“See how they fly like Lucy in the Sky, see how they run.” [Magical Mystery Tour (1967)]

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Dirs. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Bernard Knowles                             

United Kingdom

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My knowledge of The Beatles is slight, yet to hear all of their key albums and songs, but even to a layman the drastic change Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was for a band who came to stardom for songs like I Want To Hold Your Hand is obvious. Reviled by many when it was shown on Boxing Day 1967, Magical Mystery Tour would have made it even more obvious what The Beatles’ shift in musical experimentation and psychedelia would lead to. Taking the form of an hour long combination of fictional travelogue, fairy tale narration by Paul McCartney, bizarre sketches, surreal combinations and proto-music videos, the film is a catalogue of vignettes following a tour through alternative England and seaside done in good honest English fun.

As a short television work it is desperately erratic, a jumble of ideas that vaguely resembles a Monty Python sketch or two at times but with a whimsical and naive tone that only has a few bites to it – the vehicle race where its shown vicars are cheats and poor sportsmen, to a striptease performed alongside The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. It is the kind of quaint weirdness the English are well known for if a lot more ramshackle in tone, everything from scenes of The Beatles as wizards with high voices to a predecessor of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) and Mr. Creosote with a restaurant sequence of spaghetti being shovelled onto a dining table (made even odder by half the reoccurring cast being in their underwear only) feeling as it is was heavily improvised and a lark for those involved. That it is as much a celebration of traditional British culture too, from the footage inside the tour bus  to the end sequence set to Your Mother Should Know, matched to this nose tweaking manages to show a contradicting but peculiar aspect common in Britain, turning our culture upside down yet still being reverential to it.

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It is as much about the music too. It has great soundtrack with iconic songs, and while Magical Mystery Tour is a flawed piece in the career of the band, it does feed into the development of the music video as well. Blue Jay Way is the closest to this, almost coming off as an attempted replication of a Kenneth Anger short in its superimposition and abstract images; it’s not as rigorous as an Anger short, and is far more closer to music videos that bombard the viewer with random but striking images, but it adds a background that must have influenced music videos later on. The music sequence that works the best though, shown on the EP album and all the promotional material for the film, is the only existing performance of I Am The Walrus that, while not as technically complicated, manages to suit the song perfectly. Intentionally written as gibberish by John Lennon, the song’s interpretation is fittingly barking in its strangeness, if not for Lennon and the band in animal costumes, or for the egghead capped men walking onscreen in a white yoke costume together, but for four policemen high above in the corner of the screen, shuffling side-to-side in unison on the same spot, the most subversive image of the whole project and far more effective than anything else in Magical Mystery Tour.

It is a film for fans of The Beatles and the curious only. Even in its short length it will not have the attraction some viewers need to engage with it unless they enjoy the music and silliness of it all. It doesn’t completely work, and the hostile reactions to it from that first screening are completely understandable, but to think a major musical band like The Beatles made this is fascinating. It is certainly as much of a lark for the viewer as it was for those who created it if you are willing to forgive its inherent flaws.

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