"Magical Mystery Tour" (feature) by The Beatles – **

First released: 1967

I first saw this film at the public library in a crappy 16mm print around 1978 that you could hardly see and was barely in color. I was fascinated as to why The Beatles would film and release something as shitty as this. My sister totally hated it, but I was more intrigued by The Beatles first failure. It certainly wasn’t the songs. Later on, I taped it off the air. A local station just happened to play it commercial free around 1981. It was still a shitty copy. Then I purchased a pseudo-legal video copy about 1986. Yet again it was a shitty film. I was convinced that this film was shot badly in the first place. Finally, MPI released the first “official” release and the color and sound was glorious! You could actually hear snippets of dialogue that were long muffled. Now, I’m not saying that this improved the film all that much, but now I see that The Beatles did know a little bit about filmmaking. Today, I see it as an extended music video, where you just zip past the boring dialogue parts, and I own it on DVD. As Paul said in the "Anthology", “Where else will you see John performing "I Am the Walrus?"”