News From Pepperland: 'Submarine' Resurfaces

ALLAN KOZINN

09/10/99

Sometimes the dippiest notions have the greatest potential. "Yellow Submarine," the animated Beatles film that has just been thoroughly refurbished for its video release and is having a limited theater run beginning this week, started life as a vague idea for a song that occurred to Paul McCartney as he was falling asleep one night in 1966. In the light of day, Mr. McCartney decided that his song — something about everyone living in a yellow submarine — would make a cheerful children's tune that Ringo Starr could sing on "Revolver," the album the group was then recording.

When Mr. McCartney brought the song into the studio that May, Mr. Starr and the others ran with it, taking 6 hours to record the basic instrumental and vocal tracks and 12 more to overdub party noises, funny voices, brass band music and an array of maritime sound effects that included blowing bubbles and dragging chains across a metal tub filled with water.

Released as a single — the only Beatles single on which Mr. Starr is the lead vocalist — the song went quickly to No. 1. Within weeks of its appearance, Al Brodax, a cartoon producer at King Features in New York, flew to London to persuade the group that "Yellow Submarine" could be the basis of an animated film. The Beatles resisted the idea, having seen and loathed the "Beatles Cartoons" that Mr. Brodax had been producing since 1964 and that were running on Saturday mornings on American television.

Still, the Beatles owed United Artists a film, but had lost interest in acting after "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" Here was a project they could keep at arm's length. They were required to provide only four new songs; the others in the film would be drawn from the "Rubber Soul," "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" albums, the last of which was released just as work on the film was getting under way. They would appear in the film in the flesh only briefly, at the end. They refused to dub the voices, and only Mr. McCartney bothered to read any of the scripts.

Yet for all that, they liked "Yellow Submarine" when it was released in the summer of 1968. Its story appealed to the naïve sensibility of the period, bounded by "Sgt. Pepper" in 1967 and the Woodstock festival in 1969. In it, the Beatles sail off in a magical yellow submarine with the elderly Young Fred and save the peaceful citizens of Pepperland from an attack by the vicious Blue Meanies. The Beatles' weapon is music, specifically "All You Need Is Love," the group's anthemic 1967 hit.

The look of the film appealed to them as well. With its bright colors, its pioneering blend of photography and cartoon imagery and its menagerie of exotic sea monsters, Blue Meanies, Apple Bonkers, Snapping Turks and Flying Gloves, the movie was a compendium of the psychedelic Pop Art that was flourishing at the time.

Since its original release, though, "Yellow Submarine" has been hard to find. It turned up occasionally on college campuses in the 1970's, and it was shown on television a few times, mostly late at night. A video version was released by MGM/UA in 1987, but it was quickly pulled off the market because of an ownership dispute that involved Apple (the Beatles' company), King Features and MGM/UA.

Now the legal questions are settled, and "Yellow Submarine" is back with a vengeance. And it is not quite the film you may remember. The original mono soundtrack has been replaced with six-channel Surround Sound using a system called Dolby 5.1, and includes newly remixed versions of the Beatles' songs. It also includes the scene in which the Beatles sing "Hey Bulldog," a sequence that was deleted after the earliest screenings to quicken the pace of the film's final reel.

The videotape (in stereo) and the DVD (a digital video disk in Dolby 5.1, with a documentary and other extras) are to be released on Tuesday, as is a compact disk, "Yellow Submarine Songtrack" (Capitol), with the new mixes of the 15 songs heard in the film. Dozens of tie-in items, from cookie jars and tea sets to action figures and inflatable chairs, have already hit the market. And the United States Postal Service is issuing a "Yellow Submarine" stamp.

The idea of renovating "Yellow Submarine" occurred to Bruce Markoe, the vice president of feature postproduction at MGM/UA, in 1995, when he played the film for his 5-year-old daughter. She loved it, Mr. Markoe said; but as a more critical viewer, he was disappointed that the colors were not as dazzling as he remembered them and that the soundtrack was flat by modern standards.

