This is for the benefit of those of you who found as little information as I did on Google about MySQL converting dates to Binary when using DATE_FORMAT, or just about any other formatting function inside your SQL. Now, I could have sworn I'd tried this before, but I must have been high on Pepsi. Anyway, here's the SQL that was giving me binary data:

DATE_FORMAT(tbl.field,'%Y-%m-01')

And here's what I did to make it work...:

CONVERT(DATE_FORMAT(tbl.field,'%Y-%m-01'),CHAR)

Your mileage may vary, but enjoy :)