The following is an abridged transcript of an interview with Bruce Markoe
by: Dr. Bob Hieronimus, host of 21st Century Radio:

If you've seen the renovated Yellow Submarine on VHS video only, Markoe says, "You didn't even see half of it, if you didn't see it on film... or hear it in 5.1 digital it's the difference between black and white and color.

"This whole renovation was my idea. About 1995, somehow I just happened to think of the movie, went to Blockbuster, I wanted to see it again for myself and also show it to my daughter who at the time was 5 years old. I found a copy, hard to find because when it came out in '87 it was almost immediately pulled. Showed it to my daughter and she loved the movie.

I then realized this is a UA picture and I work for MGM/UA. I'm Vice President of feature post production, and I said it seems like this would be a phenomenal movie to restore and re-release. And I then did a little investigation here at the studio and found out that it had been tied up in a legal dispute since 1987 and had been pulled from the market and was out of print and unavailable and nobody could do anything with it because of the lawsuit. And I thought this was kind of a crime and a shame and I said gee, now you have a whole generation of young people who've never seen this movie and I felt it had a great message for kids and figured there's an awful lot of Beatles fans out there.

It was 1995, the anthology hadn't come out yet, but it was in the works, so I knew there was going to be this real big resurgence of interest in the Beatles because of the anthology, and I said we were siting on a gold mine here.

So, I went to the then president of UA, John Cally, and kind of gave him my pitch and said you're sitting on something here that I think is worth a lot, but it's tied up in some stupid lawsuit. And if you ask me, we should do a whole renovation on this movie and upgrade it to the new digital sound. And he said, you know, that's a great idea, so he picked up the phone and called the head of our business affairs department and said settle the lawsuit.

So, it took another year to actually settle the lawsuit, it didn't happen overnight. Took another year to get a green light to say OK, we can start now, we finally resolved it. And I then started putting together a budget and a plan for doing a renovation of the picture. I coined the phrase "renovation" because I really believe that's what we did with the movie - to me when you take something and you do a restoration; is when you restore something to its original form, pristine form, but back to its original condition.

When you take something that is a classic piece of art or architecture or whatever it may be and you do a renovation, that means that you're improving it while remaining true to the integrity of the original piece. And that was my goal as overseer. This project was to do just that.

And so I did some research on the project, and my goal was to have the film restored and renovated so we could release it in theater. For whatever reason, it became a home video project, and they had never spent any where near this amount of money doing anything, in terms of fixing up a movie. And one of the first steps I did was call Abbey Road and was investigating the condition of the sound and the tracks. And, I mean, I knew what sound elements we had in our vaults, basically we had a mono mix of the movie which is how it was done originally and we had a mono master just with a single mono music track, a single mono effects track, and a single dialogue track. And I said by today's standards I wanted this to be 5.1 digital sound.

Basically when you go to a movie theater these days, almost all movies are done in either Dolby digital or DPS digital or Sony digital, and that's all what we call 5.1; it's really 6 channels of discreet digital sound. And my feeling was that if we just took even the stereo Beatles albums that existed and remixed them into the movie, they wouldn't play well in the theater to today's standards, because just having a left-right stereo album sound in a movie theater where audiences are used to hearing six channels of audio, it would really be compromising the sound of the Beatles by today's standards.

So, when I contacted Abbey Road, and when I first said I want to remix all their songs in 5.1 digital, and they went, 'Well, you can't do that, you can't touch their songs, nobody's been allowed to, they've never remixed their songs.' I went OK, and then , they were very nice of course, but they were surprised that I would even be thinking of doing that.

Then I talked to Neil Aspinall over at Apple and explained to him what I wanted to do. And after I explained it he agreed that the Beatles were always at the forefront of technology and pioneered many recording techniques, and that if indeed this technology was even remotely available back then they would have probably been the first to use it. I've been told that people have tried to get them to remix their stuff in the past and they've always said no.

IS THE RENOVATED FILM THE UK OR US VERSION OR A MIXTURE OF BOTH?

"This is the original UK version that was shown at the premiere in the UK. We found an original interpositive element, the only change to my knowledge was reel 4, I believe, which had the "Hey Bulldog" song in it.

But in addition to the song, it had material that bridged before the song, and actually, there was some extra animation. It was actually animation done for the American version to help when they cut the Bulldog song. They had to add some new animation to make it make sense. So, that American animation which was short, was probably only 20 seconds, is not in this version. I tried to see if I could incorporate both into one but it didn't work, so I basically went with the UK version which seemed, actually, from the continuity stand point, to make more sense, as well as if you follow the story line. And the only thing that we did, we cheated a little bit on a song.

