On the plus side, there is lots of rare footage of the Beatles performing, and of course, their music is used extensively. As a video autobiography, the film shares the advantages and disadvantages of autobiographies generally. Except for brief newsreel-like recitations, there is no overall narrative, just interviews with the three Beatles then still alive ( John Lennon's comments are culled from his numerous press interviews over the years), along with three key associates, Neil Aspinall (who began as their roadie and went on to run their company, Apple), Derek Taylor (their press representative), and George Martin (their record producer). (The 2003 DVD reissue contains five discs, with two episodes per disc, plus an 81-minute bonus disc containing extra material.) At the longer length, the story is the same, a roughly chronological history of the Beatles from their beginnings in Liverpool, England, to worldwide fame and their breakup at the end of the 1960s. The home-video version had eight episodes, each running between 71 and 81 minutes, for a total length just short of ten hours, which just about doubled the running time.
(A coffee-table book was published in 2000.) It expanded enormously on the original TV broadcast, which ran six hours including commercials. The second CD set was released in March 1996, with the third coming in October, while in September the VHS version of this video set was released. The TV portion continued on Wednesday and concluded on Thanksgiving.
The Beatles Anthology project (ultimately comprising audio, video, and book aspects) initially reached the public during the week of Thanksgiving 1995, with the first of three two-hour television specials broadcast Sunday, November 19, followed by the first of three two-CD sets of outtakes of the group's recordings released Tuesday, November 21.
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