Yellow Submarine was a song by The Beatles, with Ringo Starr on the lead vocals. It was issued as a single, coupled with Eleanor Rigby, and released just before it appeared on the Revolver album. It has a peculiar little difference, though, which I remember distinctly; on the single version, during the last verse, the responses start one line earlier, with “life of ease”. Compare the album version with the single version around 1:40.
It became the title song of a 1968 animated United Artists film. The Beatles themselves had little to do with the making of the movie – other actors did the voices of the Beatles characters – though the movie was chock full of songs from the latter half of their career. This is a movie I saw at least four times, once on a day I saw ALL of the Beatles’ movies in one sitting. I even watched it on commercial television (CBS, I think), which is not recommended.
Oddly, the soundtrack to the movie was not released until January 1969, some six months after the movie debuted. The second side of the album was instrumental music arranged by George Martin. Side one starts with the album version of the title song and ends with All You Need Is Love. There were four other songs on that album:
Only a Northern Song
All Together Now
Hey Bulldog
It’s All Too Much.
In 1999, Yellow Submarine – Songtrack was released. It dumps the instrumentals for other Beatles songs used in the film, mostly or all remastered.
Now, The classic 1968 animated feature “Yellow Submarine” showcasing music by the Beatles has been “carefully restored frame-by-frame for a special DVD release May 28, 2012.”
I haven’t seen it in a couple of decades, and it’d be interesting to see how it stands up.
(Note: I had some links to movie segments that are no longer operational; I am willing to bet that you can find similar clips on YouTube from time to time.)
