Extended ‘Beatles Anthology’ takes fans beyond the mythology of the band

LONDON: A new episode of the “Beatles Anthology”, 30 years after the original landmark series, shows the impact on Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr of being in the biggest rock band in history, its writer and director said.

The original eight-part documentary, broadcast in 1995, spanned the band’s gritty early days in Liverpool and Hamburg to the phenomenon of Beatlemania and global superstardom and the break-up in 1970.

The “Anthology” project included the single “Free as a Bird”, created in the 1990s from a demo recorded by John Lennon in 1977, three years before he was murdered.

The remastered series, with a ninth episode including unseen 1990s footage of McCartney, Harrison and Starr, debuts on Disney+ on Wednesday.

“The new episode is untethered from the chronology of the original episodes,” writer and director Oliver Murray said.

“One to eight is the literal birth of the Beatles through to their break-up in 1970, and episode nine is able to speak to the inward-looking sense of what it was like to be a Beatle.”

The film was restored by an Apple Corps production team working with Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post company in New Zealand, with technology Jackson used to make “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary, which premiered in 2021.

“The whole of the Beatles archive has been restored and is now digital,” Murray said. “Every time we went into the edit suite it was almost like stepping back in time to the mid-90s.”

He said Jackson’s documentary changed the mythology of the Beatles, which until then had been etched in stone.

“What ‘Get Back’ did was break down those stereotypes, and we see them more as very young men,” he said.

The new episode gives fans an opportunity to learn about the band from scratch, with an understanding of who they were as people, he said.

“The reason that the Beatles story still resonates is because it’s 20th-century folklore,” he said.

“It is a timeless story of some lads from Liverpool who share a dream and go on to conquer the world.”