Bugs belt out Beatles’ tunes
For six years, Josh Wakely couldn’t shake his vision of five happy-go-lucky bugs belting out Beatles’ tunes from his mind. So much so that when the WAAPA graduate and award-winning filmmaker relocated to the US with his wife, it became a full-time job trying to convince TV and music executives that the concept for his animated children’s series, Beat Bugs, was a winner.
But as the years rolled by, Wakely’s idea struggled to gain traction. It was during this time that he became a first-time father to Ethan, now 21/2, having also broken many promises to his wife. “I said to my wife after I’d sold screen plays in America ‘Look I want to have a crack at pursuing this right. I think it’s going to take six months, would you be OK with that’,” he recalls. “And then it turned into a year, and about a year-a-half in, when I should have given up, it started to seem like it could be a possibility. “I had my son Ethan and we had run out of money and it seemed like it wasn’t going to happen. But I didn’t want to be that guy who had almost got the Beatles rights.”
Given the series — which centres on five insect friends Jay, Kumi, Crick, Buzz and Walter as they explore their overgrown surroundings in a suburban backyard — revolves around the Beatles’ music catalogue, Wakely’s attempts to secure the worldwide music rights seemed near impossible.
By: Vanessa Williams
Source: The West Australian
