I've just rented Yellow Submarine from the local DVD rental shop. Here are the thoughts I thought as I watched the film, and some of the thoughts I had after having watched the film, and some I had whilst watching the film again with the audio commentary on.

5. The When I'm 64 part has a bit in which the passage of time is illustrated by a count-up to 64. It takes 50 seconds for it to reach 60.

8. According to the commentary, part of the script was written, uncredited, by Roger McGough, the poet. I always pronounced his name 'McGow' but apparently it's 'McGoff'.

1. The live-action bit at the end where the Beatles appear is hard to watch. Apparently they weren't too keen on the whole idea of an animated film (although they were impressed with the finished result), and they seem forced and embarrassed. Also, I find it impossible to look at John Lennon smiling without imagining him injecting heroin into his arm in some dingy hovel somewhere.

4. One thing that's always intrigued me has been solved. No, the German and Italian dubbed versions of The Beatles do not sound at all scouse. That said, it's possible that the dubbers try to 'map' Liverpool to a specific, Liverpool-esque region of their own country.

2. It's been a long time since I heard Nowhere Man. Is it just me, or is Steve Harley's 'Come up and see me (make me smile)' remarkably similar?

2b. Nowhere Man has a really good guitar solo at the beginning. Top marks to George Harrison, who had obviously done this kind of thing before. Lord knows why anybody would want to puncture one of his lungs.

2c. I just know I'm going to get an e-mail from somebody that mentions 2b above and goes 'How fucking perceptive! Who the fuck are you, shithead and what kind of shit is this? The world doesn't need you to tell it that there's a really good guitar solo in Nowhere Man. Fuck you.'

4. Can't we just have DVD menus that animate the first time, and then never again? Or is that too much to ask for? Jakob Neilsen should wield his sword of justice against the world of DVD. If it means that all films will be like My Dinner with Andre, why not?

5. Sorry, that's mean. Jakob Neilsen isn't on a quest to eliminate style, he's just on a quest to eliminate barriers to accessing style. I'd just like to get that straight. If the point of a film is to look good, that's fine - but if you show it in a cinema that's only accessible by balloon, what's the point?

7. I don't want to sound egotistical, but that quote about how 'if the point of a film is to look good, etc' is really good and it's a shame it's wasted here, where nobody will read it except for:
a. People who know me personally and
b. Who visit my website and
c. Who are interested in me writing about Yellow Submarine and
d. Have the patience to read this far.
That's, by my reckoning, about two people in the entire world.

7. Given that it's an animated film with lots of bold block colours, the remastering is a bit poor. There's blobs on the film all over the place, and in lots of places the black bits aren't very black. It looks like a video copy that's been dusted off.
You'd think they would have scanned each individual frame into Photoshop and then touched it up, so that the defects in the celluloid don't show.
Part of me wants to believe that the deterioration is part of the period charm, in the same way that the recording on the early Beatles LPs sounds crude today. But it's not, it just looks shoddy, as if they're going to charge another £19.99 in a year's time for a 'Special Restored Edition'.

8. To paraphrase the Nowhere Man:
Thesis:
As I kid I thought that Yellow Submarine looked good, but was boring, had no plot, but had some very good music. I couldn't hear what the Beatles were saying most of the time, because they muttered really quickly in deadpan voices.
Antithesis:
A while back I would have poured scorn on all the above. 'It's a classic film', I would have said, 'and I am ashamed to have been so stupid as to not like it.'
'The plotlessness is a clever evocation of the random terrors of childhood, and if my past self couldn't understand what the Beatles were saying, I was obviously stupid. The music is facile, however, and should be removed.'
Synthesis:
It is dull, though. Most of the plot consists of a series of random happenings, topped off with a finale that's over too soon. Compare it to, for example, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and it has issues. Alice in Wonderland is similarly surreal, episodic, and plot-less, but much denser.
Taken as a series of isolated bits, Yellow Submarine works extremely well (the Eleanor Rigby and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds sequences in particular), and as a series of 70,000 still paintings it's also very good, but as a ninety-minute motion picture it doesn't hang together.
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The film had four different writers, and was apparently rewritten at the last minute. Perhaps because of this, whilst some of the dialogue is snappy, most of it is just muttering, or a series of references to Beatles songs - and, like the Hot Shots! films, it's not interesting or funny to just make a reference to something, you have to do something with the reference.
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The Beatles come across well enough, but apart from George's catchphrase 'It's all in the mind', their distinct personalities don't come through. They don't do or say enough for any personality to emerge, and if you didn't know that, for example, John was the sarcastic one, and that Paul was... well, Paul, there's nothing in the film to show you.
It relies on you already knowing the Beatles, whereas the modern mainstream audience will be familiar with a dozen or so of the most popular songs, and little else. Few enough people can name all four of them, and if you ask the average person on the street what, for example, George Martin did, they'd probably say Careless Whisper and I Want Your Sex. You might disagree, but then you're part of a tiny minority of a tiny minority.
The Beatles of Yellow Submarine are uniformly deadpan and sarcastic, which makes Nowhere Man seem silly, as the Beatles appear to be no more sincere than the Nowhere Man himself.
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The film starts off well. The pre-credits assault on Pepperland has the vitality of a James Bond film, and sets up the plot very well without going on too long. But after that it goes nowhere for an hour, as our heroes travel in the submarine to Pepperland through a series of disjointed, surrealist sketches. When they get there, they sneak into a bandstand, grab some instruments, and then play them. End of film.
There isn't any intrigue or daring or derring-do, and because it all takes place in a world of the mind in which anything can happen, there's no way of having any dramatic tension, because everything is unexpected. Not just the unexpected bits. It reminded me of Barbarella, in that it looks fantastic, but not much happens - unlike, say, the similarly incident-free-but-attractive 2001 : A Space Odyssey, I got the impression that stuff was supposed to happen, but that it hadn't.
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As a kid I loved the look'n'feel of Pepperland (it reminded me of Jamie and His Magic Torch, a mid-70s cartoon series that borrowed heavily from Yellow Submarine (it took place in 'Cuckooland' and had a similar look), but well enough for it to be a homage and not a copy), and wanted to live there, but at the same time I couldn't ride a bicycle and I couldn't buy drinks back then, so what did I know?
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Having said that, treated as a series of bits it works well. I don't want to give the impression that I hate Yellow Submarine. That would be like kicking a puppy, or breaking into somebody's house and shooting their dog, or cutting off a woman's nipples and stabbing her in the neck again and again and again and then cutting her head off and fucking her skull.

