![]() Characters that I worked on."īorn in the small Australian town of Seymour, Victoria, Campbell says that after his light-bulb moment involving Tom and Jerry, he began to truly apply himself in art. "I mean, if I'm gonna paint in my old age, what am I gonna paint? Cactus? I like to paint characters. "It's really just something I do to stave off the final day that can't be staved off, you know?" says the Arizona resident with a laugh. He now paints and exhibits new renderings of the Fab Four and his other celebrated cartoon figures at galleries worldwide, which Campbell will do during his area visit to Davenport's Bucktown Center for the Arts on July 17 and 18. And even though he's now retired, and the musicians disbanded in 1970, Campbell's association with the Beatles continues to this day. And then, in 1968, Campbell was hired by producer/screenwriter Al Brodax to help animate the legendary musical Yellow Submarine, a critical and box-office hit that boasted a Beatles soundtrack and the likenesses of John, Paul, George, and Ringo as its leads.Īs evidenced by the excitement generated by the counterculture classic's 2012 DVD and Blu-ray restoration and simultaneous re-release in theaters, Yellow Submarine is perhaps even more beloved now than it was in 1968. Beginning in 1965, Campbell was tapped to direct nine episodes of ABC's Saturday-morning cartoon The Beatles, a half-hour of music and comedy that was the first weekly series to feature animated versions of actual celebrities. Yet as an artist, Campbell is perhaps best known for his iconic work involving a certain fabulous four from Liverpool, England. He also worked on animated sequences for Sesame Street and the Emmy- and Peabody-award-winning series Big Blue Marble, and founded Ron Campbell Films, Inc., the studio that TV junkies of my generation have to thank for childhood memories of Nanny & the Professor. ![]() Since arriving in America in the mid-1960s, animator/director Campbell has been an instrumental force on some of the most famed creations in animated-TV history - Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, Winnie-the-Pooh, George of the Jungle, The Jetsons, The Smurfs, Rugrats - with additional credits on more than four-dozen others. Meanwhile, if you or your kids grew up with TV-cartoon characters capturing your own brains, you likely have Campbell to thank (and/or blame). 'You mean, I can do a drawing, or a number of drawings, and they can come alive?!' And that idea sort of captured my brain for the rest of my life." "And then, of course," says Campbell, "I learned that they were actually drawings, which, like all kids, was something I liked doing, too. ![]() And I remember thinking, when I was like seven years old, that Tom and Jerry were real, and were somehow behind the screen running around. We went to see Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but before all that bang-bang cowboy stuff, there were cartoons. ![]() "When I was a child in Australia," says 75-year-old Ron Campbell, "the way you saw cartoons was you went to the movies on Saturday afternoons, which was the way the movie industry catered to the children's audience. ![]()
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