Things that have become normal in my home: My 3-year-old singing “Help!” to herself as she falls asleep. My 3-year-old reenacting scenes from the 1965 live action Help! movie. My 3-year-old singing—you guessed it—“Help!” to her baby brother to get him to stop crying. These are all tiny victories, as I would take any Beatles song on repeat over any grating C*c*melon tune. So where does my daughter’s Beatlemania come from? A little children’s program dubbed Beat Bugs.
The animated show centers around five adorable insects (Buzz, Kumi, Walter, Jay and Crick) living in a suburban lawn. They have adventures and learn lessons and blah, blah, blah—the best part is that the show’s creator has the rights to use Beatles music in the series, which means instead of the typical toddler bangers, a la “Fruit Salad” or “Icky Sticky Bubble Gum,” my kid is auditing rock n’ roll 101 with some of the best family songs out there.
A 15-minute episode is dedicated to a single Beatles’ song. Seasons one and two have 13 30-minute episodes, packing in two songs while season three has 26 stand-alone episodes. It’s all the same, just packaged differently for whatever reasons. For example, season one episode one is called “Help!/Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” (That first ep really stuck with my daughter.) There are 52 episodes available to stream on Netflix, which means my toddler really gets to work through the repertoire. In the “Help!” episode, Jay gets stuck in a jam jar and breaks into “Help!” because he needs, well, help. (Spoiler alert: He is saved by his friends’ ingenuity and a lesson about something is learned.) In the “Hey, Jude” episode, the bugs save a baby from crawling into the street by singing her name, Jude. Certain plot points are…strange (see: unaccompanied baby saved by bugs), but now my daughter belts “Hey, Jude” into the karaoke mic on playdates.
