So Liverpudlian poet Roger McGough – who was in Merseybeat band The Scaffold (Lily The Pink) – was hired to ‘give authentic voice to The Beatles’, says McGough, ‘because what they were currently speaking was Woody Allen meets Plato. Unsurprisingly, The Beatles didn’t think the characters sounded like them. The original script was written by a team of Americans – one of them, Erich Segal, was a professor of Greek at Harvard, as well as author of the classic 1970 weepie Love Story. Yellow Submarine grew out of a deal struck by Beatles manager Brian Epstein to make a series of cartoons for American TV ![]() So director Charles Dunning and the animators stole the only copy, put it in Dunning’s bank vault, and told the Americans, “You can have it back – if you pay.” So they were given a bit more money.’ The final budget was £250,000. But the Americans refused to move from the budget. ‘The British studio told the American producers that they needed more to finish it. ‘There was this epic struggle between the British and the American producers about money,’ recalls Valentine Edelmann. John could’ve blown up because there was 240 volts running through this thing…’ So to protect the mic Mal Evans had a condom in his bag, and I put the mic in the condom and put it in the bottle. Then I realised there was a huge amount of electrical current going through the microphone. ‘He didn’t realise the implications… I thought to get a bottle of water and put a microphone in the water and get him to sing to that. ‘John wanted to be recorded underwater to simulate being in a submarine,’ Emerick recalled. John Lennon sang the backing vocals for Yellow Submarine through a condom, according to Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. But an art assistant in the animation studio misunderstood his colouring instructions. And the Blue Meanies are genocidal tyrants, though they were originally Red Meanies, an attack on communist forces. The flying glove is the heavy hand of oppression. ‘He had experienced Nazism and communism.’ So, the ‘Apple bonkers’ that fall from the sky are bombs. ‘My father was a refugee,’ says Valentine Edelmann. Yellow Submarine had political undertones. It’s a miracle that Yellow Submarine was made.’ Don’t start without an animation studio that is fully equipped for the job. If you want to write a book about how not to make a feature animation, Yellow Submarine ticks all the boxes. ‘It was produced under very chaotic circumstances. ![]() ‘My father had a very difficult relationship with this film,’ says the late artist’s daughter Valentine. Yellow Submarine was his first film – and his last. To make Yellow Submarine, the British animation studio TVC hired Heinz Edelmann, a Czech-German graphic designer, to art-direct the film. It’s also the guitarist’s dig at his lowly pecking order within The Beatles’ song publishing company, Northern Songs Only A Northern Song, one of four new songs featured in Yellow Submarine, isn’t just a minor psychedelic masterpiece from George Harrison.
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