Disney+ Debuts Trailer For Restored ‘The Beatles Anthology’ Ahead of Streaming Debut
The landmark eight-part series chronicling the formation and rise of the band has an additional episode featuring previously unreleased footage.
A scene from the infamous TV film Magical Mystery Tour shown on British TV at Christmas 1967 and panned by the critics.
Disney+ dropped the two-and-a-half minute trailer for the upcoming refresh of The Beatles Anthology series. The beloved documentary chronicling the formation, fame and frenzy surrounding the Fab Four — which was originally broadcast in 1995 in the U.S. and U.K. before being released on video — will make its streaming debut on the service beginning Nov. 26.
The first three episodes will drop that day, followed by parts 4-6 on Nov. 27 and episode 7-9 on Nov. 28. The series has been restored and expanded from eight to nine episodes, including a new ninth ep featuring what a release promised was, “illuminating and previously unreleased footage of Paul, George and Ringo during the creation of the original 1990s Anthology series and music project.”
The series follows John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison as they look back on the legendary band’s eight-year rise to global superstardom, with the Disney+ version slated to feature a new restoration of the footage and a sound mix overseen by the Apple Corps production team working in conjunction with director Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post crew in Wellington, New Zealand.
The trailer opens with the voice of Lennon describing the origins of the group. “I met Paul and said, ‘do you want to join me band?’… Then George joined. Then Ringo joined,” he says. What follows is a whirlwind tour through the group’s early years, with Ringo explaining, “We’ve heard it from everybody else, now you can hear it from us” as archival footage has Lennon lamenting, “the demand on us was tremendous.”
The clip then takes us from a series of high points, the group’s legendary Feb. 1964 Ed Sullivan appearance that launched a million bands to the first-ever major stadium rock show at New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965, which was followed by a second show at Shea that Starr completely forgot about. “I thought we only played there once,” Starr says. “How was it?”
The new ninth chapter finds the then living members — McCartney, Starr and Harrison — regrouping in 1995 to work on the first “new” Beatles song since the group’s split in April 1970, “Free as a Bird.” In addition to the original doc series, The Beatles Anthology project included a four-volume set of double albums (which also contained another “new” song “Real Love”) as well as 2000 coffee table book.
“Nothing will ever break the love we have for each other,” says Lennon, who was murdered by a crazed fan outside his New York apartment building on Dec. 8, 1980. “The Beatles exist without us,” adds Harrison, who died in 2001 of cancer at age 58.
Watch The Beatles Anthology trailer below.
