. These cartoons seemed very formulaic for the time, and the basic premise was often redone to correspond to the musical group of the time. For example, I recall large similarities between the Beatles cartoons and the Jackson 5 cartoons, however the Jackson 5 typically had a more 'futuristic' viewpoint (they went into space and encountered aliens and stuff like that). I'm also reminded of old Scooby-Doo cartoons, where there were those interminable chase scenes over the dubbing of a musical number. Apparently the Beatles themselves were not overly enamoured with these pieces either. Having said that, I'm sure that now is a good time to get these cartoons out as a DVD collection to span the entire Beatles' media contributions. I'm sure that a lot of people would be all over them purely for the sake of nostalgia, entertainment, and curiosity.

The thing I remember most about this series was the fact that George's speaking voice sounded exactly like Frankenberry's, from the Frankenberry/Count Chocula breakfast cereal commercials that were popular at the time...In other words, nothing even remotely resembling the baritone nasal scouse of the real George Harrison. I also seem to recall a couple of occasions where the animators didn't quite get the lead vocalist correct (in one episode, Paul was singing lead on "No Reply"). In spite of all that, the series still managed to be quite entertaining, and was the first place I had ever heard the songs "From Me To You" and "Paperback Writer." I only owned Beatle albums and not singles, and neither of those songs were on any Beatle LPs at the time.

I couldn't have been more than four or five when this show came out! Many years later (like 25!) "I'll Follow The Sun" came on the radio at work. I mentioned to my friend how whenever I heard this song I could vividly recall how it was featured in one of the episodes of the cartoon, even though I only saw the episode once in my life. She said she saw it as a child as well and clearly remembered the scene, with the sun in one corner and the Beatles in a cluster looking up and following it. And strangely, it was the one and only element either one of us could remember about the series at all. I would love to have the opportunity to see this series again, perhaps on Cartoon Network or TV Land.