Yellow Submarine

Part 1 - Background and Production

Of all the official Beatles movies of the sixties, the animated feature, Yellow Submarine, is perhaps the one with the strangest production genesis. Unlike their previous television feature, the Beatles personally had very little involvement in its production history. However, the labyrinthine twists and turns that led to the film’s eventual production pre-date the Magical Mystery Tour episode by a considerable period, and to trace the film’s origins we must briefly backtrack to 1964.

During that year, Epstein had been approached by an ambitious Hungarian-American cartoon producer, Al Brodax, whose company, King Features, had been responsible for the evergreen Popeye series. With the outbreak of Beatlemania, Brodax wanted to produce an American cartoon series starring the group and their songs. Epstein, although slightly reluctant to have his increasingly stoical assets trivialized into cartoon characters, saw no far-reaching or harmful consequences in the venture and struck a deal with Brodax. Thus began, in September 1965, a series of cartoon shorts starring the group in around sixty short animated adventures in which the ‘moptop’ Beatles were chased around (Help!-style) by an assortment of weird and wonderful characters and fans. The series, which based its episode titles on their songs, was networked on US television by ABC, but not shown on British television until much later, and then only in one TV region.1 Despite this, it proved extremely popular internationally, eventually running for two years and earning the Beatles and Epstein 50 per cent of the project’s profits.2

In their initial dealings Epstein had promised Brodax the group’s cooperation for a feature film if the series turned out to be successful. In 1966, Brodax reminded Epstein of his promise and succeeded in getting him to agree to endorse the project with the Beatles’ names and four new original songs for the soundtrack. Neither Epstein nor the Beatles had been particularly keen on the idea but, according to McCabe and Schonfeld, they saw the film as ‘a means of fulfilling their obligation to provide United Artists with a third film’.3 This, as we shall see in the next chapter, turned out to be a misplaced judgement.

Production began in 1967 and was initially envisaged by Brodax to be a kind of Fantasia-style production which, like the cartoon series, would be heavily based on the imagery and allusions of the group’s contemporary recordings. As Brodax later commented, ‘We derived a lot from the Sergeant Pepper album. We took the word "pepper", which is positive, spicy, and created a place called Pepperland which is full of colour and music. But in the hills around live Blue Meanies, who hate colour, hate everything positive.’4 The production itself was financed by Brodax’s American company and produced (for $lmillion5) through TVC (TV Cartoons) in London. The director was the Canadian animator, George Dunning, and the writing credits were shared by Brodax, Lee Minoff, Jack Mendelsohn and Erich Segal, a professor of Greek and Latin at Yale, who later wrote the hugely successful Love Story (1970). In some ways, the employment of Dunning as director mirrored that of Lester some years earlier for A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Like Lester, Dunning had worked in commercials during the fifties and, again like the American director, his approach to film­making married commercial instinct with avant-garde sensibilities. As well as having worked on avant-garde shorts like Cadet Rouselle (1945), Dunning had also gained invaluable experience with more commercial ventures (in the early fifties he had worked in America at UPA on The Gerald McBoing Boing Show), and by the time he moved to London and set up TVC in 1956 his experience and aptitude for stylistic breadth took in a breathtaking range of influences derived from experience gleaned from living and working in Canada, Paris and America. Five years before Yellow Submarine, his short film The Flying Man (1962) had won the Grand Prix at the Annecy International Animation Festival.

The fantasy story of the feature was based on an idea by Lee Minoff, in turn derived from the Lennon and McCartney title track which, as well as appearing as one half of the highly successful ‘Eleanor Rigby’ double A-side single, was also a hugely popular album track from the 1966 album release, Revolver. Although the Beatles were not closely involved with the making of the film, which included work by two hundred animators worldwide, McCartney gave his blessing to Minoff’s first screenplay outline which, according to Lewisohn, is dated November 1966 and states the following objective: ‘The goal should be nothing less than to take animation beyond anything seen before in style, class and tone, but avoiding the precious and pretentious.’6 However, achieving this objective proved no small task and, according to actor Paul Angelis, the script underwent fourteen re­writes before it was finally completed.7 Moreover, it has been suggested that other uncredited writers were involved in the project, most notably Roger McGough, the Mersey poet and member of the pop group the Scaffold, who, according to Angelis, ‘wrote a lot of the Beatles’ dialogue’.8

What is certain is that neither Apple nor the Beatles had much involvement in the film’s production. Indeed, although the film credits state the film to be an Apple Presentation (which Denis O’Dell negotiated to ‘make it more official’,9) the Beatles’ contribution was limited to the four contractually enforced original songs, a few minor script ideas, and a brief appearance at the film’s closure, again negotiated by O’Dell, who also tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to get the Beatles to lend their own voices to the project.10 In the end, the Beatles’ voices were dubbed by actors and even the idea of producing four original songs was treated with marginal disdain by the group. As George Martin explains, ‘Their reaction was, "OK, we’ve got to supply them with these bloody songs, but we’re not going to fall over backwards providing them. We’ll let them have them whenever we feel like it, and we’ll give them whatever we think is all right.’11 In the event, the Beatles grudgingly honoured Epstein’s commitment and provided the film soundtrack with four new numbers, ‘It’s All Too Much’, ‘Only a Northern Song’, ‘Hey Bulldog’ and ‘All Together Now’. While I shall discuss later what I consider to be the frequently overlooked merits of this material, it must be conceded that the songs were, at least in part, culled from sources external to the film itself. The second number (a Harrison composition) had been a left-over from the Sergeant Pepper LP, and ‘It’s All Too Much’, another Harrison number, dated from May 1967. However, although the group were initially sceptical about the film, thinking that it would put their newly acquired, more ‘serious’ image back several years, they had a massive change of heart when they saw the film in its almost finished state and were, in Barrow’s words, ‘So pleased with the way the whole production had been put together that they were only too happy to associate themselves with it more closely from then on.’12

Continued... Yellow Submarine: Part two

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008