A few years ago I found out that my Beatles-fan brother had not yet seen a certain 1967 television opus. I asked why he hadn't sought out that essential slice of Fab Four 'merchandise'.
"I'm afraid I'll be disappointed."
This Beatles fan, if not quite "fanatical", enjoyed the group's first foray into "personal filmmaking". While this Magical Mystery Tour might not exactly be magical, it has its appeal for some of us.
"They're coming to take me away!"
Willingly I went along for the bus ride, sharing the "coach", as they call tour buses in the UK, with an assortment of interesting and odd characters. Through the frequent stops in various towns, villages, and fields, the crowd's buffoonery becomes the scenery. The production involved a lot of made-up shenanigans, and at times it shows. There is that unscripted "let's just have fun" vibe to most of the 53-minute running time. And there are those great Beatles songs to give the picture some solid ground, even if a lyric mentions a walrus and we see a "walrus", and a line speaks of a "fool on the hill" and what we get is Paul McCartney playing not so much a fool, but a bored-looking bloke standing still — on a hill.
Though critics at the time of MMT's original television showing in December of 1967 complained of being bored stiff, today's rearview mirror of some 50-plus years rates the flick as an interesting, if not exactly absorbing, artifact. Unique among the telly tableau of the mid-sixties, the Beatles-authored experimental film certainly plays better today... though many fans now still list this particular, and perhaps peculiar, creative tour as a rare Fab Four trip.
The DVD contains a few extra features: I'm interested to hear what Magical Mystery Tour booking agent and organizer Paul McCartney has to say....
Postscript: In the mid-sixties, the vast majority of British households had monochromatic (black-and-white) television sets. As the flick was shot in colour, and done so with little or no regard for that spectral fact, a lot of visual tricks, like picture "posterization", were lost, and appeared to viewers as shades-of-gray mush instead of the intended creative splash of chromatics. This unfortunate anomaly did not cast any magic spell on the BBC1 audience, that Boxing Day evening of 1967.
Magical Mystery Tour
Made by
The Beatles
EMI Records Limited
2012
1 comment:
Whenever I read or write "The Beatles" I hear Margaret Meehan's voice.
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