"I thought, 'We have something valuable here, something that a couple of generations haven't seen,' " he said. "I also thought that this was a film that cried out for upgrading with today's technology. So I went to John Calley, who was the president of the company at the time, and pitched him the idea of renovating the film for rerelease."

Mr. Markoe was told he could proceed once the legal problems were settled. That took a year. It took nearly as long for Mr. Markoe to get Apple to agree to allow the Beatles' music to be remixed for Surround Sound from the master tapes. In recent years, as the 60's recordings by the Byrds, the Who, the Kinks and other bands have been remixed and remastered to take new technologies into account, the Beatles have generally insisted that their music be left alone. In his meetings with Neil Aspinall, the chief executive at Apple, Mr. Markoe argued that simply replacing the mono recordings on the soundtrack with the stereo versions available on CD was not the best option.

"I told Neil that audiences are used to 5.1 digital sound in the movies now," Mr. Markoe said, "and that while we could spread out the stereo mixes for 5.1, it would compromise the recordings. I think that was the key, because the Beatles never liked to settle for compromises. Neil said we could go ahead, with the understanding that if the Beatles didn't approve the new mixes, we couldn't use them."

The audio remixing got under way in October 1997 with Peter Cobbin, a staff engineer at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London, at the remixing desk. Mr. Cobbin's task was inherently contradictory: the songs had to sound much as they originally did, yet the new mixes had to take advantage of the six-channel capability.

"A very detailed kind of attention was needed to make sure that everything was put back the same," Mr. Cobbin said of his mixes. "As you're probably aware, there are many takes of a song, and even within the take that was used for the record, there may be guitar solos or vocal harmonies that were not used. So a lot of time was spent seeing that the right elements were used."

Complicating matters further was the recording technique that the Beatles used between 1965 and 1968, when the songs on the "Yellow Submarine" soundtrack were recorded. Using the four-track equipment available at the time, the Beatles tended to fill all the four tracks with the basic skeleton of a song — drums, bass and guitar, for example — and then copy them on to a single track on a second reel of tape. They would then add vocals, solos and other embellishments on the remaining three tracks. When their ideas grew more complicated, they repeated this process until they had filled the tracks on three or four tapes.

There were trade-offs in this method: once the earliest tracks were mixed, copied and augmented, there was no way to reconsider the balances. And every time a copy was made, the sound quality was degraded. But EMI kept all of its Beatles session tapes, and using digital multitracking equipment, Mr. Cobbin was able to transfer the unmixed component tracks into a computer and remix them with a freedom that the Beatles and their producer, George Martin, did not have in the 60's.

"Eleanor Rigby," heard early in the film, is one of the simpler examples of what Mr. Cobbin was able to do.

"That was recorded with a string octet, laid out in a fairly traditional manner," he said. "Because the strings were recorded on all four tracks, they had to be bounced to mono for Paul to do his vocals. I had the four string tracks, so I could pan them the way the players were seated. And then, when you use the rear speakers for ambience, you do get the feeling that you're inside the stereo image, much more than if you have the strings coming out of one speaker."

Many of Mr. Cobbin's remixes have a revelatory freshness that even Beatles purists may find surprising. The vocal harmonies that open "Nowhere Man," for example, now envelop the listener; on the original stereo recording, the vocals were on one channel and the instruments on the other. The delicate percussion in "All Together Now," buried in the original recording, has a presence that gives the song a more complex, tactile texture. And "Only a Northern Song," never before released in stereo, has become a kaleidoscopic welter of sound.

The mixes passed the Beatles' audition, as well.

"Ah, it was great," Mr. Starr said of the 1998 session at which he and Mr. McCartney heard the Surround Sound mixes for the first time. "We're listening and saying, 'What is that?' Because you hear all these sounds that we made in the studio, but they all got buried. It's so lively."

