Magical Mystery Tour is a 1967 British made-for-television musical film written, produced, directed by, and starring the Beatles. It is the third film that starred the band and depicts a group of people on a coach tour (including the band members) who experience strange happenings caused by magicians (also played by the band as well as road manager Mal Evans). The premise was inspired by Ken Kesey's Furthur adventures with the Merry Pranksters and the then-popular coach trips from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights. Paul McCartney is credited with conceptualising and leading the project.
Much of Magical Mystery Tour was shot in and around RAF West Malling, a decommissioned military airfield in Kent, and the script was largely improvised. Shooting proceeded on the basis of a mostly handwritten collection of ideas, sketches and situations. The film is interspersed with musical interludes, which include the Beatles performing "I Am the Walrus" wearing animal masks and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performing Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes' "Death Cab for Cutie".
The film originally aired on BBC1, in black-and-white, on Boxing Day, 26 December 1967. A colour transmission followed on BBC2 on 5 January 1968. It received mixed reviews,"Arena – The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, 1. Magical Mystery Tour Revisited" Bbc.co.uk, Broadcast 6 October 2012. although its accompanying soundtrack was a commercial and critical success. The film received an American theatrical release in 1974 by New Line Cinema, and in select theatres worldwide in 2012 by Apple Films.
Background The film was an attempt to combine the free-wheeling fun of Ken Kesey's 1964 cross-country American bus tour aboard Furthur with the Merry Pranksters, and the then-popular coach (bus) trips from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights.George Harrison in Chapter 7.4 of The Beatles Anthology John Lennon stated that "if stage shows were to be out, we wanted something to replace them. Television was the obvious answer." Most of the band members have said that the initial idea was Paul McCartney's, although he stated, "I'm not sure whose idea Magical Mystery Tour was. It could have been mine, but I'm not sure whether I want to take the blame for it! We were all agreed on it – but a lot of the material at that time could have been my idea." According to McCartney, he had been creating home movies and this was a source of inspiration for Magical Mystery Tour.
The script of Magical Mystery Tour was largely improvised. The Beatles gathered together a group of people for the cast and camera crew, and told them to "be on the coach on Monday morning". Ringo Starr recalled: "Paul had a great piece of paper – just a blank piece of white paper with a circle on it. The plan was: 'We start here, and we've got to do something here …' We filled it in as we went along."
Plot The situation is that of a group of people on a British mystery tour"A pleasure excursion to an unspecified destination" as per "Entry: mystery tour", Oxford Dictionaries in a 1967 coach, focusing mostly on Richard B. Starkey and his recently widowed Auntie Jessie. Other group members on the bus include the tour director, Jolly Jimmy Johnson; the tour hostess, Miss Wendy Winters; the conductor, Buster Bloodvessel; and the other Beatles.
During the course of the tour, "strange things begin to happen" at the whim of "four or five magicians", four of whom are played by the Beatles themselves and the fifth by the band's long-time road manager Mal Evans.
During the journey, Starkey and his Aunt Jessie argue continually. Aunt Jessie begins to have daydreams of falling in love with Buster Bloodvessel, who displays increasingly eccentric and disturbing behaviour. The tour involves several strange activities, such as an impromptu race in which each of the passengers employs a different mode of transportation (some run, a few jump into cars, a group of people pedal a long bike, while Starkey ends up beating them all with the bus). In one scene, the tour group walk through what appears to be a British Army recruitment office and are greeted by the army drill sergeant. The sergeant, shouting incomprehensibly, appears to instruct the assembled onlookers on how to attack a stuffed cow.
The tour group also crawl into a tiny tent in a field, inside which is a projection theatre. A scene in a restaurant shows a waiter, named Pirandello (also played by Lennon), continuously shoveling spaghetti onto the table in front of Aunt Jessie, while arriving guests step out from a lift and walk across the dining tables. The film continues with the tour's male passengers watching a strip show (Jan Carson of the Raymond Revuebar). The film ends with the Beatles dressed in white tailcoats, highlighting a glamorous old-style dance crowd scene, accompanied by the song "Your Mother Should Know".
The film is interspersed with musical interludes, which include the Beatles performing "I Am the Walrus" wearing animal masks, Harrison singing "Blue Jay Way" while waiting on Blue Jay Way Road, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performing Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes' "Death Cab for Cutie" sung by Stanshall.
Cast John Lennon as John, Magician #1 (Magician with Coffee), Ticket Salesman, The Eggman, Pirandello the Waiter, and The Narrator Paul McCartney as Paul, Magician #2 (Painted Nose Magician), and Major McCartney George Harrison as George and Magician #3 (Magician Looking Through Telescope) Ringo Starr as Richard and Magician #4 (Talkative Magician) Jessie Robins (as Jessie Robbins) as Auntie Jessie Derek Royle as Jolly Jimmy Johnson Miranda Forbes (as Mandy Weet) as Miss Wendy Winters Ivor Cutler as Buster Bloodvessel Mal Evans as Magician #5 (Magician Standing in the Corner) and a Passenger on the Bus Victor Spinetti as Sergeant Spinetti Neil Aspinall as Man with Hat on the Roadside Nat Jackley as Rubber Man Nicola Hale as Little Girl George Claydon as Photographer Maggie Wright as Starlet Shirley Evans as Accordionist Jan Carson as Stripper Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band as themselves
Production
Filming
Shooting proceeded on the basis of a mostly handwritten collection of ideas, sketches and situations, which McCartney called the "Scrupt". Magical Mystery Tour was ultimately the shortest of all Beatles films, although almost ten hours of footage was shot over a two-week period. The core of the film was shot between 11 September and 25 September 1967.
