The
Beatles Yellow Submarine
Not a real submarine but an animated (cartoon) classic movie released in
1968.The rock album with the soundtrack was released on
The album:
The only Beatles album that could really be classified as inessential, mostly because it wasn't really a proper album at all, but a soundtrack that only utilized four new Beatles songs.
The movie:
At the time The Beatles, under contract, owed a film to United Artists. They were not in the mood for making another film and most of all they didn't have any idea for one.
They had one year
to resolve this problem. Al Brodax, the guy that created the TV cartoons, went
to them and said 'Look, I know how you can fulfill this United Artists thing
... we can do it like we did the cartoons on TV, you won't have to do
anything.' The Beatles balked at the idea of those cheesy cartoons making it to
the big screen, but Brian Epstein saw it as the only way to bail them out with
U.A., so a deal was struck to create the impossible: a full-length animated
Beatles film to be delivered within a year.
The plot of the
movie:
80,000 leagues
under the sea, there was a wonderous, magical place called Pepperland, where
all was color and music and beauty.
An interesting footnote in the history of animation, Yellow
Submarine stands alone as the only non-Disney animated feature film of the
1960s to enjoy a degree of both commercial and critical success.
Beatles wanted
nothing to do with the movie, until they realized how good it was.