From the very beginning of their career, The Beatles were a
multi-media project. Sure, Elvis’s hips rattled small screen variety shows and
corny matinee features and The Monkees had their own weekly series and starred
in a fabulously avant garde big screen flop, but The Beatles not only appeared
on TV with great regularity and variety (let’s not forget their charmingly cheesy
cartoon alter-egos that mesmerized kids every Saturday morning from 1965 to
1967), but they made their own promo videos even before The Monkees went on
the air, appeared in live action and animated feature films, often allowed
cameras to capture their concert and studio work, and even recorded on live TV
for an international audience. With so much material, nearly every one of the
whopping 28 number one hits they scored in the UK and US has its very own
visual document.
The Beatles’ latest multi-media project groups those
videos—and more on a limited deluxe edition—with Giles’s Martin’s stereo remix
of the 2000 compilation Beatles 1. The
videos provide a nifty and swift romp through the Beatlestory, as we see them
shake stages and rooftops, mime in absurd circumstances that find Ringo working
an exercise bike instead of a set of Ludwigs and George pretending to sing into
a punching bag, float through London on an acid cloud, transform into cartoon
characters adrift on a yellow submarine, and make goo goo eyes at their wives.
Most of this material has already been available to anyone
who owns the old Beatles Anthology
DVD or has bookmarked YouTube, so the big news is the new HD restoration. Quite
a bit of expectation management is necessary to appreciate the visual quality
since a lot of these clips are upscaled from video. The filmed clips are the ones captured at their native frame rates, and some of them are
excessively grainy and soft. However, if you A/B them against the versions that
appeared on The Beatles Anthology
discs, you can see how much improvement went into each clip, and some of them
are genuinely dazzling, particularly the McCartney-directed “Hello, Goodbye”
video in which the guys’ Sgt. Pepper’s costumes are so vivid you’ll think a tab
of acid was included as a blu-ray bonus. I noticed neither scratches
nor blemishes— neither irritating NR nor edge enhancement.
Giles Martin’s remixes won’t necessarily box your ears
either. Don’t expect to hear new sounds not present in the original mixes or
the 1999 Yellow Submarine Songtrack remix.
However, playing these remixes against the originals does reveal better balance
and more forceful sound without excessive loudness. Martin clearly approached these old recordings with a light
hand out of respect for recordings that really didn’t need to be monkeyed with.
Bonuses on the video discs include introductions for “Penny
Lane”, “Hello, Goodbye”, “Hey Jude”, and “Get Back” (and “Strawberry Fields
Forever” on the limited edition disc) from Ringo that mostly consist of
laughing, goofy descriptions of what’s happening on screen, and peace-sign
flashing. He provides the most detail about the rooftop concert. Paul
McCartney’s commentaries over all those videos (except “Get Back”) are
considerably more detailed. He doesn’t spill anything revelatory. The
extra disc included in the limited deluxe edition, however, is far more than a
nifty bonus. With clips for such essential tracks as “Strawberry Fields
Forever” (perhaps the most beautiful restoration of all), “Revolution”, “A Day
in the Life”, and “Rain”, and relative oddities such as “Hey Bulldog”, this
disc really rounds out the story with some of the very, very best Beatles songs.
It also provides opportunities to see the band working in the studio, getting
really weird, and hanging out with Mike Nesmith that the main disc does not.
