Beatles Video:

Editorial Review:
Australian DVD (NTSC/Region 0) of the notoriously weird Beatles vanity project that began as a feature film & ended up as a TV special, taken from the same master as the 1988 videocassette release. Features seven songs as well as some newsreel excerpts chronicling Beatles efforts, a brief production history, & trailer. Approx. 50 mins. RBC Entertainment. 2004.

The Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour Reviews:
Magical Mystery Tour Movie (DVD)
2007-07-03 - This is similar to all the other Beatles movies. The camera work is not great although there are some terrific special effects. The trac of "I am the walrus" is particularly fun to watch. The DVD does not have subtitles or captioning. Altogether, the movie is a an interesting psychedelic trip with the Fab Four, and a bus full of passengers, through the English Country Side.

C'mon, it's the Beatles
2007-02-18 - Despite the usual panning of this movie, I found it to be hilarious and made for people who just want to relax their minds and float upstream. Not technically great but c'mon, it's the Beatles.

I don't know about all these other cats, but I liked it
2006-11-17 - This movie is full of prop comedy, it's the Beatles being comedians, but now I must agree with one of the other reviewers, this is absolute proof the Beatles did drugs, and to truely enjoy it, well, I'll let you figure that out

Finally Mysterical, Edgar (a Luckily Sympathetic Diagnosis)
2006-10-07 - And now, in their holy and ongoing quest for expansion of form, the noble knights of the realM bring the sable brush of surrealism to the proceedings both musically and visually. Twisted humor, sly buffoonery, and elastic reality are combined with groaning mountains of overcooked spaghetti and a stripper dancing while the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band sings "Death Cab For Cutie"...and what Mystery Tour is complete without midget wrestling? This show is completely misunderstood and underrated: the Beatles could swing the avant-garde with the best of them. This is one of the most perfect expressions of mid-sixties hallucinatory lunacy made, and it is, as such, a logical tangent from the mania and silliness of "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!". Remember, when the going gets strange, the strange only get stranger, and when the weirdness starts to crackle in from the edges, that's when it's time to turn off your mind, relax, and enjoy the show.

starring The Beatles, Ivor Cutler & The Bonzo Dog Band - superb
2006-10-01 - Five stars for the original film, but only two stars for this DVD.

This DVD is in acceptable video quality - but it shows video artifacts which indicate that it was saved at one stage in the transfer to DVD as an inferior quality "SVCD" file. An A/B comparison shows that my 1988 MPI VHS has vastly superior video quality - and the colours are much richer.

The problem with the MPI VHS was that it was all in HiFi mono (even though the cover claimed it to be stereo) - and the songs were dubbed from only the left channel of the stereo recordings (so they all sounded odd).

This DVD has clearly had a stereo effect applied to the dialogue and incidental sounds, but the Beatles songs sound very much as if they were transferred from original master tapes at Abbey Road Studios, as is claimed on the DVD. The Bonzo Dog Band track "Death Cab For Cutie" has been given the same phony sounding stereo effect as the dialogue (and they're miming to their original album track - which was in excellent stereo).

There's no good reason why this DVD couldn't have at least looked as good as the 1998 MPI VHS. It really is only just worth the budget price being charged in Australia (approx. US$8)

One major point of value in this film is that it contains the only feature film appearances by both Scottish performance poet Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Magical Mystery Tour may be silly in places, but that's just par for the course considering everyone involved - and it's about the best quality silliness you'd ever expect to see.

My favourite musical sequences are "Flying", "I Am The Walrus" and "Death Cab For Cutie" (by the Bonzos).

People might be tempted to quibble about minor errors (like synch in "Blue Jay Way") in the film's editing, but at least the music is all here in its glorious stereophonic entirety - and this version may be as good as we're likely to get as a DVD release.