Paul McCartney's 1984 short animated film was a project he'd been planning for years: buying the film rights to the Rupert the Bear character was the first thing he did after leaving The Beatles. The more you get into it, the more you realise the extent of his passion for it.
Released alongside Give My Regards to Broad Street in cinemas, the film also serves as a music video for We All Stand Together, also known as The Frog Song. We start by discussing the song: why was it for so long the watchword for "embarrassing Uncle Paul", and how does it measure up today now that image is largely shed?
Paul's voiceover work is also worth getting into: it serves the story rather than acting as a showcase for him, and we contrast this with the approach to Broad Street. And with Ringo Starr doing the Thomas the Tank Engine voiceover, and George Harrison writing the foreword to the 1990 book The Secret Life of Sooty, we look at the relationship between psychedelia and the childlike.
Videos
Watch the 14-minute film:
The similar scenes we mention in which the main character watches a secret ritual from an elevated vantage point, both from films released around the same time as this, are from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984):
And Young Sherlock Holmes (1985):
Links
An episode of The Magic Roundabout, which ran on the BBC from 1965 to 1977