It is optimistic, brightly colored, abstracted, allegorical, eccentric - I’d call it switched-on steampunk. The movie was developed in 1966 and ’67, concurrent with psychedelia at its most confident and Utopian, and every aspect of its design reflects this. It is a fairy tale, and while applying realism to a fairy tale is a great mechanism for comedy (says the author of Barry Trotter), stories so told have no mythic power. A lysergic Fab fable of good versus evil, its distance from reality is what gets its point across, and the point is lost if you reimagine the Chief Blue Meanie as a normal human being with tattooed skull and a weird nose. That the movie works is nothing short of a miracle, and it works because it is a seamless whole. I’ve called it their last great stroke of collaborative luck. The Fabs were dubious about Yellow Submarine, with good reason it should have been terrible. If they suck, they injure the originals if they don’t, they reduce the originals’ artistic authority. Having Alex Ross come behind Heinz Edelmann is, I would argue, the same thing as Apple allowing contemporary musicians to re-record all the Beatles’ LPs in a contemporary style - then branding them and selling them as “authorized reimaginings” of the originals. But The Beatles weren’t a TV show they were real people living through a real era, and the work they created can’t be taken out of its historical context without something essential being lost. You could easily reboot The Monkees, and nothing would be harmed. Fans argue whose Kirk is better, Chris Pine’s or Bill Shatner’s, and Paramount sits back and counts the money. I’m sure that within the conference rooms of Apple envious looks are thrown in the direction of, for example, Paramount - which has magically leveraged a not-too-popular space opera into a multi-decade cash-cow. Rebooting is the current Holy Grail of corporate media. Yellow Submarine by Alex Ross? What’s next? The Beatles cartoon by Frank Miller? Strangelove, and trying is proof that you have no idea what you’re looking at. You can no more reboot Yellow Submarine than you can Dr. Which misses the entire point of Yellow Submarine. Apple seems determined to reboot Yellow Submarine, by repackaging it in a more literal way. It wasn’t enough to have avoided Robert Zemekis’ much-discussed live-action Yellow Submarine (a truly dreadful idea which surely would’ve not simply augured, but actually brought on the apocalypse). I love comics, and I love the Beatles, and I love Yellow Submarine - which is why I’m a little perturbed by all this. Hey, kids! See if you can find the sugarcube hidden in this photorealistic art!
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