![]() ![]() And I think 'Hey Bulldog' is very surreal. Paul McCartney recalled one of John Lennon's lesser-known, yet beloved tracks, “Hey Bulldog” - which was actually recorded on the fly during the video shoot for “Lady Madonna” in February 1968 and a highlight of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack: “One of the things that I like about John's songwriting style is it's quirkiness. They just took the music, we met with them, (and) they basically talked about basically what they're going to do.” George Harrison recalled how the Beatles were hardly the creative force behind the acclaimed Yellow Submarine film project: “Actually, the thing I liked most about the movie was we really didn't have to do anything to ( laughs) do it. And kids from all over the bloody world were shouting at me: ( Imitates a child): 'Why did you press the button?!'” Ringo Starr explained that upon the film's initial release in 1968, younger Beatles fans couldn't differentiate between the animated Ringo character and the flesh and bone drummer: “The thing with that film that still blows me away is that, like, the first year it was out, I had all these kids coming up to me saying, ( Imitates a child): 'Why did you press the button?!' ( Laughs) 'Cause, y'know I press that button and get shot out. The lyrics will appear on the bottom of the screen so the whole world can sing together as one during the coronavirus lockdown.” ![]() Rolling Stone reported that the full movie would air on the Beatles' official YouTube channel at 12 Noon ET on Saturday (April 25th) as a “one-time-only special event. But it still has an irresistible late ’60s spirit all of its own.Beatles fans young and old have the chance to enjoy the “Fab Four's” Yellow Submarine animated movie this weekend. In Beatles terms it feels like a ‘Sgt Pepper’ side project with a load of other off-cuts and outside influences merrily chucked into the pot. They’re voiced, a bit oddly, by actors and only appear briefly in a larking-about epilogue. It has flashes of winning silly humour (‘What day is it?’ ‘Sitar-day’), and who can resist the submarine turning into a cigarette lighter to the tune of the Hamlet cigar commercial? The Beatles themselves didn’t give a great deal to the film. But when already-existing songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds’ kick in, the whole thing soars and makes a strange sort of psychedelic sense. The fantastical story is happily all over the place, and the handful of songs written especially for the film aren’t especially memorable. Only The Beatles can help, and so an old sailor pitches up to Liverpool in a Yellow Submarine to collect them and take them on a mission to defeat the Meanies. Clearly influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, ‘Yellow Submarine’ features a version of the band on the run through a series of hallucinogenic set-pieces involving bad folk called the Blue Meanies who are running riot in the seriously out-there Pepperland. ![]() ![]() But it’s weirder and scrappier than that, pitched somewhere dreamlike between childhood and adulthood. Now that the title track has become a nursery-school standard, you half expect this to be a kids’ cartoon. The Beatles put their name to no fewer than five films in their quick decade together, and while ‘Yellow Submarine’ isn’t the best of them (surely that’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’?), it’s the only one to feature their ‘Sgt Pepper’ alter-egos in a trippy animated fantasy that feels like a Terry Gilliam-designed album cover come to life. ![]()
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