Queen album cover inspired by cartoon?

My parents had Queen's "News of the World" on 8-track when I was about 6 or 7. It still worked about 8 years later when I was beginning to broaden my musical horizons and actively seeking 8-track tape players at garage sales. It's hard to forget the image on the cover, even if it was only two or three inches square on the front of the 8-track tape.



Fast forward to last year. A 1950s cartoon hidden in a rack of $1 dvds. The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird. (Alternate titles: "Le Roi et L'Oiseau" or "The King and the Mockingbird" or "The Shepherdess and The Chimneysweep.") The title is underwhelming. Anthropomorphic animals aren't usually my bag. But the cover shows a fantastical city in the background and a giant robot aiming a ray from its eye. (Turns out to be just a normal light projected from its eye, but you had me at giant robot.) For a buck, I'll risk it.



The voice of the bird is Peter Ustinov (a legendary actor whose career I'll minimize by saying that my fellow geeks may remember him as the old man at the end of Logan's Run), and the animation is smooth, the style is unique, the story somewhat darker than your average cartoon.

Halfway through, the evil king activates a giant robot to stomp through the city and find the shepherdess he loves. The robot's head is different and the fingertips are pointed, but I couldn't help wondering if the artist of that Queen album cover was thinking back to this cartoon s/he might have seen 25 years earlier. Maybe it's just archetypal that a giant robot is going to hold humans in its palm in a way that's tender yet threatening.

Post-Script update: An anonymous commenter pointed out that Queen's News of the World album art was based on the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.