To be associated with the Beatles, however peripherally, is to earn a cachet that will gild anyone’s artistic oeuvre.
Cartoonist/animator Ron Campbell, who will visit Long Island this week, never met any of the Fab Four.
“They were always on the other side of the world,” Campbell, 76, chuckled as he spoke from his home north of Phoenix.
But his work on their groundbreaking, psychedelic Yellow Submarine album cover was said to be crucial to its success, and he was also associated with one of the more obscure corners of Beatlemania: the Saturday morning TV cartoon featuring fanciful caricatures of the band (and a couple of songs per episode) that ran from 1965-69.
Campbell saw his first cartoons in a movie theater in his small town in Australia, and “when my grandmother told me that they were only drawings, it hit me like a thunderbolt,” he related. “I realized that drawings can live… walk, talk.”
Like millions of others, he was enthralled by the artistry and creativity of Disney’s Fantasia, never dreaming that one day he’d befriend and collaborate with some of its creators.
Campbell worked in every aspect of his business—producer, director, story editor, storyboard creator—and won numerous awards and had a long list of credits.
He admitted that much of what he created was ephemeral—after all, a movie runs 24 frames per second, and in the days before computers took away the laboriousness, an animator (or more likely, aspiring underlings) had to draw 24 different sheets for every second of filming.
One day Campbell took a walk on Rodeo Drive in Hollywood and discovered that some of his artwork, which he had tossed, was on sale at a street fair. There was a market for it, after all.
After his retirement, he began doing paintings based on beloved cartoon characters and periodically does shows in which he greets fans, paints and sells his work.
Campbell has worked on such iconic cartoons as Scooby Doo and The Flintstones, but his work with the Beatles remains a career highlight.
“There are a lot more Beatles fans. [Their] music is much more powerful than Scooby Doo,” he laughed.
