MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (1967)
RETRO
The band's third film was made for TV and first shown by the BBC on Boxing day 1967. It was completely unscripted, even more random and surreal than Help! and largely confused and infuriated the festive family audience across the UK. Paul McCartney was apparently behind the initial concept, inspired by the English tradition of children's mystery bus rides, nostalgic Liverpool to Blackpool coach trips and the more recent LSD-fuelled American bus tour of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. The Beatles, plus various odd characters, including Jessie Robins as Ringo's fictional Aunt Jessie, set off in a colourful bus for destinations unknown. They stop at various locations and take part in miscellaneous strange scenes and activities including a race using random vehicles, a walk through an Army recruitment centre – with Paul McCartney playing an incomprehensible shouting officer – and a crawl through a tiny tent with a movie theatre inside. Later they visit a restaurant and John Lennon becomes a waiter shoveling copious quantities of spaghetti onto Aunt Jessie's table. Meanwhile there are peculiar scenes featuring the band and their road manager Mal Evans as five magicians who appear to have control over the unfolding strange events.
The musical interludes – essentially free-standing video promos for yet another fabulous set of songs are highlights, especially the brilliantly
bizarre I Am A Walrus sequence. While it is undoubtedly a poorly edited and at times clumsy folly, Magical Mystery Tour does brilliantly represent the psychedelic late Sixties scene and is a clear forerunner of the soon to come, more coherently executed surreal comedy of Monty Python's Flying circus.