The Beatles on Record
The History Channel is showing “The Beatles on Record,” an official Apple Corp. documentary. It’s sort of a mini-Anthology, focused solely on their studio work. Parts of it appear as the mini-documentaries on the remastered Beatles CD catalog. For a knowledgeable Beatles fan there’s nothing new in “The Beatles on Record,” but the movie clips are in the best possible quality, and there are some fun studio audio outtakes.
If I’d been paying better attention, I would have noticed that back in September somebody posted the program as it had appeared on the BBC. The American version is exactly 45 minutes without commercials, whereas the British version is a smidgen under one hour. Once again we Americans get an abridged version of a Beatles product! When will it end? I’ve collected the parts into a single YouTube player. It’s window-boxed within a letterbox, but the quality is otherwise excellent.
For comparison, here’s how it looked on the History Channel. This segment covers the middle period, from “Beatles for Sale” through “Sgt. Pepper.” Along the way, the title of Engineer was passed from Norman Smith, whose stint ended with “Rubber Soul,” to Geoff Emerick, who took over the console starting with “Revolver.”
5 comments November 27th, 2009