This afternoon, I have tickets for Carole and I to see “Yellow Submarine” on its 50th anniversary rerelease: “restored in 4k digital resolution . . . [with] the film’s photochemical elements . . . restored by hand, frame-by-frame [and] soundtrack and score . . . remixed in 5.1 stereo surround sound at Abbey Road Studios by mix engineer Peter Cobbin,” at least according to the promotional copy.
Technically, whoever’s distributing the film has jumped the gun; “Yellow Submarine” was not screened for the first time in the U.K. until July 17, 1968, according to the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia, and not in the U.S. until November 13 of that year.
Objectively, “Yellow Submarine” is not one of the classic great works of world cinema. It’s riddled with lame puns, the story arc is simplistic and obvious, and the Beatles -- whose songs inspired the project -- really had very little to do with the finished product, other than a brief live-action appearance for several minutes at the end.
The band’s songs dominate the soundtrack, of course, although only four were created expressly for the film and had never been released before (and one of those was cut from the version released in the U.S.). The rest were recycled from more than a year before (four cuts from Sgt. Pepper), or two years before (a pair from Revolver), and one was nearly three years old (from Rubber Soul).
But who could complain? The visual animation, in all its vibrancy and variety, was spectacular. The “retreads” (such as “Nowhere Man” and “Eleanor Rigby,” as well as the title cut that inspired the whole thing and the song that created the characters of Sgt. Pepper’s band) are among the Beatles’ best.
“Yellow Submarine” was one of a small handful of movies I saw on first run as a child. My father took the whole family to see it in Portland, my future home, as part of a vacation by train from downstate. I don’t have any particular memories of that first viewing (I was only 9 years old, after all), save that it was in a theater at the south end of downtown along Broadway, but I know it must have been on the movie’s first run because the next summer, 1969, we drove to Europe and lived there for the next two years.
“Yellow Submarine” would become my fail-safe, feel-good movie for the rest of my life. I’ve seen it roughly a dozen times over the years, nearly always on a big screen, though it’s probably been roughly two decades since my last viewing . . . of my VHS copy, mainly to see what the excised “Hey, Bulldog” sequence looked like.
The second time I caught it was at a U.S. Army base cinema outside Hanau, Germany in 1970. Ticket prices at that house were 25 cents for kids, 35 cents for adults. (The most a grownup would pay for a blockbuster feature was maybe a dollar.) I smuggled a tape recorder into the house and tape recorded most of the soundtrack . . . and was thoroughly annoyed when a couple of little Asian boys hooted loudly and suggestively (“wooh! wooh!”) in the seats directly behind me during the tamely risqué animated sequence for “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” I tried to shush them up, but apparently their parents weren’t with them. But then, neither were mine, and I was 11.
The third and fourth times were on network TV at my grandmother’s house back in Oregon in the early 1970s (because my family, next door, had no television), and I audio taped it at least once again. These recordings, to which I listened many times in my teens, drilled the soundtrack into my head, so by the time I got to college on the opposite end of the continent, I knew most of the dialogue cold. My college roommate recalls my reciting nearly the whole movie to him in the appropriate voices and dialects (probably without the songs, although we’d sing some of those back in our room with him accompanying on guitar) while we walked around the campus.
I’d like to say I must have seen “Yellow Submarine” a couple more times in the late Seventies and early Eighties on the giant screen at the Harvard Square Theater, a grand old cinema that overlooked Harvard Square, across the street from Harvard Yard and the center of the university campus.
The Harvard Square Theater opened in 1926, and though it always screened movies, over the years it also hosted “magic shows, vaudeville, and rock concerts” by such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Hall and Oates, the Clash, and Bruce Springsteen. By the time I was living in the area, the theater screened a different double feature of old films every night for a dollar, mostly from the 1960s and 1970a. I regard all the movies I saw there (including several I had recalled my mother raving about, such as “East of Eden” and “King of Hearts”) as an integral part of my college education. (The theater apparently shut down in 2012 and is poised to be replaced by a shiny new business complex.)
But I can't be certain I saw “Yellow Submarine” again there. What I DO remember, vividly, is trekking all the way out to the Stoneham Public Library for a free screening. That entailed riding the MBTA subways to the very end of the Orange Line, then taking a bus to the far northern suburb of Stoneham . . . and after the screening, an anxious hitchhike back into the city long after dark. Google Maps says Stoneham is nearly a dozen miles north of Boston; plus, I had to ride 4 miles west from Cambridge to get to the Orange Line downtown. Those were the days. (To the left, that’s a mammoth 2013 collection of background on every Beatles song -- recording dates, instrumentation, who sang and composed what, and the stories behind each composition -- which is well worth the price if you’re a fan like me.)
As I noted years ago on this blog, the Beatles formed the soundtrack for much of my life, as they did for so many others, not only in the U.S. and UK, but around the world. From the first song I heard on our kitchen stove radio when I was not quite 5 . . . to the beat-up used copies of many of their albums I bought in my early teens . . . to singing with my college roommate and his guitar (and being able to identify most songs simply by the bass line rumbling through the dorm walls, ceiling, or floor from other students’ suites) . . . to singing along with a crowd of some 500 at a Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle Center in the mid Nineties, the Beatles have been an ongoing presence in my life.
I’m sure I will thoroughly enjoy this tenth, twelfth, or whatever-it-is viewing.
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