The world première of The Beatles’ animated feature film, Yellow Submarine, took place on this evening at the London Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus.
Although the group had largely retreated from the public eye in recent months, with their trip to India and the recording of the White Album, their popularity remained undiminished. As with their previous film openings, large crowds turned out, blocking streets and bringing traffic to a standstill.
The only Beatle to arrive alone was Paul McCartney, whose fiancée Jane Asher was absent. Three days later sheannounced the end of their relationship on BBC television.
Among the other guests were The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, plus members of The Who, Status Quo and Grapefruit.
After the première The Beatles went to a celebratory party at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, where the in-house discothèque was renamed Yellow Submarine for the occasion. It retained the name for several years after.
At the party Paul McCartney spoke to Clem Curtis, lead singer of The Foundations, for whom he promised to write a song.
“What follows is the most original and inventive feature-length animated cartoon since the days when Walt Disney was still thinking up innovations. As Disney demonstrated in “Fantasia,” and as the underground has abundantly proved for the past decade, there is no form of film with more freedom than animation. You can do absolutely anything you want with movement, dimension color, shapes, perspective and anything else that occurs to you.”
– Roger Ebert (1968)
The Beatles themselves only appeared in a short live-action snippet at the end of Yellow Submarineand their characters were voiced by professional actors. The film has come to be recognized as a genre-changing work that led to animation gaining greater respect as an art form and Time magazine noted that it “turned into a smash hit, delighting adolescents and esthetes alike” Although the band members were initially skeptical about the film, in 1995 all three surviving Beatles expressed an appreciation for it in The Beatles Anthology documentary series.
