Beatles-Inspired Animated Musical Kids Series ‘Beat Bugs’ Set At Netflix W/Eddie Vedder Airs Aug 3
http://deadline.com/2016/02/beatles-animated-musical-kids-series-beat-bugs-netflix-beatles-songs-1201699735/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu-5mkWii0c
Beat Bugs, an animated kids series inspired by the songs of the Beatles, will premiere on Netflix this summer, with artists Eddie Vedder, P!nk, Sia, James Corden and more adding their voices.
Josh Wakely will direct, write and produce the series via his Grace: A Storytelling Company, which he co-owns with Beat Bugs executive producer Trevor Roy. Film and TV production group Thunderbird co-produces with Beyond Screen Production. The series follows Grace’s deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing for worldwide rights to record covers of the Beatles song catalogue for the production.
Beat Bugs incorporates songs from the Lennon/McCartney ‘Northern Songs’ catalogue, to tell uplifting and life-affirming stories filled with hope and melody. The Beat Bugs are charming, funny, adventurous, and have a knack for getting themselves into mischief and
mayhem. Each of the five friends (Jay, Kumi, Crick, Buzz, and Walter) has a distinctive personality, and they display the charm and energy of five knockabout, lovable kids. They are best friends who band together to explore and learn in an overgrown suburban backyard, which to them is their entire universe.
Some of the most well-known Beatles songs will be woven into the narrative of each episode, with Eddie Vedder, P!nk, James Bay, Sia, The Shins, Of Monsters and Men, Chris Cornell, Regina Spektor, James Corden, and Birdy each recording their rendition of an iconic song. Further artists joining the project are expected to be announced in the coming months. Among the songs featured include Help!, All You Need Is Love, Come Together, Penny Lane, Yellow Submarine, Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Magical Mystery Tour.
“It’s a rare occasion to be presented with a truly one-of-a-kind children’s show that is so perfectly suited to Netflix,” said Andy Yeatman, director of original kid’s content at Netflix. “Josh and his team have not only developed a compelling children’s show filled with life lessons, but they’ve built a show that will transcend generations and have parents and grandparents enjoying right alongside their little ones.”
Thunderbird-owned Atomic Cartoons will provide animation for the series. The series, repped by Beyond Distribution, will premiere on Netflix in Australia after its premiere on Seven Network.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu-5mkWii0cBeat Bugs, an animated kids series inspired by the songs of the Beatles, will premiere on Netflix this summer, with artists Eddie Vedder, P!nk, Sia, James Corden and more adding their voices.
Josh Wakely will direct, write and produce the series via his Grace: A Storytelling Company, which he co-owns with Beat Bugs executive producer Trevor Roy. Film and TV production group Thunderbird co-produces with Beyond Screen Production. The series follows Grace’s deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing for worldwide rights to record covers of the Beatles song catalogue for the production.
Beat Bugs incorporates songs from the Lennon/McCartney ‘Northern Songs’ catalogue, to tell uplifting and life-affirming stories filled with hope and melody. The Beat Bugs are charming, funny, adventurous, and have a knack for getting themselves into mischief and
mayhem. Each of the five friends (Jay, Kumi, Crick, Buzz, and Walter) has a distinctive personality, and they display the charm and energy of five knockabout, lovable kids. They are best friends who band together to explore and learn in an overgrown suburban backyard, which to them is their entire universe.
Some of the most well-known Beatles songs will be woven into the narrative of each episode, with Eddie Vedder, P!nk, James Bay, Sia, The Shins, Of Monsters and Men, Chris Cornell, Regina Spektor, James Corden, and Birdy each recording their rendition of an iconic song. Further artists joining the project are expected to be announced in the coming months. Among the songs featured include Help!, All You Need Is Love, Come Together, Penny Lane, Yellow Submarine, Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Magical Mystery Tour.
“It’s a rare occasion to be presented with a truly one-of-a-kind children’s show that is so perfectly suited to Netflix,” said Andy Yeatman, director of original kid’s content at Netflix. “Josh and his team have not only developed a compelling children’s show filled with life lessons, but they’ve built a show that will transcend generations and have parents and grandparents enjoying right alongside their little ones.”
Thunderbird-owned Atomic Cartoons will provide animation for the series. The series, repped by Beyond Distribution, will premiere on Netflix in Australia after its premiere on Seven Network.