12. All together now was apparently a popular football chant for a while. I thought it was stupid when I was a kid, but it's okay. I don't remember All you need is love being so short - there's a verse and a chorus and a verse and a chorus and then it finishes.

10. The 'can I take my friend to bed' line in All together now gives the whole film a weird group-sex subtext. Or maybe that's just me.

12. The performance of the lead villain always got me. It's so bizarre. Is it a man or a woman? What's up with the noses? Are they supposed to be so deliberately phallic? Even as a kid, I thought they were rude. It's not as if that's something that goes over the heads of children, given that a sizeable minority of them own penises and know what they look like. Political satire, yes; phallic noses, no.

13. Anyway, the lead villain. Let's assume it's a man. All his lines are delivered much too slowly, and as most of them are 'What's that? Destroy it!' this becomes boring.

EXT: PEPPERLAND - MEANIES' BASE.
Lead Villain:
"Are!"
PAUSE

You get the picture. The villain leers out of the screen...

"The!"
PAUSE

...like something from a 3D film. Presumably the creators expected the kids in the audience to go 'boo!', but...

"Bonkers!"
PAUSE

... apart from lounging around, the villain doesn't really do much.

15. Yellow Submarine, the song, always made me sad as a kid, and it still does. The gap between reality and the fantasy world of the song is too big for wishful thinking to bridge. The distance between Pol Pot and living in a submarine with lots of friends is too big.
Full marks to Ringo's vocal performance on the verse. He sounds as if he wants the stuff about living a life of ease to be true, but he knows that it isn't, but he lives in hope.

1. I don't care if people think When I'm Sixty-Four is stupid. I like it. It's a sad reflection on mortality. Same as Eleanor Rigby but more devious, because the guy in the song is trying to be happy even though he's not.

5. As I sit at work reading about how big companies sack hundreds of workers, and the reporters report it as if it was a good thing, and as I read about how everybody on the internet believes that the best way for us to be happy is if we train kids to use guns so that they can defend themselves against every other human being, and as I read about how all women actually relish the opportunity to take their clothes off in front of businessmen, and how if all we care about is ourselves, we'll be better off than we are, and how I can sort out my finances by sending off for a newsletter, it makes me happy to know that a thing as good as Eleanor Rigby exists.
It starts, does its thing, does it really well, and stops. If it went on a second longer it would get boring. If it was shorter it wouldn't be long enough. The only remotely iffy bit is the high-pitched violin line at the end, which is slightly too loud. It says more in less than three minutes than Yes have done in over thirty years. And that's not supposed to be a joke.

9. Four blocks of walnut can support an elephant. Similarly, in 1968, five pounds would buy you a round of drinks for twenty people. "London was incredibly inexpensive and fun", according to the audio commentary from John Coates, animation supervisor. Living in London in 2001, I can confirm that it is now extremely expensive and only fun if you are very rich and steer clear of everything outside zone 2.

12. A Yellow Submarine LP was released at the time, consisting of a clutch of songs from the film (but not all of them) and a side of George Martin's orchestra score. Martin's music is very good, and it's a shame that he didn't do more film scores. Presumably there were only so many hours in the day for him to manage AIR studios and have a personal life.

