THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY ON DISNEY+ NOVEMBER 26TH

November 26th: the documentary series The Beatles Anthology will be streamed on Disney+ with its first three episodes available.

Thirty years after its original release, the production has been restored and remastered and incorporates a previously unreleased ninth episode. The nine chapters will be released in three consecutive installments: the first three on November 26th, the next three on the 27th, and the final three on the 28th.

“The Beatles Anthology” is the landmark documentary series exploring the life and times of the most influential and beloved band of all time, as told by The Beatles themselves. Beautifully restored by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post in Wellington, New Zealand, the illuminating series includes a new ninth episode featuring previously unreleased footage of Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr during the creation of the original 1990s “Anthology” series and music project. The series spans the band’s gritty, hungry early days to the phenomenon of Beatlemania and global superstardom. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr take us along for the ride as they revisit the highs and lows and twists and turns of The Beatles’ long and winding eight years as a band.

Restoring “Anthology”
The new incarnahon of The Beatles’ “Anthology” proves that both their music and the story of their time together are full of an incredible sense of excitement and vitality. Most of that, of course, is down to their unique talents and qualihes. But across all the episodes of this newly restored and recut series—including the new ninth episode—the sheer magic of what viewers see, hear and feel is also the result of painstaking work behind the scenes. The result is a viewing experience that reflects one of The Beatles’ defining qualihes: sheer hmelessness.
As “Anthology” first came to life in the early-to-mid 1990s, the original interviews with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr—along with a handful of their closest associates—were shot on 16mm film. Three decades on, this meant they could be digihzed and rendered newly prishne and sparkling with relahve ease. The new “Anthology’s” defining challenge, by contrast, was the restorahon of a wealth of archive footage that captured the four of them at every stage of their career and was originally gathered from around the world.

Even the shortest original sequences were shot on film and then stored in old-fashioned cans. But
inihally, producers at The Beatles’ Apple organisahon feared that the original masters for all this
material would have long since been transferred to videotape and then lost or thrown away, which
would have presented massive technical challenges. As the “Anthology” 2025 co-producer Marhn R. Smith recalls, this assumphon proved to be wonderfully wrong. “In almost every instance, from every archive provider, the original film had been kept,” he says. “So, we had an embarrassment of riches.”
Working with the original material, the aim was “to retain the flavour of the 1960s, but with a quality fit for the twenty-first century,” and bring new life to oken iconic scenes—from the performance at the Cavern in Liverpool filmed in late 1962, through the Maysles’ brothers footage of The Beatles’ first trip to the US in 1964, and on to such delights as 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour and the promohonal films for “Hey Jude” and “Revoluhon” filmed the following year. Over long months, the necessary restorahon was done by a team of specialists from Peter Jackson’s Park Road Produchons, the centre of excellence that had done such spellbinding work on his three “Get Back” films. This work is unbelievably forensic. Thousands of individual sequences were given to a team of restorahon arhsts, who went through the footage frame by frame, retaining as much original detail as possible while eliminahng such glitches as scratches, chemical marks, warping, and hairs in the original camera gates. Grain and noise-management techniques ensured that the filmic quality of the original material was preserved. To combine that sense of historic authenhcity with the visual richness of today’s high-definihon screens, the skills of Park Road’s colourist were crucial.

Giles Martin provided the wide range of music content of the nine “Anthology” episodes, working
closely with audio restorahon teams from Park Road Post and Jackson’s produchon company WingNut,which was responsible for the “Get Back” documentary series. Giles has made sure the episode soundtracks reflect the quality of the picture restorahon and match the newly remixed studio masters used in the project. From an audio perspechve, the technical quality of The Beatles’ live tracks, in particular, has always been a challenge. The sources themselves were oken sub-optimal at the time of recording. That, combined with oken raucous crowd noise, makes it hard to hear the band’s on-stage performances.

The first stage of audio restorahon entailed the de-mixing of the live performances led by WingNut’s Emile De La Rey who de-mixed the raw audio files using MAL—which stands for machine-assisted learning and was given its name to honour the Beatles’ late road manager Mal Evans. Emile heads the same team who had already worked not just on the audio aspects of “Get Back” and the restored film “Let It Be,” but “Revolver,” “1962-1966” and “1967-1970” (aka the Red and Blue albums), as well as “Now And Then,” the Beatles’ last song, released in 2022.
Their addihonal task was to “demix” what accompanied “Anthology’s” visuals, allowing extraneous noise to be separated from music and dialogue with raw dialogue being separated from “clicks, pops, artifacts and reverb.” giving new levels of precision. The dialogue, music and effects for each episode have also been restored and remixed in Dolby Atmos 5.1 and stereo for home theatre release.
Upgrading and enhancing their original live sound was all about emphasising “proximity and clarity.” For the first time, the oken-deafening wall of screams that accompanied The Beatles’ shows could be isolated to reveal the wonders underneath—a process that one insider likens to “liking a veil.”

Giles’s remixes push the band’s stage sound to the fore, enhance its energy, and unearth a more
detailed sonic experience for the fans from the iconic performances they love. A selechon of tracks
from studio master tapes were also de-mixed and remixed along the way, including “Things We Said Today,” The Beatles’ version of “Money (That’s What I Want),” “Flying,” and “All Together Now.”
Menhon should also be made of the restorahon and enhancement of the archive John Lennon
interviews that form one of “Anthology’s” key elements. These oken combined his voice with music and background noise, which could at last be separated out, allowing the clarity and impact of what he said to come to the fore.
Everything combines into a breathtakingly up-close telling of The Beatles’ story. The new clarity of what we see finally fits the significance of all those events and incidents, and the impact of the music. So, as always, the four of them and their story transcend the past, and speak with a unique power to the present, and future.

©Apple Corps Ltd.

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