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http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/netflix-beatles-beat-bugs-original-1201702121/
Todd Spangler
NY Digital Editor @xpangler
Netflix is bringing the tunes of John, Paul, George and Ringo to a new generation of tykes with “Beat Bugs,” an animated series featuring renditions of the Fab Four’s songs by artists including Eddie Vedder, Pink and Sia.
“Beat Bugs,” from Grace: A Storytelling Company, Thunderbird and Beyond Screen Production, will bow on Netflix this summer. In Australia, Netflix will obtain streaming rights to the series after its premiere on Seven Network.
The series features original characters and a world created by Australian native Josh Wakely, who directs, writes and produces the series, following a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing for worldwide rights to record covers of the Beatles song catalog.
“Beat Bugs” incorporates songs from the Lennon/McCartney “Northern Songs” catalog. The show will feature some of the best-known Beatles songs woven into the narrative of each episode, with Eddie Vedder, Pink, James Bay, Sia, The Shins, Of Monsters and Men, Chris Cornell, Regina Spektor, James Corden and Birdy each recording their rendition of an iconic song. Among the songs featured are “Help!,” “All You Need Is Love,” “Come Together,” “Penny Lane,” “Yellow Submarine,” “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Magical Mystery Tour.”
The series revolves around five friends — Jay, Kumi, Crick, Buzz and Walter — who band together to explore and learn in an overgrown suburban backyard, which to them is their entire universe.
“Personally I’m very grateful to be part of Josh’s vision,” Eddie Vedder said in a statement. “A tremendous show for kids that combines beautiful animation with great stories and obviously some of the best songs ever written.”
“Beat Bugs” was “a rare occasion to be presented with a truly one-of-a-kind children’s show that is so perfectly suited to Netflix,” said Andy Yeatman, director of original kids’ content at the streamer. Added Wakely: “Bringing ‘Beat Bugs’ to life on Netflix and having a platform to re-imagine this universally acclaimed music for families around the world is an exhilarating and rewarding experience.”
The series is the first project from Wakely’s independent film and TV production and development banner, Grace: A Storytelling Company, which he co-owns with “Beats Bugs” exec producer Trevor Roy. Vancouver-based film and TV production group Thunderbird serves as a co-production partner, alongside Beyond Screen Production. Atomic Cartoons, a Thunderbird-owned studio, is creating animation for the series. The series is represented worldwide by Beyond Distribution.
Maybe my kid will be over listening to Santa Claus is Coming to Towm by Bruce by then
Eddie Vedder covers The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” in trailer for Netflix’s Beat Bugs
The Shins, Regina Spektor, Chris Cornell, and Sia also contribute to new animated series inspired by legendary outfit
by Alex Young on February 10, 2016, 1:30pm
Beat Bugs is he name of a new animated series inspired by The Beatles, the one-time band of audio emoji innovator Paul McCartney. Each episode draws its story from a different Beatles song, which means the episode based on “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” should be a real trip.
Because Netflix blew too much money on reviving Full House, the soundtrack does not feature any original Beatles material, but rather covers sung by the likes of The Shins, Regina Spektor, Chris Cornell, and Sia. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder is also a contributor, and you can hear his magnificent interpretation of “Magical Mystery Tour” in the show’s newly revealed trailer.
...
http://www.avclub.com/article/eddie-vedder-chris-cornell-and-more-cover-beatles--232030
Kids who love music deserve high-quality music!!
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/04/14/amazon-bob-dylan-series-time-out-mind
The idea for a Bob Dylan-themed series isn’t just blowing in the wind — it’s in the works at Amazon.
The streaming service is developing a one-hour drama series titled Time Out of Mind that is based on Dylan’s songs and characters, EW has confirmed. Time Out of Mind writer/director Josh Wakely — who has secured the rights for Dylan’s impressive six-decade catalogue of songs — will craft stories around the creative work of the legendary singer-songwriter.
Time Out of Mind, which is being produced by Lionsgate and Wakely’s production company, won’t be the first time that the the Australian writer has transformed an iconic artist’s song catalogue into a musical television series. Or, rather, streaming series. Wakely is also the creator of Netflix’s Beat Bugs, an animated children’s series that weaves stories inspired by songs from The Beatles. The show, which will debut this summer, will include Beatles covers from such artists as Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, and Sia.
Beat Bugs - Season 1 airs August 3rd.
Beatles revived for kids TV show Beat Bugs by Daniel Johns, Josh Wakely
Throughout his career in Silverchair and beyond Daniel Johns has pushed himself in new directions, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before he became a big blue slug called Walter. That’s the character to which Johns lends his voice in the new animated children’s series Beat Bugs, created by fellow Novocastrian Josh Wakely, but Johns’s speaking role is only a small part of the story.
