Watch The Trailer For Beat Bugs, Netflix’s Beatles-Themed Cartoon Feat. New Covers
Netflix has announced a new animated children’s show based around songs by the Beatles. It’s called Beat Bugs, and will feature covers from popular musicians including Eddie Vedder (“Magical Mystery Tour”), Sia (“Blackbird”), Chris Cornell (“Drive My Car”), the Shins (“The Word”), P!nk (“Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”), and over forty more.
In an interview with USA Today, series creator Josh Wakely explained the difficulty of getting the rights for the Beatles catalog, which have been notoriously hard to pin down: “I would say, ‘I’ve got this amazing idea for a kids show, and all I have to do is get The Beatles rights.’ People would roll their eyes. … I thought it would take four months. It took three years.” (The band just came to streaming services last December.)
Netflix has ordered two seasons worth of 13 half-hour episodes, which will each feature two 11-minute segments that contain a Beatles song, making for 52 covers in total. The show has the rights to around 300 songs for use in the future if it is picked up for additional seasons.
Watch a trailer featuring clips of some of the new covers below.
It will debut on Netflix in August 2016.