The Animated Beatles

By 1964, the Beatles had conquered the media of music, radio, television, film, and literature. Little did they expect they were about to dominate animation.

Al Brodax produced The Beatles Cartoon (1965), which was the first time that likenesses of contemporary personalities were cast as stars in an animated television series. (They beat the Three Stooges by a few weeks.) The premiere scored a 51.9 share, which was hitherto unheard of in daytime TV. Brodax followed up in 1968 with Yellow Submarine, another first: ". . . extremely real and enormously famous people were going to be animated into a feature film." It received rapturous critical notices and audiences flocked to the theaters. Today it is recognized as a classic and an alternative to the Disneyfication that had taken over and stagnated animation.

The Beatles are the most caricatured celebrities of all time, with new fan films coming out daily on YouTube and TikTok. Matthew Hahn, author of The Animated Marx Brothers, The Animated Peter Lorre, and The Animated Universal Classic Monsters, has found hundreds of toons with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, and also "Fifth Beatles" Brian Epstein, George Martin, Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best, and Billy Preston. They have appeared in computer games, music videos, rides, museum exhibits, virtual reality, and AI. All three surviving Beatles did guest shots on The Simpsons (1989), and John made many posthumous cameos. Other projects include Family Guy (1999), The Powerpuff Girls (1998), Robot Chicken (2005), Celebrity Deathmatch (1998), BoJack Horseman (2014), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), Minions (2015), Paul McCartney's Give My Regards to Broad Street (1985), The Beatles Rock Band (2009), unfinished works like the long-gestating remake of Yellow Submarine, and apocryphal ones like the "Lost Beatles Cartoon Episode." Creators and voice actors affiliated with Beatle-toons include Paul Frees, Bob Godfrey, Matt Groening, Dan Castellaneta, Hank Azaria, Seth MacFarlane, Simon Pegg, Seth Green, Jake Kasdan, Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Jason Schwartzman, Robert Zemeckis, and Cary Elwes.