Beatles animator enters 'second act' of his career

From the animated version of The Beatles to Scooby Doo, The Jetsons, Rugrats, Krazy Kat and The Smurfs, Ron Campbell spent 50 years making cartoons that were must-sees for the Saturday morning TV-and-cereal set.

Now he has laid down his animator's pen and grabbed his paint brush to make his own art inspired by the Fab Four and many of the other well-known characters he has worked on as an animator and director. Campbell's pop art will be on exhibit and for sale at Stephano's Fine Art, 1813 Grant St., in Little Rock.

Even better, Campbell himself will be at the gallery Friday, Saturday and Jan. 21, chatting about The Beatles, cartoons, animation and art.

"There will be about 50 paintings hanging around, and I'll be there holding court, talking about the good old days of Saturday morning cartoons," says the charming 78-year-old Campbell from his home near Phoenix earlier this month.

Prices for Campbell's paintings, bright watercolors on white backgrounds, will range from $300-$9,000.

He grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and became obsessed with animation after seeing cartoons at a movie theater.

"We didn't have TV in those days," he says. "So we would watch a lot of cartoons before a Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers feature film, and I couldn't figure out what the devil these cartoons were."

He was 7 years old when he told his great-grandmother about these strange images he was seeing on the big screen.

"She said, 'Ronnie, they're just drawings.' That hit me like a ton of bricks," he remembers. "It was a childish epiphany. Drawings? You mean I could do drawings that come alive? That's extraordinary."

It was a realization that would direct his life from then on.

After high school, he attended art school. By 1958 he was working in animation.

"I wasn't going to work for the government, and it was the first time in Australia that you could make a living in animation."

He started out making commercials and caught the attention of American producer Al Brodax, who hired him to work on Krazy Kat, Beetle Bailey and Popeye cartoons.

"That was great," he says. "Things were very simple in those days. The budgets were low."

While Campbell was buried in his animation work, four musicians from Liverpool, England, were causing a bit of a stir. So much so that they were ripe for their own animated series.

The Beatles was a cartoon featuring the series namesakes that ran from 1965-'67. Campbell worked as director and animator on the show, which was wildly popular.

"The ratings were unbelievable. Through the roof," he says. "One or two episodes had a 57 share, meaning that out of every 100 televisions turned on at that moment, 57 were tuned to The Beatles. Mind-boggling."

Interestingly, Campbell hadn't paid much attention to the band before working on the show.

"I didn't even know who the Beatles were," he says. "I was an ambitious young man, and I was desperately trying to learn how to make cartoons, how to organize people and budgets, where to get cameras. I wasn't paying any notice to popular culture."

When Brodax called him about animating a Beatles cartoon, Campbell wasn't sure what he meant.

"He said it's The Beatles and I said, 'Al, insects are very difficult characters to draw as cartoons.'"

He soon learned all about the group, though, and became a fan. Campbell would later work on the animated segments of the film Yellow Submarine.

Much of his current art centered around The Beatles, which he makes with bright, intense watercolors, follows the same imagery of the film and series. Band members are playfully out of proportion and are often surrounded by familiar psychedelic motifs and lyrics.

Meeting Beatles fans on his frequent trips to exhibit and sell his work is a highlight, he says.

"I travel around the United States a lot, and I talk to a lot of Beatles fans and they are crazy. Big in their hearts, they have a love of the memory of being a child and watching the cartoon. They talk about that a lot. It figures big in their nostalgia and memories of the music."

Baby boomers might gravitate toward Campbell's Fab Four renderings, but Gen Xers and even millennials likely grew up on his work.

After The Beatles, he moved to America and worked for Hanna-Barbera Productions on shows like The Jetsons, George of the Jungle, Scooby Doo and The Flintstones. He started his own production company, Ron Campbell Films, and produced animation for the Peabody Award-winning children's show The Big Blue Marble. He also directed animation for Sesame Street.

By the '90s, he was working with Disney Animation on Darkwing Duck, The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and others. He was also associated with Nickelodeon, contributing to Rugrats and Rocket Power. The last thing he worked on was the final scene of the final episode of Nickelodeon's Ed, Edd n Eddie.

"I put my pencil down and knew" it was time to retire, he says. "It was 50 years and one month to the day that I first professionally picked up a pencil out of art school."

In his retirement, Campbell turned to painting.

"I came out of art school and I never touched a paint brush," he says. Now, he can revisit those familiar images, brightly colored and popping off their white backgrounds. And on visits like the one he will make to Stephano's, he gets to hear how these energetic, Saturday morning TV adventures seeped into the pop culture DNA of generations of kids.

"This is a second act," he says. "I'm convinced it keeps me alive. One of the things that has amazed me in my old age, going around with these paintings, is the affection people hold in their hearts for the cartoon films we made. It's incredible to me. As my great-grandmother said, 'It's just drawings.'"

Style on 01/14/2018