teledyn

As Sun Ra said, every disc you buy represents somebody's hopes and dreams. Given the age (1998) the animation is impressive, sneaking in Platonic solids transforming and zooming about as the camera eye sails deeper into the model. Right there, this wasn't easy to make, look at the diffusion textures made of telescope images, yeah, it's trippy and the disembodied voice guide says 'tetrahedron' far too often, but it is well done, and in its own realm, it tells a story. I might have preferred images to enlightened us about their notions, but this isn't any recruiting video, it's of its time, esoteric fan-service for meditation whatever and there's nothing wrong with that.

Pepperland. A far-away fable of a land where people are charming, where string quartets of seniors can sit in the park, flowers in bloom everywhere, butterflies drift by while children dance and play in the sunshine.

You and I remember Pepperland, but it seems so very long ago. The songwriter Randy Newman puts it at Dayton Ohio, 1903. "Long ago when things could grow, the air was clean and you could see, and folks was nice to you" -- our Pepperland was a time when bandstand gazebos in public parks were put to use and the music there enjoyed by all.

The Blue Meanies could not tolerate such open joy. It irked their sense of Order and Control. They sent in the Butterfly Stompers, Hidden Persuaders, Hungry Turks, and the 10 foot barristers they called the Apple Bonkers. Music, the open and shared music commons that gave the sense of community and culture, was collected up and locked away, guarded by dogs and goons, and the cultural heroes enclosed and silenced. Soon Pepperland too was silent, cold as stone, a tear in an eye here and there the only life to be found.

But look around. This is not fiction.

Everyone decries the decay of our civilization. Pollution, crime, vandalism, distrust, lockdowns in the schools, deadbolts on the doors, the homeless everywhere, endless demonstrations, lawyers and regulators at every turn. What happened? How did we get so bonked? As Soft Machine sang, "Why are we sleeping?"

When I recruit players for our community band I tell them of Yellow Submarine. I remind them of that scene where the lads from Liverpool must tip-toe in the night, up past the guards and their dogs, their urgent mission up the hill to break into the sealed-up grand bandstand and the bandroom where the ancient brass-band gear of Sargeant Pepper's band is locked away.

"What happens next," I tell them, "is what WE do." Our job, as community musicians, is to sustain Pepperland.

Marshall Allen tells us, "If you want a better world, you must make a better music." Once upon a time, our streets, our parks and our communities were filled with music. Music we made ourselves, music we made together, for ourselves and our neighbours.

Yellow Submarine is a call to arms; you say you want a Revolution? Unlock the bandrooms, grab the old uniforms, STRIKE UP THE BAND! The Stompers, the Persuaders, the Barrister Bonkers, even the Blue Meanies themselves and their right-hand glovemen cannot stand up to the power of music to bring back the love and wake the people. We all want to change the world, but dig: what good is revolution if you can't dance to it!

By now you've already figured out I'm a huge fan of this film; it's been on my top-films since I saw it in the theatres the first time around. There is already powerful magic in this film, and this new re-release has done more magic of its own to bring the original vision into the twenty-first century. The sound is incredible, the colours astounding, and the added footage completely justified.

Unless you are buried bonked under a mountain of green apples, and especially if you are, you should commit this film to memory, because THIS is how it is done, how we get out of our current societal mess, how we get back to where we once belonged.

There is something going on here. It isn't that the acting is bad and contrived, it is way beyond that, it is actors (who are B-picture actors) acting as bad actors, spoofing themselves, their genre and the whole Hollywood-Disney comedy industry that was so big at the time. Remember "Herbie the Love Bug" with Dean Jones? It is that caliber of forced performance turned up a notch, mixed with three six-packs of 4th-wall gags, Three Stooges shticks like tiny offices with low-hanging bookshelves and multiple entrances. It's Looney Tunes with Frankie Avalon as Daffy Duck.

Plot-wise this is ... well, hey, you have bikini FemBots way ahead of Woody Allen's Casino Royale, you have Vincent Price with a Disney-style dunderhead for his Igor, you have a spy agency and the lamest Secret Agent Car you've ever seen, there's just no room for a plot! It is, however, a film. By that I mean it doesn't fall apart half way and end in a psychedelic chaos rush like, say, the Monkees movie 'Head'. The film states a reality (a very strange reality) and sticks to it until the tale is told. It is formulaic to the extreme, with one of the most surreal Peter-Sellers-style farce car-chase scenes in cinematic history.

I figure there has to be more to this movie, some secret society undercurrent or something, and that's why I gave it a 7. Certainly it wasn't so bad I couldn't watch; I had to see it through just to see it through. It is set in San Francisco, which in itself is a significant hipness-clue factor for those times (Herbie was also SF, no?).

The Bikini Machine has got that Beach Party Bingo feel to it complete with Dobie Gillis but without Maynard G. Krebbs, and that alone makes me want to include this film in some sort of hip cannon and shoot it.