What the 37-year-old musician is most happy about is that he got to produce and arrange more than 30 songs from the Beatles’ catalogue for the show — and have household names such as Sia, Pink, Eddie Vedder and Robbie Williams sing them.
“It’s a dream job to go into the studio and dissect all of the Beatles’ music,” says the singer, who bought his first Beatles album, The Beatles (also known as the White Album), when he was nine. “That remains one of my favourite pieces of music,” he says “They are responsible for writing some of the greatest songs of all time.”
Spending time with the Beatles catalogue — breaking it down and building it again — was also a learning experience for the Australian star. “That was half the reason I was so excited,” he says. “I had to force myself to pick up a guitar on occasions and figure stuff out.”
That Johns got to rework so many Beatles classics was an incredible coup for writer, director and producer Wakely, who has spent six years bringing Beat Bugs, 52 animated stories about five bugs who live in a suburban back yard, to life.
The first three of those years were spent working on the show without having the rights to the Beatles’ music. All the young director had was a strong belief in what he was doing.
That faith proved worthwhile in early 2014 when publishers Sony/ATV liked Wakely’s vision of bringing the Fabs’ songs to a new audience via stories written around them. They gave Wakely’s GRACE production company licence to use hallowed material such as Magical Mystery Tour, Penny Lane, All You Need is Love and Strawberry Fields Forever in the show.
“It’s pretty incredible that we got the rights,” says Johns. “That’s the thing that always surprises me about Josh. He’s so ambitious and brave. When he told me what he was trying to do I said, ‘I wish you the best of luck, but I don’t fancy your chances.’ I still don’t know how he managed to pull it off. It is such an honour to have a part in it, but of course there’s pressure that comes with that to do a good job.”
The series, which is aimed at five to seven-year-olds, screens on the Seven Network and from August 3 on Netflix. Beat Bugs is the collected adventures of five characters: Jay, a mischievous beetle; a ladybug called Kumi; Crick the cricket; Buzz the fruit fly; and the aforementioned Walter.
“They have lived in my head for so long that I don’t have their date of conception,” says Wakely, taking stock of his achievement while in Sydney for meetings at Seven’s Sydney headquarters. He describes the five bugs as “little bits of me, probably. Even when I’m not writing episodes they occupy a strange corner of my mind”.
Each episode of Beat Bugs is designed to tell a story through a Beatles song, but with simple lessons about life embedded therein.
“The reason those songs have held up is not just the music,” says Wakely. “It’s because there are stories inside them. It’s about teaching kids, but with a bit of humour and not in a patronising way. All You Need is Love was the main message we wanted to put in front of kids.”
For Wakely the completion of the show marks the end of a long and arduous journey. A self-confessed workaholic, he has several projects on the go, including a feature film and a television drama series, Time Out of Mind, based on the songs of Bob Dylan, for which he also has secured the rights. It’s a high point in his career, which has been on an upwards trajectory since he graduated from the Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts. He studied acting but then turned his hand to writing and directing. Wakely was one of the writers on the award-winning Australian children’s series Lockie Leonard.
It was while pitching and selling screenplays in Los Angeles after moving there with his wife that he had the idea of using Beatles songs to tell children’s stories, although he can’t remember how or why he was so inspired.
“When you’ve lived with an idea for so long you can’t really remember its origins,” he says. Wakely is an animated figure when he talks about his work, clearly driven by his vision of and belief in the creatures he created. He is also relieved that after six years of hard work, half of that time not knowing if the series would get made, it finally has come to fruition.
“More than 1000 people were involved in the making of the series, including a team of writers from around the globe and animaters in Los Angeles, Vancouver and Australia,” he says. “It was my full-time job for three years.
“I was living in Los Angeles and I had sold some screenplays. I made the decision that I wanted to do this. I was passionate about bringing the best music in history to children through Pixar-quality animation.
“I asked my wife to give me five months to work on it, then it was eight months, then it was a year. The money I had made from selling screenplays was about to run out.
“Then at about the two-year mark I was obsessed. It started to seem real. I didn’t want to be the guy that nearly got the Beatles’ rights. That’s just a bad story to tell, so that last year was really harrowing. When I thought I might have the rights they suddenly became elusive, but I’d go back and write another script or I’d work up the songs with Daniel.”
