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This article is about the Beatles' film. For the album and EP, see Magical Mystery Tour. For the song, see Magical Mystery Tour (song).

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Magical Mystery Tour
File:MMT poster.jpg
The 1988 VHS release cover art
Written byJohn Lennon
Paul McCartney
George Harrison
Ringo Starr
Directed byJohn Lennon
Paul McCartney
George Harrison
Ringo Starr
Bernard Knowles (uncredited)
StarringJohn Lennon
Paul McCartney
George Harrison
Ringo Starr
Jessie Robins
Vivian Stanshall
Mal Evans
Ivor Cutler
Derek Royle
Victor Spinetti
Miranda Forbes
Narrated byJohn Lennon
ComposersThe Beatles
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
Shirley Evans (accordionist)
Country of originUnited Kingdom
Original languageEnglish
Production
ProducersJohn Lennon
Paul McCartney
George Harrison
Ringo Starr
Gavrik Losey
Dennis O'Dell
CinematographyDaniel Lacambre
Richard Starkey M.B.E.
EditorRoy Benson
Running time52 minutes
Production companiesApple Corps
BBC
Release
Original networkBBC1
Original release26 December 1967 (1967-12-26)

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Magical Mystery Tour is a 52-minute-long British television film starring the Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) which originally aired on BBC1 on Boxing Day, 26 December 1967. Upon its initial showing, the film was poorly received by critics and audiences.[1] The film received an American theatrical release in 1974 by New Line Cinema, and in select theatres worldwide in 2012 by Apple Films.[2][3]

Plot[]

The situation is that of a group of people on a British mystery tour[4] in a 1967 coach, focusing mostly on Mr Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr) and his recently widowed Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robins). Other group members on the bus include the tour director, Jolly Jimmy Johnson (Derek Royle); the tour hostess, Miss Wendy Winters (Miranda Forbes, credited as Mandy Weet); the conductor, Buster Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler); and the other Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison).

During the course of the tour, "strange things begin to happen" at the whim of "four or five magicians", four of whom are played by the Beatles themselves and the fifth by the band's long-time road manager Mal Evans.

During the journey, Ringo and his Aunt Jessie argue continually. Aunt Jessie begins to have daydreams of falling in love with Buster Bloodvessel, who displays increasingly eccentric and disturbing behaviour. The tour involves several strange activities, such as an impromptu race in which each of the passengers employs a different mode of transportation (some run, a few jump into cars, a group of people have a long bike they pedal, while Ringo ends up beating them all with the bus). In one scene, the tour group walk through what appears to be a British Army recruitment office and are greeted by the army drill sergeant (Victor Spinetti). (McCartney appears briefly as "Major McCartney", on whose desk rests a sign reading "I you WAS".) The sergeant, shouting incomprehensibly, appears to instruct the assembled onlookers on how to attack a stuffed cow.

The tour group also crawl into a tiny tent in a field, inside which is a projection theatre. A scene in a restaurant shows a waiter (played by Lennon) repeatedly shovelling spaghetti onto the table in front of Aunt Jessie, while arriving guests step out from a lift and walk across the dining tables. The film continues with the tour's male passengers watching a strip show (Jan Carson of the Raymond Revuebar). The film ends with the Beatles dressed in white tuxedos, highlighting a glamourous old-style dance crowd scene, accompanied by the song "Your Mother Should Know".

The film is interspersed with musical interludes, which include the Beatles performing "I Am the Walrus" wearing animal masks, Harrison singing "Blue Jay Way" while waiting on Blue Jay Way Road, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performing Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes' "Death Cab For Cutie" sung by Stanshall.

Initial idea[]

The movie was an attempt to combine the free-wheeling fun of Ken Kesey's 1964 cross-country American bus tour aboard "Further" with the Merry Pranksters,[5] and the then-popular charabanc trips from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights. [6] [7] In The Beatles Anthology, Lennon states that "if stage shows were to be out, we wanted something to replace them. Television was the obvious answer."[8] Most of the band members have said that the initial idea was McCartney’s, although he stated, "I’m not sure whose idea Magical Mystery Tour was. It could have been mine, but I’m not sure whether I want to take the blame for it! We were all in on it – but a lot of the material at that time could have been my idea."[8] Prior to the movie, McCartney had been creating home movies and this was a source of inspiration for Magical Mystery Tour.[8]

Production[]

File:The Beatles magical mystery tour.jpg

Pictured while filming a sequence for "I Am the Walrus"