While Mr. Cobbin was working on the songs in London, Ted Hall, at Pacific Ocean Post (POP) Sound, and Greg Kimble, at POP Video, both in Santa Monica, Calif., revamped other elements of the film. Mr. Hall's domain was the rest of the soundtrack — dialogue, sound effects and Mr. Martin's orchestral score. A suite from Mr. Martin's score had been included on the original "Yellow Submarine" soundtrack album and where possible, Mr. Hall replaced the mono soundtrack recording with the album version, which is in stereo.

"The stereo recording was not from the original scoring date for the film," Mr. Hall said. "He rerecorded it for the album several months later, so the arrangements are a little different, and a lot of the music wasn't included. But it sounded good and I wanted to use it. That meant that there are stretches that are eight bars in stereo and eight bars in mono. The challenge was to make it seamless."

Mr. Hall also removed clicks, pops, hiss and other noises from the soundtrack. He assembled an effects library by recording each of the film's roughly 300 sound effects separately, and enhancing some by adding bass, reverberation or other forms of processing. A few touch ups were necessary. In one scene, the Beatles are seen applauding, but there was no applause on the original soundtrack. Mr. Hall and Mr. Markoe recorded some themselves. Mr. Hall also supplied a burp for one of the Blue Meanies.

When he transferred the effects to the new soundtrack, the Surround Sound system allowed him to think spatially: now when the Flying Glove menaces the people of Pepperland, it can be heard flying around the theater, and the Blue Meanies' missiles seem to move across the screen.

Mr. Kimble worked on the film itself. Mr. Markoe had found an original negative for all five reels of the film, and an interpositive — an intermediate copy made from the negative — of the last three reels only. The interpositive was in good enough shape to use, after substantial cleaning and color correcting. But a new interpositive had to be made for the first two reels, which account for 40 of the film's 90 minutes. Before doing that, the negative, which Mr. Kimble described as "dirty, beat up and scratched," had to be scanned into the computer — a process that took 340 hours — and restored.

"There were tears to repair, crooked splices to fix and the colors had faded at different rates over the years," Mr. Kimble said. "Reds had become brown, whites had yellowed. In the opening titles, there are white letterings on a black background, but the black had become cyan. The color had to be corrected digitally. Other problems — frames that someone had forgotten to color, or where there was dirt or a scratch — had to be painted by hand. We went through the film frame by frame."

Creating a new print took about six months, and by the time the film and its soundtrack were reconciled, MGM/UA had spent about $600,000, more than double Mr. Markoe's original budget.

As complicated as the renovation was, it was the very picture of organization compared with the chaotic original production. With the Beatles uninterested in it, and their manager, Brian Epstein, behaving increasingly erratically in the final months of his life (he died in August 1967), the film was a frustrating endeavor from the start.

Mr. Brodax, discussing the early scripts, said: "I flew to London with a stack of scripts, each one with a different color cover. First I met with Brian, and he said, 'I haven't read them yet; stay in your hotel and I'll choose one.' Five days later, I hadn't left my hotel room and I was furious. When I finally saw him again, he picked up the first treatment and said, 'I don't like this — it's purple,' and threw it on the floor. The next one — 'I don't like this, it's orange.' Then he gets to one in a green cover, which was written by Joseph Heller, and that one he threw away, too. So I said, 'Brian, that's by Joe Heller.' He said, 'I don't care who it's by, I don't like green.' "

Mr. Brodax returned to New York and commissioned a new script from Lee Minoff, a 29-year-old playwright who had worked as an assistant to the director Stanley Kubrick on "Dr. Strangelove" and whose play "Come Live With Me" had just had a brief run on Broadway. Mr. Minoff's script was quite different from the final version of the film: he had the Beatles visit a land where submarine-people were menaced by a large monster that used them to pick its teeth.

