Strawberry Fields

 Al Brodax was a prolific TV and film producer who worked on, among many other things, the terrible 1960s Beatles cartoon series and the splendid Yellow Submarine.  In the late eighties he decided to try again, spearheading another animated film with a Beatles soundtrack, which was promoted as a sort of spiritual sequel to Yellow Submarine, but was never released.  So pull up a chair and let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.

The project made sense on paper - the Beatles' song catalog is extensive, and plenty of songs didn't make it into Yellow Submarine.  The movie would feature original characters rather than the band, and would be made with cutting edge computer animation.  The trouble started soon.  The movie used cutting edge computer animation of the late Eighties, which was notoriously bad at rendering human characters.  Rather than make the movie with traditional 2D animation, they animated the characters in 2D and then layered them onto the 3D CGI work.  More seriously, it quickly became clear that Brodax's partners didn't have the rights to the original recordings of the songs, and the Beatles wanted nothing to do with the project, so all of the songs in the movie would have to be covers, making this closer to a spiritual sequel to 1978's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  

 

This movie never came out, but a fair amount of footage survives.  I'm going to be focusing specifically on the 1990 Trailer/Pitch Film, which is eighteen minutes long and lays out the planned storyline in some sort of coherent order, even if it leaves out elements and characters like Rocky Raccoon.

Many years ago, Maxwell the Amiable took the throne of the Kingdom of Rhyde.  Maxwell wanted a hammer to serve as the symbol of his authority, and he invited his people to bring him hammers, but none of them were suitable, until Satan appeared and offered him a bejeweled silver hammer with tremendous cosmic power.  Maxwell immediately went mad with power and destroyed his own kingdom, and the Hammer was lost.

 Centuries later, the Hammer is protected by a wise old sage known as the Fool on the Hill.  (The Fool is also a humanoid goat for some reason.)  The Fool is honor bound to reveal the location of the Hammer to anyone who presents the appropriate magical amulet, but the amulet is also lost.  The Walrus wants the hammer, so he sends his Eggmen through space (Rhyde is on a different planet) to find the amulet.

The Fool dispatches his Blackbird (an actual blackbird) to find the appropriate hero, and it finds Jude, a professional adventurer who likes to pretend to be a film noir detective.  (As far as I know Michael J. Fox was never attached to the project, but Jude is the kind of cartoon character who should be played by Michael J. Fox.)  Jude is quickly approached by shadowy femme fatale Michelle Mabelle, who is beautiful but amoral, and speaks perfect English even though the Michelle from the Beatles song is mostly known for not speaking any English at all.

Jude and Michelle evade the Walrus's henchmen in a high speed limousine chase, and manage to steal the amulet from a museum.  They're on the wrong planet to retrieve the Hammer, though, so they need money and a ticket to Rhyde.   And they get money and a ticket through shenanigans which are poorly explained in the pitch film and not particularly interesting.  They book tickets on a space train called The Magical Mystery Tour, and soon find themselves hurtling across the universe (as sung by Cyndi Lauper.)

In the centuries since King Maxwell's disastrous reign Rhyde has become a Casablanca parody for some reason, and Jude and Michelle meet and befriend a street-smart rickshaw driver named Fiat-top, who speaks in broken English because this is a cartoon from the late Eighties.  (Flat-top doesn't just drive the rickshaw, he also breakdances, and he's got an epic mullet which combines the flat-top hairstyle with hair down to his knee.  Michael Jackson provides a cover of "Come Together," because apparently he hasn't made Paul McCartney angry enough yet.) 

After finding information at Rick's Place (really), Michelle, the tough, brassy, and Han Solo-inflected heroine, is promptly kidnapped by the Walrus's forces, there's a dogfight for some reason, and Michelle is rescued.  Everyone heads to the mystical land known as Strawberry Fields, the Walrus gets the Hammer, and there's a climactic mech battle on the top of the volcanic Mount Prudence.  But, the narrator assures us, the good guys win somehow.  Satan gets his hammer back and plots revenge.

 

Out of all the Beatles-related projects we've looked at so far, this one has the fewest Beatles involved; even Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had Billy Preston, one of the many people referred to as the Fifth Beatle.  And Strawberry Fields inverts the usual relationship between plot and songs; the plot is its own thing, and the songs seem to be there mostly for branding purposes

And then there's the animation.  To be fair, this is not a finished film, and the animation would have been refined considerably before it was released to the public, but my goodness it has not aged well.  I actually like early 90s CGI, and I will sometimes sit down and watch compilation videos like The Gate to the Mind's Eye on purpose, even if it's just for the Thomas Dolby soundtrack.  But this is supposed to be a movie, and it feels too much like one of those compilations.,  Why is there a Dimetrodon wandering around Strawberry Fields?  Why do people made of money celebrate the Walrus's victory with a big band performance?  I kind of suspect that it's because they had existing CGI footage that they could recycle.  (In fact, I recognize the money people from The Gate to the Mind's Eye.)   

Again, that's something that could be cleaned up as the film gets closer to release, and there are moments where the visuals actually feel like something out of Yellow Submarine.  But if you set aside the music and the visuals, you're left with the writing, and that falls flat.  This is a very basic quest narrative with Beatles names attached as an afterthought. Nobody really matches the songs they come from; Michelle speaks perfect English, Jude never takes a sad song and makes it better, and the Walrus never sits on a cornflake waiting for the van to come. Maybe if they had time and money and proper licensing agreements it could have worked, but it's all wrong.  That is, I think I disagree.