When I tell people I have not ever seen Yellow Submarine before they are aghast. Partly it's surprise because I have a reputation I guess for having seen a lot of movies and no small number of animated ones. But for whatever reasons, I've never seen this epic from the latter days of "Beatelmania" when Sgt. Pepper's Heart Club Band was showing the way forward for popular music. Well I finally did and I enjoyed it immensely and I don't know that I'd have said the same thing if I'd had the chance much sooner.
The fact there was a comic book adaptation (which I've never read) also is a bit of a gap and a surprise since most all movies adapted to comics I've seen, at least those adapted since the era of "Camelot" in Washington D.C. The movie doesn't really make much linear sense, save for the most bare bones of plots which is a utopian land of somewhat dim but well-meaning folks come under attack by self-absorbed villains and an emissary is sent to gather an opposition. (This sounds like The Magnificent Seven but it ain't.) That force is the Beatles who don't so much spring into action as slowly amble toward the general area where action might be found at some point.
This is really an odyssey, and the Beatles not unlike Odysseus in the original or Alice in a more recent variant must come to a new awareness of how the universe works before they can successfully defend the utopian world and fend off the villains, who are in this story called "the Blue Meanies". The pop art designs are spirited evocations of a world only imagined and impossible critters occupy many bright corners of his wackadoodle universe. I've always assumed this was some sort of allegory for a drug trip, the "yellow submarine" sounding like some popular drug of the moment. Of course they win the day, but not without new understandings of the worlds they passed through.
Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo.
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Never seen the movie, never read the comicbook, but my brother had the 45 rpm single back in the '60s. I obtained a replacement for it many years ago. If I recall correctly (without checking) it was a double A side, Eleanor Rigby being the other song,
ReplyDeleteI did not grow up a Beatles fan necessarily but my late wife was a huge fan and turned me onto them over time.
DeleteThe voice of Paul McCartney in the film was actually Geoffrey Hughes who was unknown at the time but in the 1970s he became famous in the UK when he joined the cast of the soap-opera 'Coronation Street' which was Britain's most popular TV show.
ReplyDeleteSeems like every British actor I ever come across worked on Coronation Street at some point.
DeleteI saw it in the theater when it first came out & loved it. Still do! Filled with wit & visual delights in abundance. And then there are the songs, and the sheer Beatleness of it ...
ReplyDeleteAs for the "drug trip" aspect, certainly mind-expanding drugs were part of the times then. But everything trippy in art, music, etc., wasn't necessarily about taking a trip. Surrealism & stream-of-consciousness & Theater of the Absurd were also part of the times. (They could & often did coincide with taking a trip, of course.)
Tripping in a theater seems a somewhat scary idea to me. I've never done it but I'd want the security of a home and friends if I ever did.
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