Into the Sky with Diamonds | Page 4 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

There’s a lot of Yellow Submarine talk theses days, so this is as good a time as any to post this memorabilia. (One of the few pieces   actually signed for me.)

 A number of years ago, I went to hear Al Brodax speak (producer of Yellow Submarine ). 

[flashback: “Hey Bulldog ” was once upon a time the answer to this trivia question: “what great Beatle song is by and large completely unknown?” It wasn’t in the (American) movie and hardly anyone bought the album. Consequently, 1968 came and went with hardly anyone having heard the song]

I was curious to know why “Hey Bulldog ” was cut from the movie. “Too long for American audiences” answered Brodax.

I didn’t dare ask, “then why not cut “It’s All Too Much “?” since by the end of the movie I kinda felt like it was indeed all too much.

But later came the answer: When asked which Beatle he felt closest to, Brodax answered “Harrison.”

I’m guessing he was disinclined to cut a song from his favorite Beatle. (Anyone think that was the right song to cut from the movie?)

This scene is similar to the one in which the Beatles are boarding a helicopter. The door closes to reveal the letters “TLES” – thus BEATLES.

So what? The helicopter has their name… What’s the big deal?

When A Hard Day’s Night came out, bands didn’t have their own chartered aircraft.

More significantly, Britain had two major international airlines: BOAC (“Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC”) and British European Airways known as BEA.

Thus the BEA seen in the picture was assumed by the viewer to simply be a BEA helicopter, especially since it’s written in the BEA font.

When the helicopter door closes, the viewer got a bit of a chuckle from reading BEATLES.

All of this would be lost on today’s viewer. Fortunately, it’s but a minor point.

Zig said, “To you, this must be equivalent to losing a Beatle.”

Thanks, Zig. I hadn’t thought of it that way; but you did get me thinking. I am indeed very sad, and when I heard the news yesterday it was a total shock and quite a sad one.

The analogy with the Beatles is a good one, for the Apollo astronauts and the Beatles represented two sides of the same coin: remarkable adventures one right after another for an entire decade.

The difference was that John and Paul and George and Ringo were irreplaceable, each one for a different reason.

Armstrong was replaceable. Had he been sick in July 1969, then Jim Lovell would have replaced him (and, as we know from his Apollo 13 travails, would have done a great job).

But Armstrong instantly became and has remained the figurehead of all the Apollo astronauts. So his passing in many ways extinguishes that light. I’m thinking of the flag on the Moon being at half mast tonight.

I also think Armstrong should be buried at the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington with (eventually) the names of all the Apollo astronauts.

Unknown said, “I saw him on Dancing With The Stars”

Buzz Aldrin (Armstrong’s co-Moon walker) would have a canary if he heard you. Aldrin felt that he was the one should have been first to walk on the Moon. He’s had to play 2nd fiddle to Armstrong ever since. Ironically, Armstrong’s kept a low profile while Buzz has been “dancing with the stars”!

Von Bontee said,

“If the Apollo astronauts were the Beatles, then
Mike Collins = Ringo
Gus Grissom = Stu
Gene Kranz = George Martin”

Very clever! For all these years that I’ve melded these two topics, it never dawned on me to see who the NASA equivalent of John, Paul, etc… would be.

So for me:

John and Paul = all the Mission Commander astronauts for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

George (perhaps a cut below, but still able to make major contributions on a regular basis, e.g. “While My Guitar…”) = all the other astronauts. Bill Anders only flew once (Apollo 8) but he still took arguably the most famous picture ever (the whole Earth as seen from Space).

Ringo (a major contributor in an under-appreciated fashion) = the 400,000 behind-the-scenes people it took to create the engines, the circuitry, the telemetry, the spacesuits, the food, the cameras, etc….

Gene “Failure Is Not an Option” Kranz was a great character (my boss in Into the Sky…). But I see him more as Brian Epstein, coordinating all the moving parts to get the show Off The Ground (la la-la la-la).

George Martin = Werner von Braun, one step behind the curtain, mastermind of the 36-story Saturn rockets

Pete Best = Gus Grissom  cut down on the cusp of mega fame.

and finally

Stu = Bassett and See dead before seeing the slightest glory and known only to true fans.

Mr Sun King CT said, “We haven’t had a “man on the moon” type moment in 40 years (43, actually). We need our own moment …We need a moment where everyone just stops and watches. I’m skeptical we’ll ever have one”

The good news is that these moments can sneak up on you.

If anyone in early ’61 had said, “you know, I think the summer of ’69 will be one of the greatest ever.” You’d have said, “really???” Well yes, of course: The Moon Landing, Woodstock, and Abbey Road all in the space of two months. But in early 1961 no one had ever been in Space, so going to the Moon would have sounded ridiculous; there were no Beatles (except in their own minds), so who would have cared about a recording studio on Abbey Road ; there were no hippies and no Hendrix and no “turning on tuning in and dropping out” so what would Woodstock have meant to anyone? (even the Peanuts Woodstock didn’t exist yet, right?).

So who knows what the summer of 2020 will bring? Maybe it’ll be even greater than the summer of ’69! Filled with things we can’t even begin to imagine because they don’t even exist in embryonic form.

Hey, someone’s got to get it started!!! Why not you?