You can now watch the 'lost' Beatles cartoon series on YouTube

The 1968 feature Yellow Submarine was a landmark in the popular perception of animation as a legitimate art form, but even as the Beatles were lending their likenesses to that groundbreaking work, they were also appearing in a considerably less advanced example of the form. A cheaply made cartoon series called The Beatles ran on ABC from 1965 to 1969, and while its shabby production quality has resulted in it being largely forgotten outside of hardcore Beatles fandom, as Flavorwire notes, a YouTube account called Beatles Planet has made all 39 episodes available for curious viewers.

 The Beatles‘ scripts were the work of a group of writers who contributed to everything from the Jackie Gleason Show to the Spider-Man series, and the cartoons are very much of the old-school punchline era of comedy and the overall disregard for believability and continuity that ruled in television animation at the time. Each episode finds the Beatles dropped in the middle of a standard cartoon setting—a jungle, a haunted castle—where they barrel through the barest sketch of a plot while avoiding roving mobs of Beatlemaniacal girls.

Source: Entertainment Weekly