No good idea in television ever goes unimitated. So when, in 1965, ABC launched The Beatles, a cartoon series based on the most famous musical group in the world, it was bound to spawn copies. Thus, a series called The Beagles premiered on CBS in the fall of 1966. It centered around two dogs who got into various wacky adventures and sang songs, much as the animated Beatles did. Although the songs bore a striking resemblance to Beatles tunes, the characters of Stringer and Tubby were not modeled after real Beatles. (Stringer’s speaking voice sounds like Bing Crosby.)
The Beagles was produced by Total Television, the studio best known for Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales, and it had the distinctly cheap look of those two more successful programs. After a year on CBS and a year on ABC (which means that in the fall of 1966, ABC had both The Beatles and The Beagles), the show left network air. Total Television’s shows were anthologies featuring several different cartoon elements. Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, and The Beagles included episodes of The World of Commander McBragg, Klondike Cat, Tooter Turtle, King Leonardo, and Go-Go Gophers. Local stations and Total Television itself remixed the elements in syndication for years thereafter, although I can’t remember seeing The Beagles. It’s speculated online that the Beatles intervened to kill The Beagles, although it’s unclear whether that really happened. Apart from the title and the sound of the songs, the show has nothing to do with the Beatles, really. In any case, it doesn’t matter anymore: The masters of The Beagles have long since been lost. Only a few kinescopes remain; some of the surviving video is at YouTube.
(As for The Beatles, it has disappeared into the Apple vaults. Thirty-nine episodes were made, and they aired over four years, first on Saturday and later on Sunday mornings. They were also shown in local syndication, and on MTV in 1986 and 1987. You can find several clips here. A DVD release could happen someday, I suppose, but the Beatles haven’t made their music available via download yet, so they’re not exactly on the cutting edge of new media. In addition, they were not involved in the show’s production and reportedly didn’t like it. Brian Epstein’s dislike of it kept the show off British TV until 1980. The voices sounded nothing like the real Beatles: John and Paul were both done by Paul Frees, the same actor who provided the voice of Boris on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. More than once, left-handed Paul was seen playing his bass right-handed. When creator Al Brodax came to the Beatles with the idea of doing a feature film, Yellow Submarine, they were uninterested until they were persuaded that it would be more ambitious than the TV show. So it’s possible that the surviving Beatles may prefer to keep The Beatles out of sight, despite the likely goldmine the show could represent.)
The identities of the musicians involved in the Beagles are irrevocably lost, even more so than those involved with the Banana Splits, about whom we wrote yesterday. The songwriters, Buck Biggers, Treadwell Covington, Joe Harris, and Chet Stover, were the principals in Total Television; the songs were arranged by Charles Fox, who would go on to score dozens of movies and TV shows. The show’s main theme, “Looking for the Beagles,” has an oddly downcast lyric for a show with such a silly look and feel: “Lookin’ for the Beagles/Not where rich men go/Rich is for the regals/Woe is all the Beagles know.” The gem among their songs, however, is “Thanks to the Man in the Moon,” on which the lead singer nails his John Lennon impression. Any resemblance to “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You” or “This Boy” is probably intentional. Whoever they were, the musicians behind the Beagles managed to channel the sound of the British Invasion and the Beatles themselves into a handful of pop tunes that were far better made than the cartoon series in which they appeared.
“Looking for the Beagles”/The Beagles
“Thanks to the Man in the Moon”/The Beagles
(Buy these on the same CD with the Banana Splits tracks from yesterday here.)
Did the Beagles ever record “Yelp!” ? If not, they should have!
I understand the Beagles made a movie with Sweet Polly Purebred called “A Knight’s Hard Day” where they had to care Sweet Polly’s grandfather “who’s very clean.”