A scene from the ill-fated incoherent Hanna Barbera musical ROCK ODYSSEY
The story behind the “lost” Hanna-Barbera animated feature Rock Odyssey has always been interesting to me. Production on the film began in 1981 (although it did not receive a screening until 1987) and was an attempt by H-B to expand its brand into the 18 to 34 year old market and to use as a training ground for new talent on full animation.
I saw the film at its one and only theatrical screening at the Second Los Angeles International Animation Celebration in July 1987 alongside other local animation enthusiasts like Jerry Beck in attendance. (Jerry was one of the programmers of that festival and was instrumental in procuring it for the event). Like many in the audience, I was as confused as I was intrigued at this H-B experiment at trying to capture a more adult audience as other animation studios were trying at the same time.
The only dialogue was done by Scatman Crothers as the “cosmic” anthropomorphic jukebox narrator and the rest of the film seemed to be a compilation of animated music videos stitched together. The videos followed a chronology from the 1950s up to 1980 (and in the later revised version into the 1980s). The premise was actually that a young blonde woman named Laura was seeking out true love in each of those different decades to the background of those familiar pop tunes.
Rock Odyssey was co-written (with Neal Barbera) and directed by former Ralph Bakshi animator Robert Taylor (who had co-directed The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat but also Hanna-Barbera’s Heidi’s Song) and was conceived according to Joe Barbera as “a rock version of Fantasia” that would appeal to a young adult audience. Taylor according to his son based the character of Laura in the feature on his own wife.
The film was meant as a follow-up to H-B’s Heidi’s Song (1982) animated feature and had been intended as a prime-time special for ABC to air sometime in the spring of 1982. H-B closed their feature animation unit after the box-office failure of Heidi’s Song but the content of Rock Odyssey also proved problematic and the key factor in it not being released was negative reactions from Taft Broadcasting executives and ABC executives that felt the approach was perhaps too “mature”.
In addition, it seemed to have similarities to Ralph Bakshi’s animated feature American Pop released in 1981 that told the story of a family of musicians through several generations and paralleling American music of the 20th Century that was used in the film.
However, H-B sought to recoup their investment by reworking the feature with veteran storyman Bill Perez (listed as “Creative Consultant” in the final version) including adding a new segment featuring clips from previous H-B cartoon shows (The Jetsons, A Man Called Flintstone, Hey There It’s Yogi Bear, Chattanooga Cats, Alice in Wonderland television special) to the song Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go to make the film more family friendly and current. ABC later announced it would air the feature sometime in late 1983. That never happened either.
The film was made available for international television distribution in 1987 and has aired in some Latin American countries and Spain but not the United States nor ever released on VHS, DVD or Bluray. It aired in Southeast Asia on television in 2010.
Robert Taylor who began his animation career in 1966 at Terrytoons with Bakshi had an eclectic career in animation. He worked with Ralph Bakshi on multiple films like Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, Wizards and more as well directing children’s animated series like TaleSpin, Goof Troop, The Flintstone Kids, and Challenge of the GoBots. After he retired, he became an accomplished jazz guitarist before passing away in 2014.
Instead of just purchasing the rights to the original recordings of the songs for Rock Odyssey, Taylor was adamant that they would be re-recorded in order to make the film more organic. So cover artists performed all the songs.
Barbera had liked the work Taylor was doing on Heidi’s Song and his background doing “edgy” work for Bakshi’s features seemed to make him ideal for doing a more adult oriented feature so Barbera gave him free reign until he found the film unusable since in some segments it was very Bakshi-esque.
Animation historian Charles Solomon likened the film in his July 13, 1987 review to the “Howard the Duck of Animation, a film so staggeringly terrible that the viewer has trouble believing a professional studio (Hanna Barbera) could knowingly create such a five-alarm disaster. The result is a cross between MTV and Saturday-morning kidvid, without the better features of either.
“Terrible renditions of various songs–“Bye, Bye Love,” “Satisfaction,” “Aquarius,” etc.–by unknown musicians are mismatched to visuals that have little to do with the lyrics or the mood. Nor are the vignettes historically correct: No one dressed like Elvis in 1952, and “Stayin’ Alive,” the 1978 disco hit, introduces the new era of the ’80s. Some bits of animation are re-used so often, they become as familiar as a high school classmate.”
Iwao Takamoto told Michael Mallory, “(Taylor) wanted something new and fresh. When Rock Odyssey was finished, he got something new…a new job.”
