That Beatles is a play on words. :smack:
Memo to Jain: Doobie Brothers? Not really brothers.
Did a guy on a flaming pie tell you?
Just for educational purposes…how so?
Ok, I never knew that. Always assumed it was a variation of the spelling of “beetles”.
The Beatles was a play on Buddy Holly’s band, The Crickets. To extend the musical pun, beEt was replaced with beAt.
I thought they were messing with Ringo by painting The Beatles(s) on his drum kit.
I was just going to mention something about Bill Haley and his Comets when I (swear to god) just realized that it’s a play on Halley’s Comet. :smack:
Any second the OP is going to realize the Kinks didn’t name themselves after a twisted-up piece of thread.
They needed a name that was witty at first, but that seemed less funny each time you heard it.
Of course the Beat-Alls is also a play on words. 
But did you know that the Rutles aren’t about being stuck in a rut or something, but rather derive from “Rutland TV,” which I think was a joke made-up TV station named for an absurdly small English county (rather like if Saturday Night Live’s fake newscast were from “national Rhode Island network” or some such).
What Nunzio said. I was responding to another thread where I was writing it out. I did a quick online search to see if it was “Beatles” or “The Beatles”. I had written it so many times in a short period that it started looking weird to me. And as was really looking at it, it came to me. Mercy Beat and all that.
That’s the gist of it, yes. The full version is that the Rutles orginally appeared as part of Eric Idle’s show Rutland Weekend Television, the title of which was a play on “London Weekend Televison”, a major TV company of the time. Rutland was a small county that had recently been absorbed into a neighboring county, and so was something of a byword for insignificance. As you surmise, the joke was to act as if this little backwater had the same degree of cultural significance as London.
I was around during all the years the Beatles were together. And I have to admit, it never occurred to me that the name contained the word “beat” until sometime in the '70s. And yes, the group was formed during the later years of the “beat” generation.
Best. Episode.
EVAR!
I think it was season 3 or 4 of Friends when Phoebe was standing in front of their favorite cafe, Central Perk and said something like, “Central Perk - Central Park…I just got that!”
Made me laugh.
I never really thought of it until it came up in the movie That Thing You Do.
I didn’t “get it” about the Beatles until that Simpsons episode about the Be Sharps (B#'s) in which Homer says something about having a clever, play on words name for their barbershop group that got steadily less amusing the more often you saw/heard it.
Huh, all this time I’d just assumed it was the British spelling of the word, comparable to the idiosyncratic pronunciations of “aluminum” and “jaguar”.
“And now, here they are … the OhNeeders!”