Have you met the Beatles? The odds are you have, whether you grew up with them, sought them out, or were never formally introduced. You may know the name, at least, even without having heard the numbers, as one knows Shakespeare’s without having read or seen a play, or even knowing he wrote them.
The Fab Four — phenomenal in their time, phenomenal after. Though they made their split official in 1970 after coming apart in bits and pieces, they have never gone away. As long as John Lennon lived, there was always the possibility of the band getting back together — in a classic “Saturday Night Live” bit, Lorne Michaels offered them $3,000 to reunite on the show — and his death, and the global consciousness of loss, launched an era of revived Beatles awareness, of finding new things to do with the old music, protecting the legacy and promoting the brand.
With the band’s recorded catalog lately being remixed, remastered and rereleased, in special editions with extra tracks, it was only logical that Apple would get around to the movies. Peter Jackson’s “Get Back,” his six-hour AI-enhanced cut of footage shot during the making of the album “Let It Be,” premiered Thanksgiving 2021, followed in May 2024 by his remastering of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original “Let It Be” itself. (Last Thanksgiving, we got the Martin Scorsese-produced “Beatles ‘64,” built on the Maysles Brothers film of the band’s first visit to America; the moptops have become a new holiday tradition.)
Now, 30 years after it premiered here, also around Thanksgiving, the digital squeegee has been applied to “Anthology,” the band’s own multi-part video memoir. (It aired on ABC over three nights; this edition, which echoes the longer video release, comes as eight episodes, with a new, extra ninth.) Premiering Wednesday on Disney+, also over three nights, it does look great; my only complaint is that music, every little snippet of it, is mixed too loud against the rest of the film. To make it exciting, I suppose, or because that’s what the kids expect these days; but I am right when I tell you it is wrong.
Along with the film, the original “Anthology” project included a coffee table book; three two-CD sets of demos, alternates and unfinished takes; and two “new” songs, “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love,” in which the surviving Fabs added themselves to a demo recorded by John at the piano. (In 2023, a third song, “Now and Then,” was completed by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr; it topped charts in the U.S. and U.K. and won a Grammy for rock performance.) This year adds another audio set, “Anthology 4.”
In the YouTube era, Beatles clips are just a click away. (Want to see 12 minutes of Paul rehearsing “Blackbird” at Abbey Road? It’s waiting there for you.) But when “Anthology” first aired, it was unburied treasure, bringing together a wealth of photos and film clips long out of circulation; it was terrifically exciting, nostalgia for some, but present and alive. It works both as a primer for newcomers and a horn of plenty for fans. I’m more aficionado than maniac, but I find them endlessly listenable, rewatchable — they just look great, for one thing — and interesting. Charming and witty each in his own way, they were four strong individuals and a single entity. There’s an element of fatedness to the band, of things having to happen just that way, an alchemical reaction that needed those exact people to work. Other groups might lose or gain members, but once Ringo was in the drummer’s chair, there would be no Beatles except those Beatles, even if John was joining by tape from beyond the grave.
The tale is told, in new and archival interviews, by the four Beatles, not always in agreement; manager Brian Epstein; George Martin, their producer and collaborator; and Neil Aspinall, their aide-de-camp, with a few remarks from publicist Derek Taylor. It’s an in-house production, and wouldn’t be here to see unless the three survivors and John’s widow Yoko Ono had signed off on it. It’s not a case of Beatles Tell All, nor was there ever a reason to suspect it would be — though, says Paul, “I found out more than I ever knew about the other guys from the ‘Anthology.’” The dirtiest laundry isn’t aired, and even at nine hours, it clips along so swiftly that the hardest times feel softened. But it’s no hagiography; it has the ring of honest reckoning. Having achieved detente after a period of acrimony, they are charitable with one another, and themselves.
Every episode begins with a snippet from, of all things, “Help!” as as if warning of storm clouds ahead, and not “All You Need Is Love” or “With a Little Help from My Friends.” But fundamentally, it’s a love story — boys meet boys, boys lose boys, boys get boys, to paraphrase the old Hollywood formula. “We were tight,” says George Harrison. They were “four guys who really loved each other,” says Ringo. “At certain times each one of us went mad, but the other three could bring us back.”
The added ninth episode is essentially a making-of film, as regards both the documentary and the new songs. (It’s a little strange to be looking back 25 years from the standpoint of 30 years ago; there’s no material newer than 1995.) Though additional footage has been promoted as “never seen,” much of it was included on a bonus disc accompanying the DVD release. But the material has been organized and extended here into a proper film. We see Paul, George and Ringo in the studio with Martin, isolating tracks of “Tomorrow Never Knows”; the three jamming on “Thinking of Linking,” a song Paul wrote in 1958, and Duane Eddy’s “Raunchy,” the guitar instrumental that was George’s audition for the band. They hang out — George with a ukulele in his hands, noodling away — and talk old times. They record again. George is sad that John isn’t around to share in it (“I think [he] would have really enjoyed the opportunity to be with us again”) but he’s a presence all the same. It’s a proper coda.
“The Beatles will just go on and on, on those records and films and videos, and in people’s memories and lives … The Beatles I think exist without us,” says George, gone now nearly a quarter-century. He quotes a song by John, with a title by Ringo. “Play the game existence to the end of the beginning. Tomorrow never knows.”
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