'Yellow Submarine' - Fifty Years

Fifty years ago today, July 17, 1968, the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine premiered in London.

Yellow Submarine is regarded as one of the greatest animated movies of all time, using all sorts of innovative sequences and caricatures with a vivid array of colors.  It's a cinematic expression of the psychedelic art of the late sixties that many aging hippies believe is a perfect approximation of an acid trip, yet it was sweet and palatable enough for children.  The storyline takes the cartoon Beatles on a trip through the deep seas to Pepperland, an unearthly paradise of music, love, and happiness, to save it from the Blue Meanies, who have taken it over and eliminated love, music, and everything positive.  The story uses music from no fewer than sixteen Beatles songs (including four songs recorded for the movie), yet the plot holds together quite nicely, with all sorts of visual surprises and delights throughout.

Amazingly, Yellow Submarine was made almost by accident.  The movie was an extension of the old animated Beatles cartoon series that ran in the U.S., which involved American producer Al Brodax and Canadian animator George Dunning.  When the Beatles couldn't agree on a script for the third movie they owed United Artists (after A Hard Day's Night and Help!), they reluctantly agreed to a cartoon movie (which Brodax would produce and Dunning would direct), but having seen the TV cartoons and found them embarrassing - which is why they weren't shown in Britain - they didn't want to be deeply involved with the film.  They would only film a brief appearance for the end.  

Then they saw the final cut with German poster artist Heinz Edelmann's incredible art work and with some snappy, cheeky dialogue overseen by Liverpool poet Roger McGough, and they instantly realized that this movie was not going to be just another cartoon feature. In fact, it would draw comparisons to Walt Disney's 1940 movie Fantasia for its artistry.

But here's the funny thing; Yellow Submarine was originally a flop.

The movie received a wide opening in British theaters on the heels of its world premiere in London, but it was pulled after only a few weeks and mixed, somewhat ho-hum reviews.  It was replaced by one British movie-theater chain with a re-release of Disney's Peter Pan, because, according to a chain representative, "at least the children could understand that!"  Yellow Submarine's American release had been put off until November 1968, and United Artists executives might have been worried about what the stateside response would be like; after all, Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles' previous film endeavor, was so poorly received in Britain that, after its TV airing there, no American television network would even touch it.

If they did worry, they needn't have; when Yellow Submarine premiered in the United States on November 13, 1968, it received nearly unanimous raves from movie critics and was a box-office smash.  It was such a huge hit, it was playing in American theaters as late as September 1969.  Why was it a big success in the United States?  Think about it.  By Thanksgiving 1968, Americans had gone through watching some of the worst fighting in the Vietnam War on TV news, seen Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated followed by urban rioting as least as fierce as the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967, seen Robert Kennedy assassinated, witnessed antiwar demonstrations turn to rioting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and awokened the day after the presidential election to discover that Richard Nixon would be their new President.  Yellow Submarine provided a hopeful tale of how love, music and harmony would prevail against Blue Meanies like Richard Nixon and George Wallace.  It was a fantasy, but a beautiful fantasy Americans could relate to (and, in the Age of Trump, still can).

Yellow Submarine is currently being screened in theaters in different towns in America for its fiftieth anniversary release. Yes, I just saw it - first time I've seen it on the big screen.  And I watch it every Thanksgiving on home video - I've done so since 2000.  And because there's so much to say about Yellow Submarine - too much to say in one blog post - expect me to return to the subject of this movie between now and the fiftieth anniversary of its American premiere this November.