back to article The Beatles' Yellow Submarine set to sail in 4K by 2K

The Beatles' Yellow Submarine is set to return in HD, with a digitally-restored Blu-ray Disc version of the 1968 animated classic set to hit the shelves this May. Pepperland will appear on screens like never before after specialists at Triage Motion Picture Services and Eque cleaned up the film's artwork by hand, frame by …

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  1. John A Blackley

    Unless it also comes with

    a couple of funny-smelling cigarettes there's no point in me buying it.

    1. Citizen Kaned

      Re: Unless it also comes with

      just source your own... i will be :)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sorry to offend

      Beatles fanbois but even HD super vision mega pixel update cannot make crap into chocolate cake.

    3. Wombling_Free

      Re: Unless it also comes with

      i'll take an A3 size piece of blotter paper and some Lucy, thanks.

      I might be able to make some sense of it.

  2. Swarthy

    Oh, Wow.

    I want this.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    One of the best films of all time

    Loved watching this when I was kid, I struggled to find the DVD but my good lady eventually found one.

    Wasn't there a remake / sequel due for release, or was that canned?

  4. EddieD

    Excellent.

    That may well be worth getting - it was always my favourite of the Beatles' films, probably because it had the least to do with the Beatles...

  5. Tim Walker
    Thumb Up

    Well, I'M there...

    Great film - I have the DVD, but seeing Pepperland in HD... yes please :-)

    (Related note: I wonder if that 3D CGI remake with Peter Serafinowicz you mentioned a few months back, is permanently stranded in the proverbial dry-dock...)

    1. Quantum Leaper
      Unhappy

      Re: Well, I'M there...

      Everything thing I have read the 3D CGI version from Disney has been sunk before it left dry dock.

  6. Stevie

    Er...

    "The Beatles"?

    1. CADmonkey
      Thumb Down

      You're either a troll...

      ...or you have no soul.

      Either way it rhymes.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Er...

      They're a modern beat combo, m'lud.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Er...

        They've been propping up the Liverpool tourist industry for the past 30 years.

  7. Citizen Kaned

    updated audio too? or will it be mono/stereo?

    HD sound?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Given the quality of the hardware they had then, and given that "HD" sound is a fabrication to begin with, I doubt it matters.

      Hopefully it'll be in whatever format it was in originally - mono, stereo, quadraphonic, or 80.12 Slobby Durround.

      In other news, can you imagine having the job of hand-retouching that movie frame-by-frame? That's seriously gotta mess you up.

  8. 0_Flybert_0
    Pint

    ahh the memories

    cut school from central jersey to philly to the art community squares to see it .. only place it was playing .. small theatre

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Just don't Jar-Jar Jeremy, please!

    I just hope they resist the urge to "improve" things:

    * Making Jeremy Hillary Boob PhD into a Jar-Jar ripoff

    * Adding a kid-friendly sub-racing section instead of the Sea of Holes

    * "correcting" Max's accent into something more "socially conscious"

    And of course, changing the Apple Bonkers because of a certain computer company...

    The one with half a hole in the pocket.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Just don't Jar-Jar Jeremy, please!

      * John doesn't shoot first

  10. Stuart Halliday
    Happy

    Hmm as this was hand drawn, I can't see the benefit of a blu-ray release as it'll be hard to make out any more detail surely?

    I guess the Japanese want something different to show off their new super-hd system? Perhaps they're tired of showing off Thunderbirds and Stingray?

    But a DVD version with cleaned up graphics will properly make me buy it when it's in the £3 Tesco shelves?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      A test:

      a) Make a color sketch of something.

      b) Scan it.

      c) Resize to 1920x1080.

      d) Copy. Downscale the copy to 720x400.

      e) Upscale the copy to 1920x1080. Pick triilinear if you have a good upscaling bluray player or nearest neighbor if you do it on your TV.

      f) Look at them next to one another.

      g) See the difference.

