"The Beatles," now in cartoon form.

 

 In 1965 ABC premiered an exciting new cartoon based on pop culture sensation "The Beatles," and it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.  Each episode of The Beatles featured two stories named after Beatles songs, padded out with additional skits and sing-alongs.  And while the show managed to run for thirty nine episodes, we are only looking at the first one, because I am not emotionally prepared to watch the entire series.

The first story, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," opens with the band rehearsing for a gig in Transylvania.  It's difficult, though, because even in Transylvania the Beatles can't go anywhere without running into hordes of adoring fans.  Ringo has a bright idea: they can rehearse in the spooky abandoned castle just outside of town!  They do, but the castle isn't actually abandoned, it's home to a large selection of monsters, including a ghost, an executioner, a witch, the Wolfman, Dracula, and Frankenstein's Monster.  (The Monster does at least attempt a Boris Karloff impression, though it sounds more like Bobby Pickett.) 

And the monsters chase the Beatles through the castle in a sequence which I would swear was lifted from Scooby-Doo, except that the first episode of "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" didn't premiere until 1969.

Finally the monsters reveal that they actually like the music, so the Beatles perform "I Want to Hold Your Hand" for them and then turn green and collapse.  Did they die?  Probably not, because this is just the first episode, but it sort of seems like that. 

The second story takes place on a cruise ship.  The Beatles try to escape their legion of adoring fans, and wind up stealing a yellow submarine and diving under the sea to an octopus's garden in the shade, where they meet an overly affectionate lady octopus.  To escape they perform "I Want to Hold Your Hand," because "Octopus's Garden" hadn't been written yet.

As a cartoon, this is not very good.  The animation is cheap, the writing relies on tired jokes and sub-Ruth Plumly Thompson-tier puns, and the plots are only there to string the songs together.  (The songs are actually good, obviously.)  The cartoon attempts to emulate the quick cuts and frenetic pacing of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, but the episodes are so short that there's nothing to latch onto, and the stories wind up emulating the worst aspects of Help! with several episodes in which the band travel to faraway places and meet ethnic stereotypes.

 As a Beatles product, it's even worse.  The band do not provide their voices, obviously; all of the voices are provided by Paul Frees, Lance Percival, Julie Bennett, and Carol Corbett, and the band just don't sound like themselves; Percival's Ringo does at least sound like a Ringo Starr impression.  Ringo is also treated very much as the dumb one, while John is the smart one and therefore treated as a bossy martinet.  If it weren't for the songs and the haircuts, you wouldn't be able to tell that this was supposed to be about the Beatles at all.

 In short, this cartoon does not treat the concept of "The Beatles Meet Dracula" with the respect it deserves.