Magical Mystery Tour (film)

Magical Mystery Tour
The 1988 VHS release cover art
Directed by	Bernard Knowles The Beatles
Produced by	John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr Gavrik Losey Dennis O'Dell
Written by	John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr
Starring	John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr Jessie Robins Vivian Stanshall Mal Evans Ivor Cutler Derek Royle Victor Spinetti
Music by	The Beatles The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band Shirley Evans (accordianist)
Cinematography	Daniel Lacambre
Studio	Apple Corps BBC
Distributed by	New Line Cinema
Release date(s)	26 December 1967 (1967-12-26)
Running time	52 min.
Language	English

Magical Mystery Tour is an 53-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. The film was rereleased theatrically in 1974 by New Line Cinema in the U.S. and in select theatres worldwide in 2012 by Apple Films.

Plot

The situation is that of a group of people on a British mystery tour (in a Bedford VAL Panorama 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 (Mandy Weet), the conductor, Buster Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler), and the other Beatles.

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 long-time road manager Mal Evans.

During the journey, Ringo and his Aunt Jessie argue continually. During the tour, 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 tour group member 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). There is a strange scene where the group walks through what appears to be a British Army recruitment office and are greeted by the army drill sergeant (Victor Spinetti) (Paul appears briefly as "Major McCartney", on whose desk rests a sign reading "I WAS you"). The sergeant, shouting incomprehensibly, appears to instruct the assembled onlookers on how to attack a stuffed cow. The entire tour group also crawls into a tiny tent in a field, inside which is a projection theatre. The film continues with the men of the tour group watching a strip show (Jan Carson of the Raymond Revuebar), and ends with an old-style dance scene to "Your Mother Should Know".

The film is punctuated by musical interludes, which include the Beatles performing "I Am the Walrus" wearing animal masks, George 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's "Death Cab For Cutie" sung by Stanshall.

Initial idea

In The Beatles Anthology, John Lennon states that "if stage shows were to be out, we wanted something to replace them. Television was the obvious answer." Most of the band members have said that the initial idea was Paul 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.” Prior to the movie, McCartney had been creating home movies and this was a source of inspiration for Magical Mystery Tour.

Production

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, though nearly ten hours of footage was shot over a two-week period. The core of the film was shot beginning on 11 September and finishing on 25 September.

The following 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,
• John, Paul, George and Ringo 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.
• Ivor Cutler's 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 the film was shot in and around RAF West Malling, a now-decommissioned airfield in Kent. Many of the interior scenes, such as the final ballroom sequence for "Your Mother Should Know", were shot in the disused aircraft hangars. The exteriors, such as the "I Am the Walrus" sequence and the impromptu race, were filmed 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.

The mystery tour itself was shot throughout the West Country of England, including Devon and Cornwall, although most of the footage was not used in the finished film. The final striptease sequence was shot at Paul Raymond's Raymond Revuebar in London, and the sequence for "The Fool on the Hill" was shot around Nice, France. The visual sequence for the instrumental "Flying" uses aerial footage which was shot on black and white film that had originally been photographed for Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove; it was lab-tinted for inclusion in the sequence.

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 is a Plaxton-bodied Bedford VAL Panorama I, licence 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.

Script

The script of Magical Mystery Tour was very informal. 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". The film was made up along the way. Ringo 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." 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." 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. Some of the older actors, such as Nat Jackley, were not familiar with the absence of a script and were disappointed with the lack of one.

Criticism

The British public's reaction to the film was scathing. The film initially aired in the United Kingdom as a made-for-television film on BBC1. It was broadcast in black and white, although the film was shot in colour. The Beatles and the others they worked with on the film felt this was one of the main reasons it received bad reviews. George Martin, the band's producer, said: “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." 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.

Hunter Davies, the band's biographer, said: "It was the first time in memory that an artist felt obliged to make a public apology for his work." Paul 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." McCartney also said, "I mean, you couldn’t call the Queen’s speech a gas, either, could you?". However, with the passage of time, 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".

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe notes the similarity between this film 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

1974 rerelease 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 the film, while its one-hour running length made it commercially unviable for theatrical release.

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.

The film had its first U.S. presentation in 1968 at the Fillmore East in New York City, Sunday, August 11, shown at 8:00 and 10:00 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. 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 these 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. Both were shown in the United States as part of Great Performances on PBS ten weeks later on 14 December.

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). The new release included an audio commentary from Paul McCartney along with 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 No. 1 for the week ending October 27, 2012.

Songs

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:

1. "Magical Mystery Tour"
2. "The Fool on the Hill"
3. "Baby, You're A Rich Man"
4. "She Loves You" (played on a fairground organ as part of the general medley of background music during the impromptu race)
5. "Flying"
6. "Hello Goodbye"
7. "All My Loving" (orchestrated, as background music)
8. "Strawberry Fields Forever"
9. "I Am the Walrus"
10. "All You Need Is Love"
11. "Jessie’s Dream" (instrumental piece, not released on any audio recording)
12. "Blue Jay Way"
13. "Penny Lane"
14. "Death Cab for Cutie" performed by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
15. "Your Mother Should Know"
16. "Magical Mystery Tour" (part, once more)
17. "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, Media and Northern later reached an agreement for its re-release one year later.
1988	Video Collection/Apple	VHS and Laserdisc	With a digitally re-mixed and re-mastered soundtrack by producer George Martin
1992	MPI/Apple	Laserdisc
1997	MPI/Apple	DVD	First DVD release of Magical Mystery Tour
2003	Avenue One	DVD	Bootleg of the MPI DVD.
2012	Apple	DVD
2012	Apple	Blu-ray	First Blu-ray release of Magical Mystery Tour

UK

Year	Company	Format(s)	Comments
1980s	Empire Films	VHS
1988	MPI/Apple	VHS and Laserdisc	With a digitally re-mixed and re-mastered soundtrack by producer 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

External links

• Magical Mystery Tour at the Internet Movie Database
• Magical Mystery Tour at AllRovi
• Magical Mystery Tour at Rotten Tomatoes