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Fact #168834

When:

Short story:

With John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in attendance, The Beatles' animated movie Yellow Submarine premieres at The Pavilion in London, England, UK, Europe. Other guests include Mick Jagger, The Bee Gees, Donovan, Sandie Shaw, Twiggy, P J Proby and Tony Blackburn.

Full article:

John Coates (animation producer) : I think much of the good feeling and good humour in the film comes from the fact that 200 people were doing it and enjoying it … stimulated by one or two things … though not as much as people might think. We were too jolly busy.

Paul McCartney : You have to remember that it wasn't our film anyway. The producers asked us if we wanted to do the voices, but we were working on our music at the time, so they got Liverpool actors to do our voices.

I was actually imagining a sort of Disneyesque look, but it was the middle of the sixties, we'd just made Sgt Pepper, and the producers felt they had to pick up on that.

George Harrison : The songs were taken from a period of maybe two years and, originally, weren't all on the same album, but the music is representative of us from that period.

Roger McGough (Liverpool poet and member of The Scaffold) : I wrote some of the Yellow Submarine film. I was brought in after they'd had fifteen writers, the last of whom had been Erich Segal who wrote Love Story.

My thing was to Liverpudlianise it and make it funny. The script, up til then, was things like Ringo saying, 'Let's go down to 48th Street and get some knishes.' New York stuff. So I Liverpudlianised it and I wrote the Sea Of Monsters bit. Never had any credit because that was part of the deal.

John Coates (animation producer) : From the very start, The Beatles all said they would do their own voices for the Yellow Submarine film. We kept asking them, and pursuing them and inviting them, but we could never tie them down. In the end we were left with no alternative but to hire actors to fake the voices, and they did a pretty good job.

When we finally got The Beatles along to a screening of the completed version, they all seemed very pleased until they got outside, and Paul was the first one to come up and say, "Listen, I think you did a great job on the other three, but my voice sounds awful. Can't you do anything about it?" Then, one by one, they all came and said the same thing. "They sound great, but I'm all wrong." So I suppose we must have got it right.

John Lennon : They lifted all the ideas for the movie of Yellow Submarine out of our heads and didn't give us any credit.

John Coates : Al Brodax was the chief Blue Meanie, and Max, his sidekick, was Abe Goodman - the assistant he sent to London to keep an eye on us.

Paul McCartney : All You Need Is Love is basically the message of the movie. It's a simple message, and it's affected a lot of people. I think that is still what people need.
(Source : not known)