The film was unscripted and shooting proceeded on the basis of a mostly handwritten collection of ideas, sketches and situations, which McCartney called the "Scrupt". Magical Mystery Tour was ultimately the shortest of all Beatles films, although almost ten hours of footage was shot over a two-week period. The core of the film was shot between 11 September and 25 September 1967.[9]

The next eleven weeks were mostly spent on editing the film from ten hours to 52 minutes. Scenes that were filmed but not included in the final cut include:

  • A sequence where ice cream, fruit and lollipops were sold to the Beatles and other coach passengers;
  • Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr each looking through a telescope;
  • Happy Nat the Rubber Man (Nat Jackley) chasing women around the Atlantic Hotel's outdoor swimming pool, a sequence which Lennon directed;[10]
  • Mr Bloodvessel performing I'm Going in a Field; and
  • The band Traffic performing their song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush".

Much of Magical Mystery Tour was shot in and around RAF West Malling, a now-decommissioned airfield in Kent.[11] [12] Many of the interior scenes, such as the ballroom sequence for "Your Mother Should Know", were filmed in the disused aircraft hangars. The exteriors, such as the "I Am the Walrus" sequence and the impromptu race, were shot on the runways and taxi aprons. RAF Air Training Corps cadets can be seen marching in some scenes, and during "I Am the Walrus" a RAF Avro Shackleton is seen orbiting the group.

File:Magical Mystery Tour bus Bedford VAL Plaxton Panorama II OOR 320G.jpg

Replica bus of the same type and livery used in the film.

The mystery tour itself was shot throughout the West Country of England, including Devon and Cornwall,[13] although most of the footage was not used in the finished film. The striptease sequence was shot at Paul Raymond's Raymond Revuebar in London's Soho district, and the sequence for "The Fool on the Hill" was shot around Nice, in the south of France.

The Magical Mystery Tour movie was made, but the hoped-for "magical" adventures never happened. During the filming, an ever greater number of cars followed the hand-lettered bus, hoping to see what its passengers were up to, until a running traffic jam developed. The spectacle ended after Lennon angrily tore the lettering off the sides of the bus.

The coach used in the film, a Plaxton-bodied Bedford VAL, carried the registration number URO 913E. The vehicle was new to coach company Fox of Hayes in 1967. The Hard Rock Cafe acquired the coach in 1988, and the vehicle is now completely refurbished.[14] In the race, Starr himself drives the bus around the airfield racetrack.

Script[]

The script of Magical Mystery Tour was largely improvised. The Beatles gathered together a group of people for the cast and camera crew, and told them to "be on the coach on Monday morning".[8] The film was made up along the way. Starr recalled: "Paul had a great piece of paper – just a blank piece of white paper with a circle on it. The plan was: 'We start here, and we’ve got to do something here …' We filled it in as we went along."[8] Lennon recalled in a later interview, "We knew most of the scenes we wanted to include, but we bent our ideas to fit the people concerned, once we got to know our cast. If somebody wanted to do something we hadn’t planned, they went ahead. If it worked, we kept it in."[8] At one point, Lennon had a dream in which he was a waiter piling spaghetti on a woman’s plate, so the sequence was filmed and included in the movie.[15] Some of the older actors, such as Nat Jackley, were not familiar with productions without a script and were disappointed by the lack of one.[8]

Criticism[]

The British public's reaction to the film was scathing. Magical Mystery Tour initially aired in the United Kingdom as a made-for-television film on BBC1. George Martin, the band's producer, explained: "When it came out originally on British television, it was a colour film shown in black and white, because they didn’t have colour on BBC1 in those days. It looked awful and was a disaster."[16] The film was shown in colour on BBC2 a few days later, but there were only about 200,000 colour TV receivers in the UK at the time.[17]

Hunter Davies, the band's official biographer, said that "It was the first time in memory that an artist felt obliged to make a public apology for his work."[18] McCartney later spoke to the press, saying: "We don't say it was a good film. It was our first attempt. If we goofed, then we goofed. It was a challenge and it didn't come off. We'll know better next time."[19] He also said, "I mean, you couldn’t call the Queen’s speech a gas, either, could you?"[20] With the passage of time, however, McCartney changed his view of the production, saying: "Looking back on it, I thought it was all right. I think we were quite pleased with it." He also noted in The Beatles Anthology DVD that the film features the band's only video performance of "I Am the Walrus".