That script did, however, include a few characters that survived to the final cut — most notably Jeremy Boob and Fred — and it suggests the techniques of combining film and photographs that were adopted by the animators at TV Cartoons in London, where the film was made. Other writers were later brought in as script doctors. One was Erich Segal, then a classics professor at Yale and later the author of "Love Story." Another was Roger McGough, a Liverpool writer and musician who later became a well-known poet. He contributed much of the Beatles' pun-filled dialogue.

Oddly, Mr. Brodax withheld the script from the production team at TV Cartoons. He said he did this to encourage competition between the two animation directors, Bob Balser and Jack Stokes. But Bob Hieronimus, a broadcaster at WCBM in Baltimore and the author of the forthcoming "It Was All In the Mind: The Co-Creation of Yellow Submarine," interviewed nearly 40 members of the creative team, and discovered that Mr. Brodax's strategy backfired. Lacking a script, Mr. Balser, Mr. Stokes and Heinz Edelmann, the chief designer, contributed their own plot elements.

For all the film's imagery of all-conquering peace and love, its behind-the-scenes creation was a battlefield on which all kinds of hostilities emerged. Mr. Minoff, who is now a psychotherapist, said that the hyperintellectual Jeremy Boob was meant as a swipe at Jonathan Miller, who had directed his play. One of the animators told Mr. Hieronimus that the Chief Blue Meanie has big, round Mickey Mouse-style ears because Mr. Edelmann disliked Disney animation; another said the character was patterned after Mr. Brodax, whom the team regarded as an adversary.

"You know, this was all done over 30 years ago, and myths grow," Mr. Brodax said, dismissing talk of strained relations with the TV Cartoons staff. "It's like 'Rashomon.' "

Mr. Brodax is writing his own book, "Up Periscope Yellow." Neither his book nor Mr. Hieronimus's will be out in time to benefit from the reissue of the film. But memorabilia manufacturers — and Apple's licensing department — have been quick off the mark. Among the items on offer, or due soon, are ties and boxer shorts, cigarette lighters, Christmas tree ornaments and several lines of T-shirts, comic books and posters. The original "Yellow Submarine" was one of the first films to generate a tie-in industry, and some of the items sold in 1968 are now pricey collectibles.

"The original 'Yellow Submarine' wristwatch and alarm clock are worth about $2,000 each," said Jeff Augsburger, the author, with Rick Rann and Marty Eck, of the authoritative "Beatles Memorabilia Price Guide." He added that Blue Meanie Halloween costumes in their original box are worth $900. But the prize rarity is a set of Goebel porcelain figurines, which go for as much as $10,000 a set.

"I don't plan to collect the new stuff," said Mr. Augsburger, who collects only 1960's items. "But I've been admiring it. They've come up with lots of interesting things, very few of which replicate the original items."

Will they be worth small fortunes in a few decades. "It's hard to tell," Mr. Augsburger said. "There's a different attitude now than in the 60's. Back then you bought something, you played with it, it broke, and your mom threw it away. So the pieces that have come down in near-mint condition are worth a lot. Now people think these things might have some value, so they protect them. In 30 years, everyone will pull out their 'Yellow Submarine' items in mint condition, and we'll see then if anyone wants them."

"Yellow Submarine" is having a limited theatrical release. This is because film reissues typically draw small audiences and because the video version is due next week, said Larry Gleason, a spokesman for MGM/UA's distribution arm. Usually the company prefers to show a film exclusively in a theater for four or five months.

But unless you have a DVD player with Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound, the only way to hear the vivid new six-channel mixes of some Beatles favorites — including "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," "Nowhere Man" and "All You Need Is Love" — is in a suitably equipped theater. In New York the film opens today at the United Artists Union Square 14, at 13th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, and runs through next Friday. Admission information and screening times: (212) 253-2225.

Elsewhere around the country, the film will be shown through Wednesday at the Castro in San Francisco; through Thursday at the Music Box in Chicago, the Egyptian in Seattle and the Hillcrest in San Diego, and through next Friday at the Esquire in Denver.