Al Brodax obit

Obituary: Al Brodax

‘Popeye’ producer who turned ‘Yellow Submarine’ into an animation

 

 He was not on the list.

Al Brodax, a television producer who delivered an enduring psychedelic classic when he turned the Beatles song Yellow Submarine into an animated film in 1968, has died, aged 90.

In the 1960s, Brodax ran the motion picture and television division of King Features Syndicate, where he produced hundreds of Popeye cartoons for television.

Quick to see the cartoon potential of the Beatles, he sold their manager, Brian Epstein, on the idea of an animated series. The Beatles ran on Saturday mornings on ABC from 1965 to 1969 (in reruns for the last two years), attracting huge audiences. When Yellow Submarine climbed the charts in 1966, Brodax sensed that lightning might strike twice.

He approached Epstein again, this time with some trepidation; the Beatles did not like The Beatles.

But there was an opening. The group owed United Artists one more film after A Hard Day’s Night and Help! but had lost interest in acting. An animated film, Brodax argued, would require virtually no participation by the Beatles and satisfy the conditions of their contract.

“All they had to do was sign a piece of paper,” he told the website 21st Century Radio in 1994. “I’d do the work.”

A deal was struck. Brodax put together a team of writers and animators who, despite constant friction and turmoil and a slender budget of $1 million, created a small miracle: a Popsicle-coloured fantasia devoted to peace, love and the thrilling pulse of the Beatles’ music.

Songs from the albums Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as four new songs, provided much of the soundtrack. The dialogue was spoken by actors from Liverpool.

The film appealed to adults and children alike. Directed by George Dunning with a swirling, pulsating psychedelic visual style created by Czech-born illustrator Heinz Edelmann, it sent the four Beatles on a submarine voyage to idyllic Pepperland while being threatened by the music-hating, colour-draining Blue Meanies.

Once the Beatles saw the final version, they warmed to it and filmed a brief live-action coda.

Albert Philip Brodax was born in 1926, in Manhattan. His father, Herman, was a coat manufacturer. His mother, the former Lillian Joss, was a homemaker.

He grew up in Washington Heights and, after the family moved to Brooklyn, attended Midwood High School.

He enlisted in the army in 1943 and served as a medic. He was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, earning a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Combat Medical Badge.

He found work in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency in New York and rose to become a television writer and producer.

In 1951, he married Joan Greenberg. Brodax was hired by King Features Syndicate in 1960 to run its new motion picture and television division. After producing 220 Popeye cartoons, he collaborated with Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, on the animated spy spoof Cool McCool and produced television versions of the comic strips Krazy Kat, Beetle Bailey, Snuffy Smith and Barney Google.

Yellow Submarine was fraught with difficulties. Epstein, notoriously difficult to work with in his later years, rejected every script that Brodax presented to him, including one by novelist Joseph Heller, objecting to the coloured binders they came in.

Brodax commissioned a young playwright, Lee Minoff, to come up with a new script, which underwent radical revisions but included some of the basic elements of the final product. The script doctors called in for revisions included Erich Segal, who later wrote Love Story, and Liverpool writer and musician Roger McGough, who added the absurdist puns sprinkled throughout the film.

Yellow Submarine won an award from the New York Critics Circle for achievement in full-length animation.

In the 1980s, he worked as a consultant for Marvel Comics and Computer Graphics Laboratories. His book Up Periscope Yellow: The Making of the Beatles Yellow Submarine was published in 2004.

He is survived by his wife, Joan Greenberg, daughter Jessica Harris, sons Daniel and Douglas; a sister, Myrna Kurtz; and six grandchildren.