The film carries a 58% approval rating at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on twelve professional reviews.[21] In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe notes the similarity between Magical Mystery Tour and the exploits of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In 1978 the film was parodied by the Rutles in their Tragical History Tour, "a self-indulgent TV movie about four Oxford history professors on a tour around Rutland tea-shops".

Distribution[]

File:Magical Mystery Tour New Line 1974.jpg

1974 re-release theatrical movie poster for Magical Mystery Tour by New Line Cinema, Mystical Films.

The poor critical reaction to the telecast soured American television networks from acquiring rights to the film, while its one-hour running length made it commercially unviable for theatrical release.[22]

In his Diaries 1969–1979: The Python Years, Michael Palin reveals that the Monty Python team considered showing the film as a curtain-raiser to their 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They received permission from all four Beatles to view the film, and did so at Apple on 10 January 1975. Although the Pythons were interested, the idea did not go ahead.[23]

The film had its first US presentation in 1968 at the Fillmore East in New York City on Sunday, 11 August, shown at 8 and 10 pm, as part of a fundraiser for the Liberation News Service. However, it was not seen in commercial theatres in the US until 1974, when New Line Cinema acquired the rights for limited theatrical and non-theatrical distribution.[2] It first played on American television in the 1987 as part of a syndicated release.

Restoration[]

The critical reception in 1967 had been so poor that no one had properly archived a negative, and later re-release versions had to be copied from poor-quality prints.[citation needed] By the end of the 1980s, MPI, through rights holder Apple Corps, had released the movie on video, and a DVD release followed many years later.

A restored version of the film was broadcast in the UK on BBC Two and BBC HD on 6 October 2012, following an Arena documentary on its making.[1] Both were shown in the United States as part of Great Performances on PBS ten weeks later on 14 December.[24][25]

On 22 August 2012, Apple Corps (via Apple Films) announced a re-release of the film on DVD and Blu-ray along with a limited theatrical release, remastered with 5.1 surround sound. The DVD/Blu-ray was released on 8 October worldwide, with the exception of North America (9 October).[26] The new release included an audio commentary from McCartney and special features including interviews (from former Beatles and others involved with the project) and never-before-seen footage. Also released is a deluxe edition "collectors box" featuring the film on both DVD and Blu-ray, in addition to a 60-page book, and a reproduction of the original mono UK double 7" vinyl EP.

The 2012 remastered Magical Mystery Tour DVD entered the Billboard Top Music Video chart at number 1 for the week ending 27 October 2012.[27]

Songs[]

File:Magical Mystery Tour Bedford VAL Plaxton Panorama Elite II.jpg

A coach of the same model used in the film, painted in Magical Mystery Tour livery, in Liverpool

The songs in order of their use in the movie, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney unless otherwise indicated:

  1. "Magical Mystery Tour"
  2. "The Fool on the Hill"
  3. "She Loves You" (played on a fairground organ as part of the general medley of background music during the impromptu race)
  4. "Flying" (John Lennon / Paul McCartney / George Harrison / Richard Starkey)
  5. "All My Loving" (orchestrated, as background music)
  6. "I Am the Walrus"
  7. "Jessie’s Dream" (instrumental piece, not released on any audio recording)
  8. "Blue Jay Way" (George Harrison)
  9. "Death Cab for Cutie" performed by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (Vivian Stanshall / Neil Innes)
  10. "Your Mother Should Know"
  11. "Magical Mystery Tour" (part, once more)
  12. "Hello, Goodbye" (part, finale played over end credits)

Home video release history[]

USA

Year Company Format(s) Comments
1978 Media-Home Entertainment VHS/Betamax Originally taken off the market due to a successful lawsuit filed in 1980,[28] Media and Northern later reached an agreement for its re-release one year later. Unique Identification info: Title song has a unique voice track "roll-up roll-up" introduction by Lennon and first scenes of the bus zooming in and out show stars with scratchy lines above, to show a falling effect. Overall film has washed-out colour and audio that is not very high quality.
1988 Video Collection/Apple VHS and Laserdisc With a digitally re-mixed and remastered soundtrack by producer George Martin. Unique Identification info: Title song still has the unique voice track "roll-up roll-up" introduction (now in clean remixed stereo) and first scenes of the bus zooming in and out still show stars with scratchy lines above to show a falling effect (later releases change this). Overall film has much sharper colour and remixed Dolby Stereo audio with nice separation and quality. This release's collector importance is the clean stereo version of the title song with the unique voice track intro - which in future releases will no longer be used.
1992 MPI/Apple Laserdisc
1997 MPI/Apple DVD First DVD release of Magical Mystery Tour. Unique Identification info: Title song now uses the standard album song version with its standard "roll-up roll-up" introduction, and first scenes of the bus zooming in and out with falling stars has been removed and replaced with a looping of the intro graphic. Overall film video is the same cleaned up 1988 VHS release and the audio (after the title song mix change) retains the same standard stereo remixing as well (no surround 5.1 mixes).
2003 Avenue One DVD Bootleg of the MPI DVD.
2012 Apple DVD
2012 Apple Blu-ray First Blu-ray release of Magical Mystery Tour. Unique Identification info: Title song still uses the standard album song version, with its familiar "roll-up roll-up" introduction, and first scenes of the bus zooming in and out with falling stars has been restored, yet the falling stars do not show the scratched vertical lines above them. Overall film video is cleaned up to 2012 technology standards and the audio has been remixed to include a new 5.1 surround sound mix in various formats. This version also includes new bonus features such as a Director's Commentary by Paul McCartney.

