The Beatles (1965 animated series)

The Beatles
You should probably stick with listening to the British band instead of watching this American show!
Genre: Comedy Animation Running Time: 18 minutes Country: United States United Kingdom Australia Canada Release Date: 25 September 1965 – 21 October 1967 Network(s): ABC (U.S.) ABC (Australia) ITV (UK) Created by: Al Brodax Sylban Buck Distributed by: King Features Productions Starring: Paul Frees Lance Percival Julie Bennett Carol Corbett Seasons: 4 Episodes: 39)

The Beatles is an American-British-Australian-Canadian animated television show created by Sylban Buck and Al Brodax, based on the English rock band of the same name. It ran from 1965 to 1969; The series was a historical milestone as the first weekly television series to feature animated versions of real, living people.

Plot

Every episode has a name of their songs and based on their lyrics. Each episode places The Beatles in all sorts of madcap situations, always running from fan-crazed girls, encountering local swindlers, goofy lovestick animals, or fleeing from ghosts, witches and vampires.

Bad Qualities

1. Low-budget animation; the animation in many episodes looks flat, papercut, bland, and sometimes off-putting. Although a lot of 60s cartoons suffer this same “quirk”, but at least most of them look more professional. This would be at its worst in Season One, though the characters did improve in later seasons.
   • Sometimes the character designs are off-model.
   • Sometimes the songs are sung by the wrong character, such as in " Roll Over Beethoven ", when the song is sung by John rather than George despite the vocals being those of the latter.
   • In season 3, the character designs are outdated as the Beatles had all grown facial hair in real life. To be fair, their current appearances were reflected in the Season 3 intro, which could imply this was a budget problem.
2. John, Paul, and George are unlikable characters.
3. Ringo is the butt monkey of the series most of the time, though other characters do occasionally get misfortune too.
4. On that topic, John, Paul, and George try to kill Ringo as a lesson in one episode.
5. It misunderstood the source material of the original band, since they were British and the versions in this cartoon have American accents despite originating from the United Kingdom, and many of the songs have been Americanised to sound more appealing to Americans at the time despite the band already being popular in the United States to begin with and having several number 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, so there was zero reasoning behind this decision to Americanise their music and make it more appealing to people from North America since even with their britishness, they're still popular in America to this day and even their American fans hate this cartoon for various reasons, so it failed to appeal to the market it was aiming for at the time.
6. Half of the episodes are just them singing with some plot on the side, arguably the worst offenders are episodes on longer songs like Strawberry Fields Forever, arguably glorified music videos, especially from the 5-minute length.
7. When one of them is in trouble or on the edge of death, they just sing, which makes it mean-spirited.
8. Until seasons 2 and 3, the singing sequences are recycled; something that makes the entire episodes annoying.
9. The Beatles aren't voiced by themselves, that's because The Beatles band is supposed to be British.
10. There is abundance of racial humour in almost every episode of the series in which didn't age well. " Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby " is the worst offender by far, where the Japanese girls reflect almost every racist Asian stereotype in the book.
11. It was only made to cash-in onto the band's success and nothing more, since The Beatles were the most popular music act of all time (and still are to this very day) at the the time, and since King Features thought that their success would be beneficial for a TV Show, they decided to create a cheap TV series with none of the band members involved and decided to tone-down the British charm of the band and make many of the songs more American to appeal to an American audience despite The Beatles being extremely popular in America to begin with which made this change pointless, thus why this cartoon even exists to begin with and why it was hated by the band itself when it first aired.
12. It ignored a good majority of the band's history due to how short-lived the show was and the extremely low budget, since The Beatles had one of the most interesting histories for any band out there and most of it was either good or bad depending on how it was in real-life or how the band explained it according to several interviews. An example would be the already aforementioned beards they had grown or how they had been getting influenced by Indian culture (The episode " All My Loving ", despite being a later episode of the series and taking place in India, does not touch on this).
13. A few Beatles songs aren't featured in this cartoon despite most of them appearing in the show, likely due to budget problems, which upset many fans of the band at the time and resulted in the cartoon feeling like a soulless cash-in that King Features made just to prompt The Beatles to cartoon fans, which was rendered irrelevant since The Yellow Submarine movie came out a year after the cartoon ended and was well-received and is considered to be a milestone in animation and is beloved by many cartoon fans alike unlike this travesty, so it failed at being an actual Beatles cartoon at that.
14. Some of the songs used are arguably inappropriate for a kids show, but couldn’t be replaced due to the shoestring budget.
    • The song Got To Get You Into My Life is fairly obviously about weed.
    • The song She’s A Woman also contains the lyrics “ Turn me on when I get lonely “ , which is another reference to weed. To be fair, the singalong was replaced with “ I Feel Fine “.

Good Qualities

1. Some episodes are well animated, especially in later seasons.
   • The singalong sequences in later seasons are creative in nature, almost representing Yellow Submarine, a later Beatles animated project.
2. Despite being the Butt-Monkey of the band, Ringo is much more likeable then John, Paul and George.
3. The humour and gags are creative and clever.
4. It actually has The Beatles' music, with their original vocal tracks intact.
5. The voice acting, while not realistically British, is mostly good.
6. It's one of those "so bad it's good" shows.
7. Some Beatles fans can find it enjoyable.
8. It gave rise to other cartoons based on bands, such as The Osmonds, The Jackson 5, New Kids on the Block and Puffy AmiYumi.

Trivia

• The show has never been released on VHS or DVD due to music rights issues. Episodes were available on YouTube but were taken down due to copyright infringement, And many users who uploaded the show were suspended from YouTube for copyright infringement on the music sequences, though songs of the current edition of the Red and Blue albums are generally allowed on the site.
• Originally, the Beatles disliked the cartoon; however, as time went on they grew to like it. In 1972, Lennon commented, "I still get a blast out of watching the Beatles cartoons on TV." In 1999, Harrison said, "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."

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