13. The DVD has an option to isolate the score, which is less interesting than it appears, as you have to watch the film all the way through in order to hear it. A special scene selection menu, or even an audio copy of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack appended to the disc, might have been a better solution.

56. There's a contemporary 'Making of' documentary which, like all contemporary 'Making of' documentaries, is more interesting as a glimpse of how 'Making of' documentaries were made than as a guide to the film. This one is done almost exclusively with a fish-eye lens, and has watery, washed-out colour that screams Banana Splits at you. It's American, and called A Mod Odyssey, which shows you how primitive the American mind was in those days. Presumably a similar documentary for The Who would have been called A Gay Disco Odyssey.

98. "For the first time in screen history, extremely real and enormously famous people are going to be animated into a feature film", says the narrator of A Mod Odyssey. The word 'extremely' makes that funny. In the documentary, it appears as if everybody is dubbed or an actor. When we see 'animators', they look as if they're pretending to paint, and when we hear the voice of the animation designer, a German person, we hear a cod-Germanic accent that goes 'viz' and 've' a lot. It's a bit like Points of View.

9a. Ian MacDonald in Revolution in the Head says that All You Need is Love isn't very good. 'Desultory', 'slapdash' and 'substandard' are three words he uses, although the last two words are compound words and count for one and a half words each, making a total of four words. 'Thrown together', 'offhand' and 'haphazard' are four others. I suspect that, by the time he got to that song, he had spent so long on the book that he was fed up with The Beatles and life in general. Hence his review of Abbey Road, in which he claims that it is possibly the worst LP released by a major group since that Elvis Presley one that's just a load of stage banter, or the bit where he says that, whenever he visits somebody's house, and sees a copy of The Beatles, he smashes it and gives the owner the cost of the record, in order to put them out of their misery, or the bit where he claims that the subsequent solo careers of the former Beatles caused more harm to humanity than cancer.

9b. Are the Blue Meanies, in fact, environmentalists? They seem to prefer the sounds of organic nature to the sound of the Beatles' technologically-produced music. There's a short sequence in which the Chief Villain is seen relaxing in the countryside to the sound of birds. This seems unusually nice of them.

8. The audio commentary for Ghostbusters was great, because Harold Ramis and friends are all relatively young and used to performing and thinking on their feet. The commentary for Goldfinger and Yellow Submarine suffers from the fact that the creators are now in their sixties, and clearly unused to spitting out interesting facts at great speed. Consequently, they ramble a lot. Yellow Submarine has the added handicap that it's an animated film, and thus the 'Making of' can be summarised as "We drew a drawing of the Beatles, and then we filmed it, and then we drew another drawing of the Beatles, and then we filmed it, and then we did some more drawings of the Beatles, and then there was a flying glove".
Actually, this is probably a bit harsh. Animation producer John Coates's commentary starts off badly (the first minute is taken up with him telling us his job title, and a minute is a long time) but it gets better.
On interesting thing he reveals is that the shots of the submarine moving around as if three-dimensional were achieved by building a model and drawing it from a variety of angles, so that these stock drawings could be slapped down wherever needed instead of having to draw the boat from scratch each time - rather like the sprite-based animation of the first few Wing Commander games, or Sega's late-80s arcade machines such as Space Harrier or Afterburner. But with a submarine.

8. John Coates reveals that the picture looks a million dollars because that's how much it cost. It went over budget to the tune of about 60,000 dollars. His animation studio was told off, and had to repay the money.

9. At the end of the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sequence, the Beatles identify John Lennon is as 'Billy Shears' (if you remember, each Beatle was supposed to have an alter-ego in the Lonely Hearts Club Band). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought that Ringo was supposed to be Shears. He sings the very next song, With a Little Help from my Friends, after all.

7. The flying glove is useless. It can't even catch an old man. In fact, it doesn't seem to actually do anything useful, despite being almost as cool a villain as Boba Fett. And what are the clowns for? They just wail.

2. Thirteen years later, United Artists were obliterated by Heaven's Gate. John Lennon had been dead for a year, Paul McCartney was between McCartney II and Tug of War, and both Ringo Starr and George Harrison were drawing their solo careers to a close after a surprising degree of early success. As a record-selling entity, the Beatles themselves had entered something of a dark period - too old to have contemporary influence, and not old enough to be 'classic'. Contemporary punk, new wave and metal audiences considered them a bit limp, the emerging hip-hop / rap scene probably didn't know they existed, and the mainstream pop audience were sated by Barbra Streisand and David Essex. Probably. When I'm Sixty-four and Yellow Submarine were still taught in schools - I know this to be true.
The cycle of trendy-for-being-new / dated / trendy-for-being-old seems to be speeding up. Star Wars was godlike until about 1984, ultra-naff in 1989, but the height of fashion only six years later. Will we see the same thing happen with early acid house and The Word?