Magical Mystery Tour

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Paul desperately trying to deny that this movie was all his idea.


"When a man buys a ticket to a magical mystery tour, he knows what to expect."

The Beatles's third film, and definitely the weirdest.

The film starts out as Mr. Richard Starkey, who is constantly bickering with his aunt, purchases a ticket to the titular mystery tour. Once on the tour bus... stuff happens, allegedly at the whim of "four or five magicians," and in the end everyone goes to a strip club.

Basically, The Beatles and a bus full of other people drove around for two weeks, wrote the script on the way, filmed things on a whim and hoped something magical would happen. It didn't work. Legend has it that many of the incidents and complications that plagued the shoot were more interesting than the film itself.

It was envisioned for theaters, but instead aired on BBC 1 on December 26, 1967. This hurt the film because that particular channel wasn't airing in color yet. (Even if it had appeared on BBC 2, which was airing in color, very few viewers owned color sets.) It was especially bad for the "Flying" sequence, which was simply filmed abstract color-shapes...

Tropes used in Magical Mystery Tour include: