One really long scarf for four people. Seems impractical.

Got my gnarled, ink-stained hands on a copy of Beatles Film Festival, a pretty flimsy 1978 magazine about the celluloid side of the Fab Four. It’s basically a bunch of photos, some lyrics and a few old interview comments. But there is one brief article of interest about the Magical Mystery Tour.

The Beatles didn’t make a lot of creative missteps, but the Magical Mystery Tour film is like the most boring, most annoying drug experience ever. It was supposed to be a loosely constructed series of road trip scenes alternating with videos of the group performing songs. It instead made the quartet seem like they were out of touch and lost in their own excesses. The inane attempt at avant garde style was universally panned when originally shown on the BBC.

Even in 1978, McCartney was rationalizing this disaster in a really self-delusional way. An excerpt from the magazine article titled “Paul McCartney Talks About Magical Mystery Tour”:

In 1978, Paul McCartney thought "Magical Mystery Tour" would be beloved in the future, but it still sucks.

“The Mystery show was conceived way back in Los Angeles. On the plane, you know, they give you those big menus and I had a pen and everything and started drawing on this menu and I had this idea. In England they have these things called ‘mystery tours.’ And you go on them and you pay so much and you don’t know where you’re going. So the idea was to have this little thing advertised in shop windows somewhere called Magical Mystery Tours. Someone goes in and buys a ticket and rather than being the kind of normal publicity hype…well, it was magical, really…the idea of the show was that it was actually a magical run…a magical trip.

I did a few little sketches myself and everyone also thought up a couple of things. John thought of a little thing and George thought of a scene and we just got them all along with the coach, and we said, OK, act an off-the-cuff kind of thing.

At the time I thought: ‘Oh Blimey,’ but…eh…it started out to be one of those kinds of things like The Wild Ones, you know, Marlon Brando…at the time it couldn’t be released! The interest in it came later. The interest started to grow, you know. Magical Mystery Tour was a little bit like that…well, whatever happened to it…that’s a bit magical itself. Like the Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. You know, what happened, to that, you know, I mean, I’d like to see that. So all these things work out well. You’ve got to be patient: everything like that works out well. I think it was a good show. It will have its day, you know.”