The Beatles' animated film 'Yellow Submarine' returns to theaters for its 50th anniversary
The Beatles will celebrate the 50th anniversary of their 1968 animated film 'Yellow Submarine' by bringing the movie back to North American theaters this summer, reports Billboard.
The film will receive a make-over, with a new 4K digital restoration a stereo surround sound remix. According to the Rolling Stone report, no automated software was used in the 4k restoration process in order to preserve the original, hand-drawn artwork. Instead, the film's photochemical elements were restored frame-by-frame, all manually by hand. The famous soundtrack and score, featuring top hits by The Beatles, such as 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', 'Eleanor Rigby,' 'Nowhere Man,' 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,' and 'A Day In The Life,' among others, were also remixed in 5.1 stereo surround sound at Abbey Road Studios by Grammy-winning mix engineer Peter Cobbin.
The film is set to hit theaters in July and specific screening dates are available on the Yellow Submarine website. The film is being screened through a collaboration between the Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd., Abramorama and Universal Music Group. A new trailer and film poster have been released for the film's return, which you can check out below:
The animated movie, which was written by Lee Minoff, Al Brodax, Jack Mendelsohn and Erich Segal and directed by George Dunning, is based on the song of the same name written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and sung by Ringo Starr. As Rolling Stone aptly puts it, the film 'features the Beatles embarking on a psychedelic Pop-Art odyssey to save the undersea paradise of Pepperlandia' with their overpoweringly groovy tunes.
The Beatles released a Yellow Submarine soundtrack album for the movie in 1969, that contained only six of the 15 Beatles songs in the film plus seven orchestral pieces written and orchestrated by their producer George Martin. The score for the film was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Show in 1970, but it lost out to Burt Bacharach's music for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In 1999, the fab four released 'Yellow Submarine Songtrack', an album which featured most of the songs used in the film, newly remixed.
Last summer, the Beatles' Apple Corporation announced a partnership with Titan Comics to produce a comic book adaptation of Yellow Submarine. MAD Magazine editor Bill Morrison was will be leading the project, which is expected to arrive this year, though a release date has yet to be announced.