      It really does make a ton of difference. And bluray's compression and overall datarate is better, so you don't get much horrible macroblocking around sharp lines - which feature rather prominently in animation. In addition, bluray handles color much better; the color bandwidth of DVDs is limited too. This is handled better now than back in the '90s, but it's still there.

      Upshot: It really does make a ton of difference. Unless you're using a 27" TV 10 feet away, FFS don't bother with DVDs. It's not all about maximum possible resolving power, people! Why does everyone forget that?!

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    OMG!!!

    I AM SOOO going to have to run out and not buy this when it's released!!!

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wahoo....

    ...a crap film made worse by a sound track by an overated boy band.

    She loves you yeah yeah yeah,

    she loves you yeah yeah yeah,

    she loves you yeah yeah yeah...

    All you need is love, all you need is love,

    All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

    Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.

    All you need is love, all you need is love,

    All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

    f88k me and they say modern music is repetative and uninspired.

    1. James Hughes 1

      Re: Wahoo....

      On the other hand that overrated boy band is the most successful of all time, who almost everyone have heard of, and will continue to have heard off once all the current crop are dead and buried.

      And to make your assessment on the lyrics of one (very early in their career) song is, shall we say, rather immature, don't you think?

      You don't like them. A lot of people do. Get over it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Wahoo....

        Actually it was two songs there.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wahoo....

      The lyrics to Carmina Burana look pretty dumb, too. Judging music insipid because it's lyrics are silly is absurd - you could write song whose only lyric was technically "La", but it could be a masterpiece compositionally.

      And if you have a problem with the music itself, rather than a problem with what people say about it - which, it seems, is really what you dislike - at least learn about it, and get a better cross-section than a few of the poppiest examples.

      Some of the things they did - use of instruments other than guitar/bass/drums/vocals, use of effects and samples, multitracking - were unprecedented. It's easy to forget how hard things were to do then, but nobody DID things like dubbing in sound effects and doing multiple layers of audio.

      An example: Yellow Submarine, appropriately enough - I haven't actually listened to it in ages, but from memory I think they had their normal band stuff up front, with its own post production, a backup 'singer' in the form of a bunch of guys in the background, and one or sometimes two tracks of sound effects, and another track of instrumental stuff. At once.

      Now, at that time, they had four-track tape recording. You didn't get out your 64-channel Mackie and fling everything into Cubase. You spliced that shit by hand, and mixed a couple at a time trying to get the sync right. Try planning that out and getting it right, having to do it all *physically*.

      Technically alone it was remarkable; it was layered more than some current pop music. It sounds normal because of that, but music by and large wasn't *produced*, then, it was *recorded*. To pull that off, to have really interesting *music* behind it - tempo changes, unusual chords, etc - and to then SELL IT in a POP MARKET - and to do it all while baked off their asses - that's a fucking achievement.

      If you're going to toss the Beatles out as an overrated boy band, you'd better toss out Mozart and Haydn, too, because that's what they were in their day. A lot of formula, a lot of popularity, even some really pretty mediocre stuff - but also big chunks of absolute brilliance, and a profound effect on their genres.

      Good or bad, all three of those will be remembered another couple of hundred years from now - Mozart for Violin Concerto #5, Haydn for his chamber music, and the Beatles, obviously, for Sea of Holes.

      When your mom takes you to see Yellow Submarine when you are quite young (not the original showing, I should add), what you remember is Sea of Holes. Sorry, there's just no getting around it. It's all about Sea of Holes.

      1. Sean Timarco Baggaley
        Stop

        Re: Wahoo....

        "And if you have a problem with the music itself, rather than a problem with what people say about it - which, it seems, is really what you dislike - at least learn about it, and get a better cross-section than a few of the poppiest examples."

