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So sound-alike actors were quietly cast in their place: Paul Angelis as Ringo Starr, Geoffrey Hughes as Paul McCartney, and John Clive as John Lennon. The Beatles didn't make themselves available to record their lines - a fact that United Artists went to great lengths not to publicise. Another, which brought in the Beatle patter and surreal comedy in the style of The Goon Show, the BBC radio comedy so beloved of Lennon, was pulled together by an uncredited Roger McGough. One draft was submitted by Erich Segal, the writer of the Ali MacGraw-Ryan O'Neal romance Love Story.
#YELLOW SUBMARINE CARTOON PAUL SERIES#
The film was assembled as a series of musical set pieces because music - not just the Beatles' songs, but also a deluxe orchestral score composed and arranged by their producer, George Martin - was all the animators had to work with.
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Edelmann imagined them as red, but his assistant Millicent McMillan thought they suited blue better - and after she coloured his sketches, Edelmann agreed. His next task was designing the story's villain: a skeletal Davy Jones, of undersea locker fame, and his beguiling retinue of mermaids.Įdelmann hated the idea, and instead cooked up a menagerie of totalitarian oddballs called the Meanies - some with mouths in their stomachs, others wielding giant apples, others with Mickey Mouse ears, puffed-up chests and lewd noses. On Jenkins's recommendation, he contacted the Czech-born graphic designer Heinz Edelmann, who came up with the now-iconic quartet of long-limbed, rainbow-garbed Chagallian dreamers.Īs soon as Dunning saw the work, he hired Edelmann as the project's artistic director. And by proving the medium was good for so much more than fairy tales and slapstick, it lit the fuse on the animation boom of the late Eighties, out of which exploded everything from Pixar to The Simpsons and South Park.Īgainst this phantasmagoric backdrop, Dunning knew the Beatles' animated alter-egos had to be redesigned: the old Flintstones-esque look was now an obvious yabba-dabba-don't. It brought to British visual identity a new weirdness and wonder that paved the way for Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the mind-bending satire of Chris Morris. Watching Yellow Submarine today is like bearing witness to a pop-culture Big Bang - you realise trace elements are still around you wherever you look. If you've yet to see John, Paul, George and Ringo liberate the cod-Edwardian undersea kingdom of Pepperland from the music-hating Blue Meanies, this is an ideal opportunity to take the trip. And to mark its half-centenary, it is being screened around the UK tomorrow in a vivid new 4K restoration. It was 50 years ago today, or thereabouts, that Yellow Submarine chugged out of its dry dock and into cinema history. The three realised Sgt Pepper was about to change the course of popular music - so they swore to make a film to match it.
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It was this record, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, that Dunning, Coates and Stokes found themselves listening to six months later, in a state of mounting amazement. The Beatles gave their half-hearted assent - all they had to do was provide four new songs for the soundtrack - then returned to the studio to work on something they actually cared about: their next album. A few years earlier, the band had signed a three-picture deal with United Artists, and after A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), they still had one film left to make.īrodax saw animation as a two-birds-one-stone solution: it would require minimal input from the band, who were keen to leave their mop-top screen personas behind, and there was a proven international appetite.īrodax pitched the project as a pop take on Disney's Fantasia, plotted around their recent song Yellow Submarine, the lyrics of which already had the air of a gently psychedelic cartoon escapade. The Beatles themselves weren't overly enthused about their presence: the three men, George Dunning, John Coates and Jack Stokes, came from a studio called TVC, whose weekly Beatles cartoon for the American network ABC the band found so mortifying, they'd had it contractually blocked from being shown on British television.īut for all its sub-Hanna-Barbera crumminess, the series was a smash hit in the States - and its creator, Al Brodax, saw an opportunity to take it feature-length. They had come to hear the new Beatles LP, songs from which would make up at least part of the soundtrack for a new film they had in the works. In April 1967, three animators slunk into Abbey Road studios, unsure if they were trespassers or guests.