RON CAMPBELL SHOWS AND SELLS HIS PRINTS AND PAINTINGS IN FARGO

These days, Ron Campbell is known to Fab Four fans as one of the visual masterminds behind "The Beatles" Saturday morning cartoon show and the animated feature film "The Yellow Submarine."

Campbell will set up shop at Boerth's Gallery in downtown Fargo Friday through Sunday, showing and selling illustrations from his 50-year career, including many from his years drawing the lads from Liverpool.

But in early 1965, Campbell was more familiar with "Beetle Bailey" than The Beatles.

The 24-year-old Australian was a few years out of art school and had shifted from animating television commercials to illustrating "Beetle Bailey," "Popeye" and "Krazy Kat" comic strips for King Features.

His talent was noticed, and one day in early 1965, he got a phone call from a TV show producer, asking him to be involved in a project about The Beatles.

"I said, 'Gee, insects don't make very good characters for children's cartoons,'" Campbell recalls from his home in Phoenix. "My head was in other places than popular music at the time. I hadn't heard of them at all."

He can laugh about it now, but at the time, he gave himself a crash course in Beat-ology.

"Obviously, naturally I came to love them," he explains.
As did most young Americans. The show had a 60 share, meaning that for every 100 TVs on at that time, 60 were tuned into "The Beatles."

Campbell's work directing the Saturday morning show so impressed his bosses that a few years later he was asked to lend a drawing hand to "The Yellow Submarine" movie. Two hundred illustrators were brought in for the project with Campbell's work animating the Blue Meanies, the music-hating creatures in the movie.

Ron Cambell depicts The Beatles and one of the Blue Meanies from the movie, "The Yellow Submarine." Special to The Forum

"It was about 11 minutes of the film and it took eight months to do," Campbell says with a laugh.

Still, he calls Heinz Edelmann's design work, "spectacularly beautiful."

While the bright colors and floating feel of the animation is psychedelic, he says the animators weren't partaking of any mind-altering substances at the time.

"Good lord, no. You couldn't make a film like 'The Yellow Submarine' and be high. There's no way that was the case. I didn't even smoke funny cigarettes," Campbell says. "Being high is not conducive to the creative process."

(While Peter Max is often thought to have had a hand in "The Yellow Submarine," Campbell says the artist and Beatles' friend wasn't involved.)

Campbell never got to meet The Beatles, but he says some of his paintings belong to Ringo Starr.

After "The Yellow Submarine," Campbell went back to working in TV, with the upstart public television show, "Sesame Street." Throughout the first year, he contributed a number of educational interludes with 30-second spots for things like the number 10 or the letter A.

He stayed with PBS for a while, working on "The Big Blue Marble" before getting involved with a different big blue world, "The Smurfs." He followed that with a stint with "Rugrats."

"Almost 10 years of my life dedicated to 'The Smurfs.' Can you imagine spending 10 years of your life on 'Rugrats?'" he says. "Something a grown man has to question himself for. He should be out building bridges or doing something important."

Ron Campbell's painting "Unearthly Paradise." Special to The Forum
Well, it's not that he thinks his work with "The Smurfs" and "Rugrats" is unimportant. After all, he'll be bringing work representing that period to show with his various Beatles images.

"I think it's a fantastic opportunity for Fargo to see a guy like him," says Michael Rohr, owner of Boerth's. "It's something new and different."

It may be new and different for Fargo, but in a time when computer animation has taken over cartoon shows and movies, hand-drawn images are definitely old school.

"I'm a dinosaur with a pencil in his hands," Campbell says. "The softness and gentleness, the squash and flow of the animation is not something computers can emulate. There's a clarity of color that ink and paint give to a character that computer ink and painting doesn't. There's a slightly cold edge to all computer animation, a mechanical feel to it. Hand-drawn animations has little errors everywhere and that imparts a life-like looseness to it that the perfection of computer animation kind of lacks."

What: Ron Campbell shows and sells his prints and paintings

Where: Boerth's Gallery, 212 Broadway, Fargo

When: Noon to 6 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, noon to 3 p.m. Sunday