        You might want to try doing that yourself. Most of what you credit "The Beatles" with is actually the work of their producer, George Martin. The 1960s was the era of the producers, despite what the Baby Boomers would have believe. It was the era of Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and Brian Wilson (the latter was one of the Beach Boys, making him one of the few examples of a performer / producer.) Back then, producers were not considered part of the band—you couldn't reliably replicate Spector's "Wall of Sound" technique in a live performance, so live sets tended to use a different, simpler, arrangement—so you don't get to give the credit for Martin's (and others') technical feats to the groups they were used on.

        The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop was producing multi-tracked sound effects—and even complete musical pieces—in the late 1950s. Today, they're mostly associated with their work on "Doctor Who", but before that, they were used heavily by Spike Milligan. (One of their most famous 'works' is "Bloodnok's Stomach", which is a multi-layered, multi-tracked sound effect created for The Goons in 1956. This easily predates The Beatles. Also, note that George Martin worked for the BBC's Music Lbrary prior to moving to EMI, so he would have been very familiar with the Radiophonic Workshop's Musique Concrète approach.)

        So, no. The Beatles had sod all to do with any of that recording technology. They just happened to have a good producer who knew about it. Read about how Delia Derbyshire and Dick Mills produced the original Doctor Who theme, using multiple manually synchronised magnetic tape machines, with tapes stretching down a corridor to get the loops the right length. That is what producers and musicians were already doing by 1963, when The Beatles were still singing trite pap like "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!"

        The Beatles' main contribution was the Lennon-McCartney songwriting duo, who wrote a few gems, but also cranked out an awful lot of shallow, utterly forgettable crud. They were good, but they weren't that good.

        The problem with The Beatles (and many other bands of the era) is the Baby Boomers. This generation, like every other before or since, genuinely believes that only the music recorded for their generation truly "matters". Every other generation believes that "their" music is also the best, but the Baby Boomer generation easily outnumbers the others, (although, mercifully, that won't be the case for much longer). The Baby Boomer generation's influence has become seriously unhealthy: everything has to stand up to their standards, to the music of their childhood and adolescence. As a result, the music industry has become obsessed with re-releases, recycling and band reunions and the like.

        The Beatles' main claim to fame is as the first group to be so self-contained: they wrote all their own songs, performed them, recorded them, and played them live. This was not common practice at the time: most groups were much more open to playing songs written by other songwriters, and to hiring session musicians. It wasn't unusual for the same song to be covered by multiple performers and released at the same time, often in very different styles. (Just ask Neil Diamond.)

        Even so, The Beatles hired in musicians for their later psychedelic albums as they couldn't play all the parts themselves, so they weren't an exception to that particular rule either.

        However, the result of The Beatles' in-house approach is that songs on the same album would generally sound very similar stylistically—there'd be some of Lennon's more abstract pieces, and some of McCartney's more realistic works. And that'd be about it. They might demand that George Martin recreate a sound or effect that they'd heard on another album—the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" was a major influence on their later work—but it would be George Martin and his fellow engineers who made that happen.

        Give credit where it's due: to the engineers and producers. The unsung heroes of the 1960s music industry.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Wahoo....

          I'm happy to give credit to the producers and engineers - given that I write - ? produce? who knows? - EDM, I'm acutely aware of the short shrift producers get. For instance, there's a new Chris Brown single that sounds pretty awesome - but it likely has nothing to do with Mr. Fist, and everything to do with the fact that the producer knows his way around progressive trance. As far as I can tell, he vocoded Christ Fist's voice into oblivion and looped it into acceptable background squish covered it in progressive, and called it pop music.

          Something similar happened to Rhianna - I don't know if it was the same producer - but she can actually *sing*, so the result is significantly better.

          Anyway, yeah, the people who work with a band are part of it, if I'm referencing them.

          At any rate, I don't care what you say, nobody else and no producer would have figured it was a good idea to put a sarcastic, trombone-based march into a pop song. I might be wrong, but I think that the Beatles themselves (and their LSD) get full credit for that.

  13. david 12 Silver badge

    8Mpixel?

    They start by scanning it at only 8Mpixel per frame? No wonder every frame needed to be redrawn by hand.

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