Yesterday and Toomorrow
Olivia Newton-John has certainly achieved any number of lofty career goals: hit records, movies, international stardom. But she could have been as big as the Archies!
After winning a talent contest in Australia and relocating to England, Olivia was chosen as one-fourth of a cartoon quartet of superhero/superstars called Toomorrow.
This was a project of Don Kirshner’s following his immensely successful publishing ventures of the early ’60s and his construction of the Monkees and the all-animated Archies a bit later. Toomorrow was apparently intended as something of a cross between those last two entities, but it didn’t really get off the ground (although the single pictured did emerge briefly).
Olivia was freed to pursue her own career, hitting with George Harrison’s “If Not For You” in 1971 and keeping up the pace since then as if there were no Toomorrow.
By Ken Barnes