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Hey there folks!
This one will be necessarily brief, as I was up very late (and with a cold), cutting the new show which should’ve appeared in your feed by now. For the sake of timeliness, I wanted to get my conversation with the director and the producer of Beatles ’64 done and out ASAP, while interest is high and before the crushingly negative reactions to it that I have seen poison the well for everyone. I get that the hardest of the hardcores may find a lot of it redundant, but I would advise maybe to take a step back and recognize the bigger picture: the presentation they delivered is really about contextualization, about how they were received, good and bad, and the monumental impact The Beatles had on the lives of those experiencing them in real time (we know about everyone else that came late to the party – that would be most of ourselves).
I would have been inclined to be a little more critical in the conversation, but for the fact that Disney controlled all of it: they literally had a third party on the call, mostly to prod when to wind things up but I suspect to cut in if they didn’t like the way things were going. Furthermore, they controlled the audio: normally, I do, and I was at their mercy to get it after the fact. (In fact what they did eventually deliver to me was incomplete – then the first five minutes were cut off, but at that point I was relieved to get anything at all.
So give it a listen and see if what they have to say makes more sense for what they delivered. As I say in the podcast, I think the ideal way to enjoy it is as a complementary release to The First US Visit, not a replacement. I enjoyed the talking heads in a way that I didn’t with Eight Days A Week. If you are hardcore enough to find those interludes unnecessary, maybe then recognize that the intended audience is someone not as sophisticated a fan as yourself.
But as a comparison, check out this: the earliest iteration of the Maysles brothers film, broadcast on UK TV as Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!