Until I saw this documentary as a kid, I didn't know about the Beatles that much even as I had heard a few of their songs. This documentary then, which originally ran three nights at two hours at a clip, was recorded each night and I watched the tape repeatedly over the years. It's got lots and lots of great music (not just of the Beatles but some others as well, influences in the early rock and roll and rockabilly to Bob Dylan and then to Ravi Shankar), and all of the interviews fold into one another without them becoming disjointed. If anything its quite amusing, and always of interest, to hear the similar sides to the same story, or the different sides to them, both significant and not. But it is incumbent upon most Beatles fans to check out the DVD set, which extends the running time to a point where you basically will not be able to watch it all in one sitting. This doesn't diminish its value in being long; like any other made-for-TV documentary it packs in all the information that would be needed to tell the story, all the little ins and outs (did you know, for example, that there were five Beatles that played only once at shows in Hamburg in 1962?) It's got some magnificent clips to put along to it as well, all archival, with some obscure (like John Lennon reading excerpts from a poetry/kids book he wrote in 64, or the Beatles off on retreat in the Himilayas) and others quite well-known (their movie clips, Ed Sullivan appearances, "All you Need is Love", etc). In short, its not only worthwhile to the fan to seek this out if you have not yet, it's almost essential viewing in some ways, a telling of an epic story of rock and roll, pop culture, mass hysteria, and the 60s all wrapped up around the 'fab-4'. Some of it is also very funny.
Review of The Beatles Anthology
The Beatles Anthology
(1995–1996)
the documentary that introduced me to the Beatles, superlatively
9 August 2006