Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.Įach stop along the way introduces a musical number, a new character or two, and some kind of strangeness. To boot, they even look close to Pepperland’s biggest stars: Sgt. He recruits The Beatles (voiced by John Clive, Geoffrey Hughes, Peter Batten and Paul Angelis as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, respectively) to sail across the seven seas (the ocean, then the Seas of Time, Science, Monsters, Nothing, Holes, and Green) to help fight the Meanies with the power of music. The Blue Meanies have attacked the peaceful, music-loving Pepperland, and Young Fred (Lance Percival) is dispatched to find help. The film uses these varied techniques to tell a simple story. The animation techniques in this film were later used by Terry Gilliam in his Monty Python work, as well as in Schoolhouse Rock. A low-budget animated film that was completed in less than a year still managed to be hugely influential. What looks like a haze of chemical-induced visions to an adult looks like unbridled imagination to a child’s eyes.Īnd regardless of the psychochemical state of the filmmakers and animators during its production, that sense of imagination still comes through. I’ve never gotten the details from my mom around why she chose to play it for me, but I was hooked immediately. My other main exposure besides the radio was Yellow Submarine. When my mom corrected me, and explained they had broken up 15 years before I was even born, I was devastated. It made sense to me that they had formed the Beatles after doing their own material, like a supergroup. My family and I listened to them every Sunday on WMGK’s (or maybe it was WOGL) “Breakfast with the Beatles.” They also used to mix in some solo and Wings material, which led me to interpret their careers backwards. I was a big Beatles fan when I was a small child. Having the chance to see it on the big screen as part of its 50th Anniversary re-release, I was reminded of how much of me comes from the film. Lots of kids who grew up in the 80s and 90s have stories about VHS tapes they wore out, and for me it was the 1968 Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. But the things we love as small children have a tendency to stick with us, even in ways we don’t always realize. There’s a lot of reasonable explanations for this because our emotions are based on gaining more life experience as opposed to media, and we’ve been exposed to so much more that it is difficult for any one thing to stand out.

A weird thing about being an adult is that individual pieces of media, whether they be films, songs, or anything else, don’t seem to ever mean as much to me now as when I was a child.

Yellow submarine cartoon message