Rupert and the Frog Song is a 1984 animated short film based on the comic strip character Rupert Bear *, written and produced by Paul McCartney and directed by Geoff Dunbar. The film was released theatrically as an accompaniment to McCartney’s film Give My Regards to Broad Street. The song reached No. 3 when released in the UK Singles Chart.
It was released in 2004 as one of the segments of Paul McCartney: The Music & Animation Collection, which I also have, and will be doing a post on soon. It’s a great DVD featuring three animated projects featuring original McCartney music.
But recently I found this wonderful Paul McCartney & the Frog Chorus picture disc in a charity shop in, somewhat appropriately, Winborne, England:
This was released back in 1984 in conjunction with the release of the animated project it comes from. Seeing Paul and Rupert together is a treat!
The plastic sleeve has the above title printed on it. The front of the picture disc has only the title of the song printed on it directly.
I usually post full songs on this site. Most of what I feature has long since passed into the public domain, or I am fairly confident that the content maker isn’t worrying about a small blog like mine, and so I am unlikely to be sued for copyright infringement. However, Sir Paul McCartney is more likely to be on top of his music catalogue, so I will include only an excerpt from the B-side this time:
Whoever the Finchley Frogettes are, they sure can hum! Finchley itself is a large district of north London, England, in the London Borough of Barnet. It is predominantly a residential suburb, with three town centers. And supposedly every person living there loves to hum! The Frog Chorus, who accompanied Paul on the A-Side, were comprised of The King’s Singers and St. Paul’ s Choir.
If you can find the video of Rupert and the Frog Song on YouTube, it will be worth your time!
If you’d like to see what Sir Paul McCartney would look like as a vulture, animated no less, check out my earlier post entitled Vinylmation Vultures from Disney’s Jungle Book. It also includes lyrics to “I Want to Eat You, Man!”, a famous Beatles tune. Sort of.
* Rupert Bear is a British children’s comic strip character and franchise created by artist Mary Tourtel that first appeared in the Daily Express newspaper on November 8th of 1920. McCartney obtained the film rights to the character in April of 1970. He said: “I ended up going to see Sir Max Aitken who was the head of the Daily Express at the time, in his big office in Fleet Street, and said, ‘Look, Max, baby, we’ve got to keep Rupert in England because if the Yanks get hold of him, they’ll make him talk like Winnie the Pooh and he’ll be an American Rupert.’ So, I said, ‘You’ve got to let someone like me do it.’ I gave him all the big spiel and he was impressed. So that was how we got the animation rights to do Rupert.“