Lennon recalled in a later interview, "We knew most of the scenes we wanted to include, but we bent our ideas to fit the people concerned, once we got to know our cast. If somebody wanted to do something we hadn't planned, they went ahead. If it worked, we kept it in." At one point, Lennon had a dream in which he was a waiter piling spaghetti on a woman's plate, so the sequence was filmed and included in the movie.Beatles Anthology. Dir. Bob Smeaton. 1995. Some of the older actors, such as Nat Jackley, were not familiar with productions without a script and were disappointed by the lack of one.
Much of Magical Mystery Tour was shot in and around RAF West Malling, a decommissioned military airfield in Kent,"The Beatles' bubbly", BBC, 25 January 2007. as it was not possible to book any London film studio at short notice. Many of the interior scenes, such as the ballroom sequence for "Your Mother Should Know", were filmed in the disused aircraft hangars. The exteriors, such as the "I Am the Walrus" sequence and the impromptu race, were shot on the runways and taxi aprons. RAF Air Training Corps cadets can be seen marching in some scenes, and during "I Am the Walrus" an RAF Avro Shackleton is seen flying above the group. Some scenes were also shot in the nearby town of West Malling.
The mystery tour itself was shot throughout the West Country of England, including Devon and Cornwall,"Beatles 'mystery' film discovered", BBC. 19 April 2005. including three days filming women in bikinis at the Atlantic Hotel, Newquay. Most of the footage was not used in the finished film. The striptease sequence was shot at Paul Raymond's Raymond Revuebar in London's Soho district, and the sequence for "The Fool on the Hill" was shot around Nice, in the south of France.
The coach used in the film, a Plaxton-bodied Bedford VAL, carried the registration number URO 913E. The vehicle was new to coach company Fox of Hayes in 1967. The Hard Rock Cafe acquired the coach in 1988, and the vehicle is now completely refurbished. In the race sequence, Starr himself drives the bus around the airfield racetrack. During the filming, an ever greater number of cars followed the colourful, hand-lettered bus hoping to see what its passengers were up to, until a running traffic jam developed. The spectacle ended after Lennon angrily tore the lettering off the sides of the bus.
Editing The eleven weeks that followed shooting were mostly spent on editing the film from ten hours to 52 minutes. Scenes that were filmed but not included in the final cut include: A sequence where ice cream, fruit and lollipops were sold to the Beatles and other coach passengers; Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr each looking through a telescope; Happy Nat the Rubber Man (Nat Jackley, especially recruited for his 'funny walks', which the Beatles had long been drawn to) chasing women around the Atlantic Hotel's outdoor swimming pool, a sequence which Lennon directed; Mr. Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler) performing "I'm Going in a Field"; and The band Traffic performing their song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush".
For the psychedelic visual sequence during the song "Flying", some of the flying footage from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove was re-used. As told by editor Roy Benson in the BBC Radio Documentary "Celluloid Beatles", the film lacked footage to cover the sequence for the song "Flying". Benson had access to the aerial footage filmed for the Dr. Strangelove B52 sequences, which was stored at Shepperton Studios. The use of the footage prompted Kubrick to call Benson to complain.
Reception Magical Mystery Tour was viewed negatively by not only critics, but also by many Beatles fans for, as Ultimate Classic Rock journalist Dave Swanson described it, "its stream-of-consciousness style." In addition, it was broadcast in the UK on 26 December on BBC1, which at the time only broadcast in black and white for technical reasons. George Martin, the band's producer, later said: "When it came out originally on British television, it was a colour film but shown in black and white, because they didn't have colour on BBC1 in those days. So it looked awful and was a disaster." Lennon later said: "What the BBC – stupid idiots – did, they showed it in black and white first. Can you imagine, around Christmas? And then they [the critics] reviewed it in black and white. It's like reviewing a mono version of a stereo record." It was the Beatles' first critical failure. The film had a repeated showing on 5 January 1968, this time broadcast in colour, on BBC2, but there were only about 200,000 colour TV receivers in the UK at the time. As a result of the unfavourable reviews, networks in the US declined to show the film there. Beatles aide Peter Brown blamed McCartney for its failure. Brown said that during a private screening for NEMS management staff, the reaction had been "unanimous ... it was awful", yet McCartney was convinced that the film would be warmly received, and ignored Brown's advice to scrap the project and save the band from embarrassment.