#Beatles yellow submarine movie#
#Beatles yellow submarine free#

'Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt / From his hands as he walks from the grave,' McCartney sings. Several of their songs, including 'Eleanor Rigby' from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack, are sharply critical of traditional religion. Paul McCartney once said none of The Beatles believed in God, George Harrison was interested in Hinduism, and Lennon, who identified as an atheist, proclaimed the Beatles were 'more popular than Jesus' in 1966. None of the musicians were traditionally religious. The Beatles and religion were frequent - if often uncomfortable - bedfellows. The bishop who ordained him wore a plain white cassock.

#Beatles yellow submarine free#

Richard York of the Free Church of Berkeley, a submarine church with ties to the Episcopal Church, was ordained in 1968, he wore a flowing robe of pink, yellow, green and gold that looked like it was ripped from one of the film's far-out backgrounds. Some also borrowed the film's fashion sense. Submarine churches adopted the refrain of John Lennon's song ' All You Need is Love,' spelled out in mod-style letters across the op art landscape of the film. Similar to the Biblical tale of Joseph and Mary searching for an inn in Bethlehem, Alice's Restaurant sent a couple and a donkey to a local hotel one Christmas in search of lodging. They routinely met outside church walls in parks, basements and college plazas, and they staged elaborate, protest-themed stunts. Some were new and independent others evolved from existing congregations. Submarine churches had unusual names, like Alice's Restaurant, Ecstatic Umbrella and Now Church, and were known for their equally offbeat practices. McKenzie, 'The 'Free' Church of Berkeley's Hippies,' and Elsie Thomas Culver, 'The Hippies' Pastor is Ordained.'īerkeley Free Church and Graduate Theological Union/ Two articles are also reprinted: Robert A. This 1968 flier from the Berkeley Free Church, one of the most well-known submarine churches, shows one of the first printed uses of their submarine emblem. 'It also shows that a church has to have flexibility and maneuverability.' Tony Nugent, a former co-pastor of a submarine church in Berkeley, Calif., told The New York Times in 1970. 'In the Beatles' movie, the submarine was the place where they loved each other in a groovy way and got strength to do battle with the Blue Meanies,' Rev. Attendees came from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. There were enough of the churches a year after the film's release that they operated The Submarine Church Press, which published a national directory of 40 such churches, most with mainline Protestant or Catholic roots, and held a three-day 'rap session,' or conference, in Kansas City, Mo. They adopted the outline of a yellow submarine with a small cross on its periscope as their symbol and displayed it alongside peace signs, flowers and other popular emblems of the 1960s. Not long after the British-made film landed in the United States, 'submarine churches' attracted urban, young people.

#Beatles yellow submarine movie#

When the phantasmagorically weird Beatles film Yellow Submarine premiered 50 years ago, its psychedelic colors and peace-and-love sensibility quickly influenced fashion, graphic design, animation and music.īut the 1968 movie also influenced organized religion - a fact lost in the hubbub over the release of a restored and remastered version in American theaters on July 8. The 1968 release of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine film influenced fashion, graphic design, music - and even a short-lived organization of 'submarine churches' based on the gospel of Lennon and McCartney: 'All You Need Is Love.'