Finding credits for the film is challenging. The special effects at the beginning were done by Ron Hays. Lynne Naylor, Charlie Downs, Hal Ambro, Rudi Cataldi, Spencer Peel, Irv Spence and Marlene Robinson worked on the film.
As Pete Alvardo who did layout on the film told John Cawley, “I had a lot of hope for Rock Odyssey. I think we did a lot of nice work on that thing, but it just never seemed to get off the ground. I think most of us in the business are so close to these things, we don’t really know sometimes.”
When Scatman Crothers died in 1986, Frank Welker stepped in to do additional voice-over as the jukebox. Crothers had done cartoon voice work for Hanna-Barbera including the character Hong Kong Phooey as well as work for other studios like Disney’s animated feature The Aristocats (1970).
The whole film is like some unintelligble dream sequence or drug hallucination.
The 1950s was focused on hot rod greasers with a film noirsh background although at one point in the song Blue Suede Shoes, Laura and her guy change into dancing shoes. The boyfriend gets beaten up by a biker gang that look like green-skinned hogs.
The 1960s had the guy drafted to go to Vietnam and the two young lovers are very much hippie flower children. There are references to the war, drugs and the police who are portrayed as mean-spirited literal pigs. At one point the boy imagines himself in heaven and hell and the girl dreams of being a bag of french fries being pursued by a salt shaker.
In the 1970s, the pair meet aboard a ship while they are trying to “save the whales” from evil fishermen. Laura has a flashback to her “child self” with a boy who falls off an elephant and dies. A sea dragon summons up some sort of portal where Laura is reunited with her boyfriend. There is some partial female nudity in this decade.
In the 1980s, instead of mocking the Punk scene, the young lovers are Yuppies with good jobs but there is also some type of a goblin character who summons Laura’s past lovers and merged them into the “man of her dreams” for supposedly a happy ending.
For those who are dying to see it – here is an absolutely horrible copy of the first 16 minutes:
Jim Korkis is an internationally respected animation historian who in recent years has devoted his attention to the many worlds of Disney. He was a columnist for a variety of animation magazines. With his former writing partner, John Cawley, he authored several animation related books including The Encyclopedia of Cartoon Superstars, How to Create Animation, Cartoon Confidential and Get Animated’s Animation Art Buyer’s Guide. He taught animation classes at the Disney Institute in Florida as well as instructing classes on acting and animation history for Disney Feature Animation: Florida.
Honestly, I think Warner Archive should release this movie.
Now, how about “Once Upon A Girl..?”
Oh, it would be nice to hear how that happened!
But that wasn’t actually by H-B (unless it went under a pseudonym). I thought it was done by desperate staff that left the studio and might have gotten tired of the rules by the damn parent code.
I’m sure that’s what happened. Very indie effort for it’s time.
Sounds like part of the idea for the movie might have been culled from 1981’s animated feature “Heavy Metal”, which relied on a series of unrelated sections and rock music to tell its stories (it came out just prior to the debut of MTV — given how fond Joe Barbera was of copying whatever was trendy at the moment, it wouldn’t be a shock in the 1981-86 period for the studio to have thought a series of animated music videos with barely any story at all was going to be a bit hit in theaters).
Not only did I see parallels to “Heavy Metal”, but I also sensed similarities to another rock-oriented animated feature, Nelvana Studios’ “Rock And Rule”.
Robert Taylor is the sole credited director of THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT. I don’t believe Bakshi had any involvement with the picture.
“Heidi’s Song” may not have been as grandly bizarre, but there were strange, misfired or tone-deaf moments throughout. The capper was Heidi locked in a cellar full of grim, realistic rats … and suddenly the rats are sporting zoot suits while dancing in a fantasy setting, as Sammy Davis Jr. sings an equally out-of-period song. It was as if nobody ever backed up and looked at how the pieces were supposed to fit together.
Maybe they just didn’t have the mindset for features. The first Yogi Bear and Flintstone movies barely pretended to be anything other than slightly dressed up TV episodes; their lack of pretensions is what keeps them amusing. Still, a lot of Amazon reviewers are unironically sentimental about “Heidi’s Song”.
If they ever released “Rock Odyssey”, I’d definitely buy it. Anybody so confidently striding so far out of their comfort zone, committing time, money and obvious talent to a WTF notion, demands to be seen.
Hanna-Barbera missed an opportunity by not making a Flintstones’ Woodrock documentary,featuring Sly & the Family Stone,an imagined Rolling Stones. Columbia had a real group,The Flock, 1969-70,with the album Dinosaur Swamps. In the era of Chicago & Blood,Sweat & Tears(violin in the mix of horns & reeds-same label,too);sad,these guys failed. Announcement from the stage:”Kids-Do not eat the brown Flintstone Viamins.”