In the American version, when they come out of the bubble when their being freed from the bubble, there was the intro to "Baby You're A Rich Man" playing, and in the UK version they did not use that. They didn't have any song, it was a piece of George Martin's score there. What I did was I cheated, there's not as much of "Baby You're A Rich Man" as there is in the American version, But there's about 20 seconds that I was able to sneak in because, actually, as you watch the animation as the bubble's coming down, even in the UK version the band is playing and then they stop, so I figured, well, wait a minute, if the band is playing it would be a song, which is what it was in the American version, it was the same thing.

So, I was able to sneak in a little bit of that. And then as soon as they stop playing a certain point when the bubble comes down, they stop playing in the British version and then we went back to the George Martin score the way it was in the UK version. So, I tried to do the best I could with the integrity of both, but respecting the original. And that was really the goal of the whole project was to --we spent an awful lot of time in the sound effects work , the song mixes --so we got the approval to go to Abbey Road and remaster the songs.

TELL US ABOUT REMIXING THE BEATLES SONGS

"I thought it would take a week, it took a month. Based on the complexity of what was done, it was not unreasonable at all, because the guys at Abbey Road were being so true to the original integrity of the music. There was an incredible marriage of the exact same technology that the Beatles used, literally, even some of the same microphones, the same equipment they used in the 60s to recreate the sound of the songs, in addition to using brand new --we were one of the first to use the 24 bit digital Sony machine.

We actually got a loaner from Sony. It hadn't even come out on the market yet so we were trying to use this marriage of both old and new technology because we felt that for Beatles fans, if we changed the sound of the songs, first of all the Beatles probably would have rejected it when they heard it, and that was the condition that Neil Aspinall had.

He said well, you can do this, but if the boys don't like it no one's going to hear it. So, our first step was to do something that, obviously, had to please the Beatles. And Geoff Emerick came in as well to listen to the stuff. And the second thing was, obviously, to make sure the fans weren't upset by what they heard. But yet, I really wanted to enhance the sound dramatically because I didn't want to spend all this money and have it sound like the record that everybody had heard. We needed to really utilize the 5.1 digital format to its fullest extent.

WAS ANY NEW ANIMATION ADDED TO THE RENOVATED PRINT?

"The first 40 minutes of the movie we pulled off an original negative of the film that was fairly badly damaged with scratches and dirt. Nothing was missing, it was complete. It "sunk up" to the original tracks, so we knew it was complete. Then we digitally scanned in the entire first 40 minutes of the movie and digitally cleaned everything up, removing all the dirt and scratches, restoring the color to as best as we could, as well as doing SOME touch ups of animation mistakes. But not A LOT.

A lot of the guys at Pacific Ocean Post [the studio that performed the animation renovation] pointed out a lot of animation errors and exposure problems and things like that, and there were a few things that we cleaned up, but a lot of them I felt were part of the integrity, and even just the character of the original movie, so we left some of that the way it was.

Like the move at the beginning of Eleanor Rigby over the smoke stacks which is a multi plane camera move, supposedly that was -- Al Brodax was the one who told me that was an experimental move that hadn't been done before -- and it's not very good. It's kind of jerky and it's got some shifts and flickers, and we could have cleaned that up digitally, but I said you know what? that's the character of the movie and that's not what people have come to know and love, so I said let's leave it alone. I mean we took the dirt out of it in terms of just negative dirt and negative scratches, we removed that, but there's a lot other things like that we didn't change.

And the last three reels of the movie which were not digitally restored. We found a very clean interpositive element, which to our luck, we found that was in almost pristine condition and again, nothing was missing from it. And the way we knew that, that nothing was missing, was because it matched the track. And we could tell when we made a guide print, if it didn't synch up then we knew something was missing, but everything "sunk up" perfectly, so we knew we had a complete interpositive . And we took that and then that was recolor-timed at the lab, and color timed in a standard fashion.

And again, my concern was we were not going to be able to get the color back to its original vivid nature. But luckily this interpositive lab element was in good enough shape, along with the digital part that we did, and we were able to get the color to come back really, really nicely.

And there are some scenes where the original animation had color problems in it, there are bad exposure frames, there are scenes where there's a lot of white backgrounds in the frames and the white is not consistent, sometimes it goes yellow, and it was very difficult for us to try and balance it. We did the best we could. If the whole movie would have been done digitally, we could have done even better, but it would have cost way too much money. The studio spent much more than they even thought they were going to spend on this. The original budget for this restoration was about $400,000 and I think we spent about $600,000.

WHY DOES IT SOUND LIKE THE RINGO CHARACTER CALLING "BEATLES TO BATTLE" WHEN IT SHOULD BE PAUL'S VOICE?

That's one thing we noticed, that because it was a different take and it was different animation from the American version, and I figured I would leave it the way, it was because that was the UK version. But yes, it's either a different voice or a different reading, it's just... I don't know... it maybe was the same actor doing the voice, but it's definitely different than what the American version had in it. But I figured this was the UK version. I didn't want to start intermixing the stuff because then that's me making a creative decision that I didn't think I should make. So, I figured we're going to go with what was the original UK version and we left that alone.

