The Bee Gees |

Come with us on a magical mystery tour of amazing blogs as we present

Moon in Gemini took down some Blue Meanies in her critique of the classic Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine.

Summer Reeves revisited a snapshot of Beatlemania at its most frantic, in the early Robert Zemeckis comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

Love Letters to Old Hollywood offers a heartfelt and spirited defense of the much-reviled Bee Gees/Peter Frampton version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

A Shroud of Thoughts provides a richly detailed look at another Beatles-inspired movie musical, Across the Universe.

And finally, nostalgic old me looks back at a couple of Monty Python-like music videos by George Harrison, “This Song” and “Crackerbox Palace.”

And there are more Beatles delights to come! Keep us bookmarked as we work our way through two more days of the blogathon!

With Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a splendid time is guaranteed for all…lovers of bad movies, that is. This movie was conceived at a time when wishful thinking about a Beatles reunion was at its peak, and when producer Robert Stigwood and stars The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton could seemingly do no wrong. So Stigwood snapped up the rights to classic Beatles tunes and, with the simple thinking that 3 + 1 = 4, he put Frampton and The Brothers Gibb together to make a quartet. The only problem was, that quartet wasn’t The Beatles.

The plot bears a vague similarity to the great Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine (and please, the resemblance ends there), by way of Sgt. Pepper’s band rescuing Frampton’s girlfriend (named Strawberry Fields in the movie…you know, “Strawberry Fields Forever”?) from some evildoers, particularly a ferocious band played by Aerosmith. But considering that Aerosmith does one of the few decent Beatles cover versions in the movie (“Come Together”), one would wish for Strawberry to come to her senses and become a groupie for the evil band.

But then, this wafer-thin plot is really only an excuse to gather an all-star cast (including Steve Martin, poor guy, in his feature-film debut) and make them warble half-baked versions of Beatles hits. The nadir is probably George Burns doing “Fixing a Hole” (in his throat, from the sound of it).

I suppose you can’t blame Stigwood, the Gibbs, et al. for trying to cash in on a craze. One person you can blame, though, is veteran Beatles producer George Martin, who inexplicably got involved in this mess as its music producer. At the time, Martin supposedly bragged that the soundtrack album shipped more units than the Beatles’ 1967 original album. But when the movie laid a giant egg in theaters across the country, most of those huge shipments were either sent back or were laid to rest in the $1.98 bargain bin. Since then, Martin, whose has appeared in many Beatles tributes (such as the Beatles Anthology video set), has been noticeably reticent about his contribution to this stinker.

As one critic put it at the time, if you listen to the soundtrack album backwards, you can hear Paul McCartney saying, “I wish I was dead! I wish I was dead!”