Rumor: Beatles Anthology this year (1 Viewer)

[Patrick McCart]

Both are 1.66:1 open matte.

The VHS of Help! is NOT the restored version, only the DVD is.

The DVD's are open matte because MPI had not had the equipment to do anamorphic enhancement, so they opted for the open matte approach. The guy who transfered Help! to DVD said he did his best to keep the frame open as wide as it could to keep picture information from being cut off on all 4 sides.

 

[Ed St. Clair]

TheoGB, does the GB stand for Great Britain?

Duh!

My 'memory' isn't perfect, far from it.

When BA was coming to America, I 'thought' I read England got more of a show than we did.

Maybe you can 'clear' is up for me.

Thanks.

 

[TheoGB]

My 'memory' isn't perfect, far from it.
When BA was coming to America, I 'thought' I read England got more of a show than we did.
Maybe you can 'clear' is up for me.

Not quite sure what you're implying by following Dr.Evil down the '' route.
My memory ain't up to much either but I do know that ITV had the Anthology because of the bloody adverts and the fact that it's one of the few times I actually watched the station.
When you said the BBC showed it I assumed you meant some international BBC station over there in the U.S., hence my thinking it weird that they could get overseas rights but not domestic.
I have no idea how much of the show we got. I believe each of the 8 Anthology videos is 75mins long. Off hand I can't remember how many tapes we took to record the TV broadcast without ads but I believe they were very long and I wouldn't be surprised to find that sans ads, each of the six parts were 75-90mins long.
When the videos were released they stated that the whole series was 25% longer or something and to the best of my knowledge it was never repeated prime time again, though it may have been on extra-terrestrial TV or somesuch.

 

[Tim Gerdes]

There was some earlier speculation that Anthology was to be released on DVD in the fall of 2000. In fact Allan Kozinn, New York Times music critic and Beatles author, was quoted as such in February 2000:

It will include everything

Well I expect this means we will get the extended cut from VHS and LD, not the TV cut. On the other hand, when Anthology was first released, one of the British music magazines, I believe it was either Mojo or Q, had an interview with the Beatles that discussed the making of Anthology. They discussed how difficult the editing process was and revealed that the first cut of the program was 20 hours long!
So ideally, that's what I'd like on DVD, the 20 hour cut. Because if I had one criticism of Anthology, I feel it was too short. Can't get enough of those Beatles.

 

[Duncan Harvey]

The UK transmissions were on the ITV network courtesy of Granada (who of course were the first TV station in the world to ever have the Beatles on TV).

The show was the 6x50 minute format although there were 25 min and 5 min programmes to show the FAAB and RL videos. These were horrid celebrity fests with those from the 60s saying how they were best mates with “the boys” and those from the current era saying how great they think the Beatles are.

The UK videos were the 8 extended episodes and compred to the broadcast transmission much of the extra footage comes in the early and middle, athough the trip to Risikesh (sp?) in 1968 is given more footage. Surprisingly IIRC the Get Back sessions don’t really have much more footage than the broadcast versions.

I’ve got the US LDs and from memory there is no difference between them and the UK VHS tapes –cant precisely recall if FAAB is on the tapes – I think not.

Whilst the extended version is better, theres a slight faux pas when the tribute to Brian Epstein is shown. On the broadcast version we had the lovely footage of Brian combined with the released version of “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” (ie from the Help! LP). On the extended version - having played this when covering Help!, for the Brian tribute they use the alternative “rough” take as contained on the Anthology II cd set. Whilst an interesting track, it does undermine the dignity of the original tribute to Brian, who frankly deserved better.