There are about six or eight new little teeny things that we added. Again, there were a lot of sound effects that we added to the movie, but again, staying true to the integrity of the original. We did not add any new 1999 sound effects. What we did was we created a Yellow Submarine sound effects library from the original effects of the movie, and we digitally were able to separate each effect and create a digital library of each of those effects.

There was a lot of places where I felt they needed more sound, where you saw something happening and you didn't hear anything, and I think again, part of that was due to the low budget nature and just the state of sound at the time of 1968 in movies. Today movies have a much bigger fuller sound than they did back then, but I felt, again, for today's audiences, if I left that alone, I felt it was compromising the enhancement of the movie.

But on the other hand I didn't want to stick a bunch of new sounds in there from 1999. So what we did was we took original sounds from 1968, from the actual movie, but we digitally changed them, some of them we sped up, some we slowed down, some we played backwards, some we combined two or three sound effects on top of each other. So we created new sound effects from the original sound effects and then we filled in places where I felt we needed more sound, but no new dialogue.

There's a little vocal humph and some hand claps. Actually, in the UK version when they walk out of the bubble, if you look at the original UK version, the Beatles who rescue them are clapping their hands, but they didn't have any hand claps, it was just no sound. So we added the hand claps, so that was something new was added.

IS THERE ANY NEW ANIMATION ANYWHERE, COMPUTER-GENERATED OR OTHERWISE?

Nope not at all, Not one frame. Everything is the original animation off the original negative. We were trying to be very aware of staying true to the integrity of the original piece. Because of the fact that Beatles fans have a love for this and it is a classic piece of cinema and you don't want to take something like that and mess with it. So, I'm hoping that when people see it and hear it, they can appreciate that we've actually enhanced it while being very true to the original integrity of the piece.

WHY DO YOU SAY THE THEATRE VERSION IS SUPERIOR TO HOME VIDEO?

To me seeing this in a movie theater with an audience with this new sound format -- we had a preview once, and the audience started singing along. You can't get that in your living room. It's a whole different experience. It's cross generational. You have millions of Beatle fans who when they find out what we did to the song, and that this is like going to the Beatles concert that you could never go to, and how incredible these songs now sound in this new sound format, and that this is the first time in Beatles history that they've allowed their songs to be remixed, when the Beatles fans know that and they know the only way they can hear that is in a movie theater, they're going to be lining up like for Star Wars.

Unfortunately it's really just coming out on home video and DVD. On DVD if you have a 5.1 Dolby digital home theater system you can get that same sound as in there, although it's still not the same as seeing it in a big room with a lot of people. But I'm predicting that if the word gets out to Beatles fans, that this will be the number one selling DVD title of all time, just for that reason.

TELL US MORE ABOUT THE RESTORATION PROCESS

This was done in traditional laboratory photo chemical work. The first 40 minutes of the movie that were restored digitally, that was done in a computer to restore the color. However, it was fairly easy because a lot of the film has white backgrounds and the white backgrounds in essence gives you a color palette, because white is white. So, once you can establish a white, the other colors fall into place. It gave us a reference, basically. So, that was what made this easier to do.

Again there were a lot of inconsistencies in the color even from the original that we detected, and some of them we left, some we tried to clean up a little bit digitally, but most of the film we just tried to bring- once we established a white color background as a reference, the colors came back and then it was a matter of degree and a mater of trying--- we do what we call scene-to-scene color correction in the laboratory where basically every shot of the movie gets a different color timing, and it's the way all movies are timed.

Every movie today is done the same way, where every shot in the movie they can adjust the color shot to shot. And that's what we did on this. So, we did retime the movie as if it were a new movie, so we did do that. And the first 40 minutes since they were done digitally, they had even more control over that, because in the digital world you can color correct within a shot if need be. So, the first 40 minutes got even more--but they needed it because the original element was in such horrible condition. But the last 50 minutes of the movie, the original element was, luckily, not severely faded. We were lucky, we had to pump up the color, but it wasn't all miscolored,

HOW LONG DID THE RENOVATION PROJECT TAKE?

A year and half. Pacific Ocean Post did the restoration and the sound work. About 7 people worked on it.

Did you know this is John Lassiter's favorite movie, (the creator of Toy Story). I heard also that its the Queen's favorite.

I really hope that your readers and all Beatles fans have an opportunity -- if they can't see it in the theater, which unfortunately, many of them won't be able to do, because it may not be in theater, they really should go get a DVD home theater system, because there's a huge difference between watching it on VHS tape and hearing it on the 5.1 digital that's on the DVD. The songs sound phenomenal, the clarity in the songs is unbelievable, [like] you never heard before!