Making The Beatles "Child Friendly"

With Beat Bugs, Silverchair plus musician/producer Daniel Johns and producer/writer/director Josh Wakely have taken on The Beatles, Netflix and international children's television (including Channel 7 at home). The two have created a children's television series based around music of The Beatles — songs with high pedigree and already infused with much love and expectation. It's a gorgeous musical animation that lets old songs tell new stories — including big name celebrity covers (Sia, Pink, Eddie Vedder, Regina Spektor and more feature on the soundtrack, which is released early August through Republic/Universal), and original scores by Johns. No pressure.

"We certainly felt the responsibility and pressure — people will be talking about The Beatles in the same way they talk about Shakespeare in 400 years, so we've got the responsibility to get it right for them," says Wakely. "Oh it's so scary, so scary. Only tell me if the review's good," adds Johns. The pair have developed a perfect storm of audiovisual storytelling, with Wakely's visual style informed sonically, and Johns' well-known songwriting inspired by making sounds to sight.

As part of the process each were keen to develop high quality family entertainment — giving dignity to a wide audience and a breadth of narrative experience. "Daniel's always been really open to whatever crazy idea I've brought to him, and visa versa, but when people talk about things that are world class, well people talk about us being in the golden age of television, and even though it's overused, it's kind of true. I wanted to bring those standards and that sort of rigour and obsession to getting it right to children's television too," Wakely explains.

"We were saying that we wanted to make like a Pixar movie across 52 episodes of television, which sort of hasn't been done before. We were also talking about other greats like The Muppets or The Wizard Of Oz, and certain Disney films — certain moments [as kids] that resonate with us… That's where I first got exposed to great melodies and that's the kind of thing we wanted to do with Beat Bugs."

"Yeah, it was fun. Every time The Muppets was used as a reference [during production] it was like it was an invitation to be stupid… People will feel that we're taking the music really seriously, but there is a sense of humour in it too," adds Johns.

While Beat Bugs is very much Wakely's baby in terms of story and animation, Johns' work helping to realise his sonic ideas was invaluable. "When Josh came to me with the idea [of building this around The Beatles] I thought, 'That's genius, it already sounds so child friendly'," Johns begins. "[However] I think the thing as a producer, my natural inclination with The Beatles music, especially with the more psychedelic stuff, was to just go mental and Josh was like, 'Um, that's going to scare the kids'!" he laughs.

Working together they cracked the code of "really adventurous production, simplified". Johns continues, "I would lay down a guide vocal for them then Josh would pick me up and we'd go to the studio and then Eddie Vedder's singing Magical Mystery Tour. At first when he told me the dream list I was like, 'How are you going to pull this off?' and then every day it would be revealed that it's actually happening."