UK

Year Company Format(s) Comments
1980s Empire Films VHS
1988 MPI/Apple VHS and Laserdisc With a digitally re-mixed and remastered soundtrack by George Martin
1997 MPI/Apple DVD First DVD release of Magical Mystery Tour
2012 Apple DVD
2012 Apple Blu-ray First Blu-ray release of Magical Mystery Tour

Bus tour of Liverpool[]

A bus tour of Liverpool, marketed as the Magical Mystery Tour, has operated since 1983. The tour visits places associated with the Beatles, such as childhood homes, Strawberry Field and Penny Lane. The tour was originally operated by a Bedford VAL coach as in the film, but more modern vehicles are now used.[29]

References[]

Template:Lacking ISBN

  1. 1.0 1.1 "Arena – The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, 1. Magical Mystery Tour Revisited" at bbc.co.uk Broadcast 6 October 2012.
  2. 2.0 2.1 "Magical Mystery Tour (TV Movie 1967)". IMDb.
  3. "In Theatres".
  4. "A pleasure excursion to an unspecified destination" as per Entry: mystery tour", Oxford Dictionaries
  5. "Magical Mystery Tour".
  6. "Blackpool Lights coach trip from Liverpool, Widnes and Birkenhead".
  7. George Harrison in Chapter 7.4 of The Beatles Anthology
  8. 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 Beatles, the: Beatles Anthology, p. 272. Chronicle Books, 2000.
  9. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle (London: Pyramid Books, Hamlyn, 1992, ISBN 0-600-61001-2), p. 267
  10. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle (London: Pyramid Books, Hamlyn, 1992, ISBN 0-600-61001-2), p. 264
  11. "The Beatles' bubbly", BBC, 25 January 2007.
  12. Kent Film Office. "Kent Film Office Magical Mystery Tour Article".
  13. "Beatles 'mystery' film discovered", BBC. 19 April 2005.
  14. Raul (2010). "Info about the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour bus". Retrieved 28 January 2013.
  15. Beatles Anthology. Dir. Bob Smeaton. 1995.
  16. Beatles, the: Beatles Anthology, p. 274. Chronicle Books, 2000.
  17. BBC. "The 1960s – Television". BBC. Retrieved 6 October 2012.
  18. "Take a Ride Through The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour". CBS Local Media. Retrieved 22 September 2012.
  19. Beatles Database 1967. BeatleBoy pages. Geocities.com.
  20. Davis, Andy: The Beatles Files, page 127. CLB, 1998.
  21. "Magical Mystery Tour". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 26 March 2015.
  22. "Magical Mystery Tour (TV Movie 1967)". IMDb.
  23. Palin, Michael. Diaries 1969–1979: The Python Years. NY: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006.
  24. "Magical Mystery Tour Revisited on THIRTEEN's Great Performances Friday, December 14 at 9 p.m. on PBS," WNET press release.
  25. "The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour airs on THIRTEEN's Great Performances Friday, December 14 at 10 p.m. on PBS," WNET press release.
  26. "Roll up! Roll up! The Beatles invite you to make a reservation for the Magical Mystery Tour". Apple Corps. 22 August 2012. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
  27. Billboard magazine Top Music Video chart, week ending 27 October 2012.
  28. "Beatles videos".
  29. "Magical Mystery Tour". Cavern Club. Retrieved 11 August 2015.

External links[]

Template:Magical Mystery Tour Template:Beatles filmography and videography Template:Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band Template:The Beatles

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