I honestly feel like the only one who thinks positively of this deranged movie. It was a film by Hanna Barbera of SO MUCH AMBITION, but never saw the light of day since its completion. Warner Archive has to release this unsung classic! I feel it should deserve more of a cult following like Swat Kats and Scooby Doo On Zombie Island got.
ROCK ODYSSEY aired in Spain in 1991; I still keep the VHS tape where I videotaped it. In fact, clips from this movie that can be seen via YouTube or Daily Motion come from that airing, since they have the logo of channel 2 of TVE (Televisión Española). I sincerely think that it’s one of the most creative things ever done by Hanna-Barbera in terms of design and animation and quite superior to the stuff they used to do for SatAm television, even if it suffers from an uneven storyline (anyway, there are a lot of animated features that suffer from an uneven storyline). If it got a DVD release, I certainly would buy it.
“We’re goin’ way out! Way out! That’s where the fun is, way out! Way out!” — The Way-Outs
And what a way-out movie Rock Odyssey appears to be. If it had been released, it might have sent audiences stampeding toward the way out.
Rock Odyssey might have succeeded if they had (1) eliminated the jukebox narrator; (2) dug deeper into their record collections for more evocative, if less familiar, songs; (3) eschewed the most obvious pop-cultural cliches of each decade; and (4) taken Bill and Joe’s name off the project and created a dummy subsidiary called, say, Barbaylor Productions to remove any association with children’s entertainment. I assure you that back in the eighties, I would have sedulously avoided any rock-and-roll feature from Hanna-Barbera; but having viewed the clip, I’m sure I would have enjoyed the movie if I had been in the right frame of mind, if you know what I mean and I’m sure you do.
I, too, will definitely buy Rock Odyssey if it ever comes out on home video.
The irony is 15 years earlier on a much smaller budget, Hanna-Barbera did end up with a Top 40-charting song with Little Eva, by not trying to do anything special, but just working it into a Season 2 episode of “The Magilla Gorilla Show” (the fact that Season 2 was bought by ABC for Saturday mornings after Season’s 1 success may have given Bill and Joe a little more $$$ to work with to get the song written for the show).
It was the effort to make a huge impact in a theatrical movie that apparently ended up dooming the 1981 movie.
I keep thinking I remembered seeing this… once… late at night. Maybe on USA Network when they were airing strange movies and “New Wave Theatre” late on weekends. Or perhaps ABC stuck on a late night movie. Scatman as a jukebox would be hard to forget. I also remember Queen’s “Rock It (Prime Jive)” from the opening. This would have been around the time ABC turned it down in 1983. Long before I would’ve had a VCR and maybe tried to tape it.
I suspect even if someone at Warner was determined enough to release it, they’d have lost most of the clearances for the songs, even as re-recordings.
Good job, Korky. I would love a similar expose of The Flintstones: On the Rocks, and the story behind its one-time airing and why its considered “controversial” in some quarters. Would be a lot easier for Warner Archive to release that than Rock Odyssey, with its expensive music clearances to deal with (Although I would gladly purchase both).
It wasn’t a one time airing. I recall it airing a couple of more times on CN and I think it re-ran the next few years as well.
I liked the Brigette Bardot movie the best of all!
H-B did produce “KISS Meets the Phantom (of the Park)” – remembered mainly for its camp value.
One of their other attempts to step outside their comfort zone was the “Jokebook” TV series (Scatman Crothers sang the theme), presenting several short cartoons from different creators. The Oscar-winning “Crunch Bird” was featured in one episode, but the punch line was altered to “Crunch Bird, my butt!” The one cartoon on “Jokebook” that stands out in memory was “Jerome,” about a toddler’s first trip to the toilet while potty-training… the toilet was depicted as this monolith that had to be conquered. The cartoon had this unfinished, pencil-test look to it – perhaps it wasn’t ready in time for air, and they went with what they had?
Wow! I’ve always remembered “Jerome” but had no idea where it was from. Thank you for mentioning it as I’ve now been able to see it again.
A previous post by Jerry on Rock Odyssey over at Cartoon Brew from 2011:
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/hanna-barberas-lost-rock-odyssey-35784.html
Which does includes a link to blog by Frank Forte featuring features several animated drawings from Rock Odysey
https://rockodysseyart.blogspot.com/
Frank Forte has a very nice blog plenty of Rock Odyssey art, concepts, stoyboards and animation drawings. It looks like a very promising film, pity it didn’t live up to what was expected.