Blu-ray review: 'Yellow Submarine'

Long out of print, this milestone of graphic splendor looks as vibrant and fresh as the day it was released — snapping everyone out of their Disney trance — and the Beatles' songs and George Martin's dreamlike score surround you and flow “within you and without you” as never before in 5.1 DTS audio.

Inspired by the Lennon-McCartney song of the same name and directed by George Dunning (“The Beatles” cartoon TV series), from a screenplay by Lee Minoff, Al Brodax (TV's “The Beatles”), Jack Mendelsohn and “Love Story” author Erich Segal, “Yellow Submarine” begins in Pepperland, where happiness, love and music rule day. All of that peace is suddenly shattered when the awful Blue Meanies declare war on the Pepperlanders, sending in an army led by the menacing Flying Glove and bombarding the populace with green apples (an odd way of plugging the Beatles' record label).

Young Fred the sailor (who is actually old) is dispatched in the Yellow Submarine to fetch the Beatles from Liverpool, and the Fab Four must negotiate the perils of the Sea of Time, the Sea of Science, the Sea of Monsters, the Sea of Holes, the Foothills of the Headlands and the Sea of Nothing before they engage the enemy with the power of music.