Wakeley and Johns didn’t know each other in Newcastle when they were growing up, even though they lived only streets away from each other and Wakely went to the same school as Johns’s brother. They met in 2011 when the pair collaborated on the musical short film My Mind’s Own Melody (2012), with Wakely the writer and director and Johns contributing music. From that experience it became clear to each of them that they worked well together.
“It was a real privilege and honour to get asked to do it,” says Johns. “I don’t know any musician who would turn that down.”
It helps in their collaboration that Johns has a wide knowledge of film, while Wakely has a great appreciation of an extensive range of music.
“I work with some extraordinary people,” says Wakely, “but the artistic collaboration and the way we know how to work together at a very intuitive level … I don’t often experience that. He’s able to know what I’m thinking. For a storyteller I think musically. Melody is a type of storytelling. He’s a real cinephile. I come at storytelling from a musical base and he comes at songs in a visual way.”
The two worked together across an 18-month period, primarily in Sydney, recording with a vast number of musicians that included a core band, a few orchestras and a children’s choir. “We were working quite quickly and freely,” says Johns. “I wanted to get it feeling like a band as well. I didn’t want to go in and program stuff and have it come out and be not real. Kids and the Beatles deserve to hear human beings playing their music.”
Johns, who is also splitting his time between Australia and LA where he is working on a new recording project, says the hardest thing about the Sydney sessions was trying to keep his rock ’n’ roll animal in check while recording some of the Beatles’ more experimental offerings.
“My natural inclination, especially with the psychedelic stuff, was I wanted to make it absolutely wild, take it to the next level of weirdness,” he says. “Then Josh would come in and say, ‘No mate, you can’t do that, dude, it’s for kids.’ So for me it was like having to be quite strict about the approach and not do what my natural instincts were telling me to do.”
After the recording beds had been done, the tracks were sent off to the various artists for them to add their vocals. A few years ago Wakely put together a wish list of singers while on a flight from Sydney to LA. He had them on a whiteboard in his office too, never imagining for one minute that all of the people on it would agree to take part, but they did. Rod Stewart, the Shins, Of Monsters and Men, Regina Spektor and James Bay are among the other acts on the roster. Two volumes of the tracks recorded for the series are being released in all formats on August 5.
Sia, who sings the Lennon-McCartney song Blackbird, has a special place in Wakely’s heart for a couple of reasons. The first is for the speed with which she recorded her vocal and sent it back.
Wakely sent the track to her one night and when he got up in the morning the completed work was sitting in his inbox. The clincher was when he played it to his three-year-old son on the veranda of the family’s apartment. “He gave it the thumbs up,” he says. “I always had Sia in mind for Blackbird. It was like working with a genius-meets-a-scientist. She works with such precision. Hers might just be the definitive version of that song.”
Other highlights include Vedder’s reading of Magical Mystery Tour, Chris Cornell doing Drive My Car and Pink’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Those artists and the others in the series may not be the only ones to take up the Beat Bugs baton. There is talk of another season, although nothing is finalised. That could depend on the Novocastrians’ work commitments.
Johns, however, is delighted he got the chance to work on such a distinguished catalogue of songs and to present them to a new, very young audience, although that wasn’t the hard part, he says.
“When Josh came to me with the idea,” he says, “it seemed so obvious that almost the entire Beatles catalogue, with the exception of some of the references in the lyrics, are so child friendly. The reason it was really stressful at times was because I wanted to make sure it was really good.”
Beat Bugs is available on Yahoo 7PLUS and screens on 7TWO from Monday. The Beat Bugs soundtrack will be released by Republic Records/Universal early next month.
Has anyone down under seen the first episode? Is it good?
'Beat Bugs': Kids Telly Rocks Out With Eddie Vedder, James Corden
Whether daydreams of yellow submarines sent Wakely on the path to meeting one of his own idols, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, is uncertain, but what followed was the stuff of Hollywood dreams.
"I hand wrote Eddie a letter, telling him his music meant a lot to me and that I'd love him to bring his craft to the song," Wakely said.
What came next was a phone call from Vedder himself, telling Wakely he loved the idea.
"He has children himself and he said he wished he was watching this. He got what it was -- to put the very best songs and the amazing stories that live within the songs in front of children."
A few days later, Vedder recorded "Magical Mystery Tour."
Beat Bugs: Wed 27 Jul, season 1 episode 6
Featuring I've Just Seen a Face by Andy Bull and Magical Mystery Tour by Eddie Vedder. After Jay sees Julia's face up close, none of his friends believe his story. Then, the Beat Bugs meet an eloquent showman grasshopper with an offer of an amazing adventure