09.09.09

is the release date for...

THIS!

 

My wife's too. And she's also kiwi, from Palmerston North.

 

I am indeed. So what's your significant other getting you for your birthday?

 

Now transformed into the Sgt. Pepper's Beatles, the studio Beatles, the characters leap off the end of the escalator into space, umbrellas in hand, drifting through a dreamy, druggy, surrealistic sequence that can't easily be described. In the end the four are just hanging on atop an enormous blue elephant/rhinoceros creature that is marching across a field toward a cliff to "I Am the Walrus."

The Beatles are now mere passengers on a fateful passage bigger and weirder than they could have ever imagined. The blue elephant rhino is fame itself. At the cliff edge it stops, on the song's penultimate chord, and the boys from Liverpool, endlessly good-humored, stretch their arms out to say, in effect, "ta-da!" Brilliant.

I don't have a trophy to hand out and I'm not exactly keeping score, but so far, this is my favorite bit of advertising this year. Or is it content? That's the beauty of this piece of cinema. I don't really care what it is. I just want to watch it again...

The Beatles: Rock Band's brilliant mini-movie - Los Angeles Times

 

No. But we're told the game has a bunch of secret stuff that you can unlock after acquiring certain level of "achievements". Some of the songs also have in-studio banter between members before/during/after the song.

Also:

The Beatles: Rock Band - New Rock Band Video Game with George Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Paul McCartney - Popular Mechanics

 

New gameplay trailer...

The Beatles: Rock Band

 

Time to break that piggy bank, boyz and gullz...

Promotional | The Beatles | Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band/With A Little Help From My Friends (The Beatles: Rockband)

 

While My Guitar Gently Beeps

Olivia Harrison, George Harrison’s widow, who stopped by Abbey Road while Martin was working, recalled her surprise upon first playing Rock Band a few years earlier. “You feel like you’re creating music,†she marveled. “It must engage some creative part of your brain.†McCartney also quickly understood the game’s appeal. “Miming was always fun,†he told me. “When I was growing up, there was always, on TV, people who mimed to records. It was a thing people did. I always admired the way they had to learn every little nuance.â€

McCartney’s own musical beginnings weren’t too different from picking up Rock Band and pretending to be a star, he pointed out. “I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.†The group might have kept going that way, he said, except that they’d find themselves backstage, “and we’d hear our complete set being played by the band before us.†That’s the reason, he said, he and Lennon started writing their own songs. “It’s grown to something so big, but it really just started as a way to avoid the other bands being able to play our set.â€