On April 3, 1967, two days after recording the reprise of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul McCartney and the Beatles’ assistant Mal Evans flew to America on a private Lear jet reportedly hired from Frank Sinatra. Paul planned to surprise his girlfriend Jane Asher on her 21st birthday. After stopping in San Francisco (where McCartney jammed with the Jefferson Airplane), the pair flew to Denver where Asher was appearing with the Old Vic theatre company in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
By 1967, McCartney was making experimental films, and he traveled everywhere with his video camera. While filming Jane Asher at Denver’s Civic Center Park, he was struck by an idea. It combined the randomness of his amateur films with the stories of the Merry Pranksters that he heard during his time in San Francisco and the mystery charabanc tours that took vacationers from Liverpool to Blackpool on a bus filled with beer and accordion players. Maybe the Beatles could create and film a mystery tour of their own.
By the time he returned to England, McCartney had sketched out the idea for the Beatles’ next project – Magical Mystery Tour. Together, they decided that they would write the script and direct the film. Of course, new songs would be needed for the film. On April 25, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band still being prepared for release, the Beatles began recording the title track for Magical Mystery Tour with McCartney leading the group from the piano.
It would be several months before the Beatles began filming Magical Mystery Tour. In the interim, they would release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, perform “All You Need Is Love” live on the first worldwide satellite broadcast, and begin their study of meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That summer, after the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, McCartney convinced the other Beatles that they needed to focus on Magical Mystery Tour, including writing new songs to accompany the film. The first song they would record after Epstein’s death was “I Am The Walrus.” When Lennon sang “I’m crying,” he really was.
Related: “10 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘I Am the Walrus'”
Magical Mystery Tour was doomed from the beginning. Without the help of Epstein who might have brought some semblance of order to the project, Magical Mystery Tour was fraught with an absence of direction and an abundance of bad decisions. Five days of makeshift fun traveling around England in their magical bus could not overcome scheduling fiascos, union problems, low morale, and the lack of a script.
Ten hours of film, including scenes shot at the West Malling Air Force Base and a strip club was cut down to just 52 minutes in a marathon, eleven-week editing session. When the BBC aired the final film on Boxing Day, most viewers could not make heads or tails out of the story. The overwhelmingly negative reviews forced a next day apology from Paul on the David Frost show. In America, NBC canceled plans to broadcast the movie.
Magical Mystery Tour may have been the Beatles’ first major flop, but it was more than outweighed by the double EP of music from the film that topped the charts in Britain. Included on the soundtrack were Lennon’s “I Am The Walrus,” Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way,” and McCartney’s “Fool On The Hill.” In America, Capitol decided to pair the six songs from the film with the singles the Beatles had released in 1967, including “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” and “Hello, Goodbye.” Like its counterpart in England, the Magical Mystery Tour album was Number One on the charts in the U.S.
Related: “The Fab Four’s Singles Were Number 1 – Repeatedly”
Today, the Magical Mystery Tour film is seen as a touch of hubris from a band that thought they could do anything but were forced to confront their limitations. Yet, this brief sour note did little to detract from a remarkable year in which the Beatles released the groundbreaking “Strawberry Fields Forever”/”Penny Lane” single, “All You Need Is Love,” “Hello, Goodbye,” and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – songs and albums that would forever change popular music.
-Scott Freiman deconstructs the filming and recording of Magical Mystery Tour, as well as “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” and “All You Need Is Love” in Deconstructing Magical Mystery Tour.
-Photo Credit: Getty Images
We originally posted this in 2021, but it’s been getting re-discovered lately, so it seemed a good time to re-visit it…
“His Canon video camera” – you may want to revise that, especially since Canon didn’t make video cameras until the ’80s.
We’re all so impressed with your irrelevant nerd knowledge.
Instead of snark, maybe you should just acknowledge your ignorance…
You must be pretentiously using the Royal We as WE are all pretty impressed.
Nigel….what are you, 5 years old?
Sorry, I love Magical Mystery Tour, it’s like Monty Python before they even came into existence. The film is full of quirky humor, beautiful photography & of course, marvelous new songs.
Magical Mystery Tour…a great harbor for Beatle hits….if nothing else, The Beatles couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without enough hit singles to merit a greatest hits album.
Magical Mystery Tour came along just in time to give one of their greatest collections a platform.
In the US it was becoming a real challenge to keep up with each single…not to mention, forever reloading 45 after 45. LP’s were a welcome way to fit back, for a spell, and enjoy song after song.
At that stage, frankly, it wouldn’t have made a difference what kind of film the served up to accompany the album with.
A number of factual errors. Sgt. Pepper was released June 1, 1967 so they hadn’t been recording the reprise two days earlier from his June 3 flight. And Sir Paul’s idea for MMT happened on an April flight home from the US, not his June post-Pepper visit to San Francisco, hence the first recording session for the MMT song on April 25. Research is your friend.
Ohhh. Was there ever a response to your comment?
Oh. Guess not as it would have shown up in the comments. Right.
Ten hours of MMT film, cut down to 52 minutes,…I would absolutely LOVE to see the other remaining nine hours… Please somebody put out the Magical Mystery Tour out takes! …. I agree that the film seems to predate Monty Python …I live the obscure and wierdness of it. Paul always said it might have been a ‘mistake’ in the short term, but maybe nit so much in the long term. I think the film is a period piece of that era.
Ten hours of MMT film, cut down to 52 minutes,…I would absolutely LOVE to see the other remaining nine hours… Please somebody put out the Magical Mystery Tour out takes! …. I agree that the film seems to predate Monty Python …I love the obscure wierdness of it. Paul always said it might have been a ‘mistake’ in the short term, but maybe not so much in the long term. I think the film is a period piece of that era.
Definitely wish someone would unearth that footage!
It’s also extremely possible that the Beatles expected their audience to be watching MMT stoned… That would explain a lot. 🙂
I wouldn’t call MMT the film a total flop. The music sections like I Am The Walrus are excellent and certainly influenced music videos. One problem that wasn’t mentioned is that it was only shown in black and white on the BBC. It’s a movie that needs to be in color. I think many people are Choising Beggars in regards to this… Try to keep up the level of communication the Beatle’s had with their fans via music, interviews and films and see how well you do. The film helped to bring about the music and the music portions are worth the purchase price for anyone buying the DVD/Blu-ray.
Just change “video camera” to “film camera” or “movie camera” and you’ll be all set.
“Movie Camera” was the term of the day
The BBC showed Magical Mystery Tour in black and white, which must have negatively impacted the audience’s experience of the film.
I’m really bored with all of the MMT bashing. I love the film. As others have cited, it’s absurd like much of the “underground” British television was becoming at that time. And, yes — it stands alone as a great collection of music videos. I think the only mistake the band made was not insisting that it be broadcast in colour. Hardly a “flop”. Perhaps more a case of “ahead of its time”.
For those of you who don’t know the great Ivor Cutler, in Britain he is an absolute artistic legend.
Insert back into the film, the excerpts that were left on the cutting room floor. And with some minor edits, MMT is a brilliant art house film. The real problem is that it was ahead of it’s time. This remains a real opportunity. Never say never.
Could it have been the 2nd disc of a double Sgt. Pepper album?