The Beatles Unauthorized is a 51 minute feature compiled by Good Times video of public domain Beatles material. The main part of this disc is devoted to The Beatles first US concert in Washington, DC. The picture is horrible and the sound is pretty bad too, at least on the concert segment. I'm sure if you were there that night, the sound would have been pretty murky too. There wasn't really equipment back then for bands to fill stadiums with sound. Bands or singers didn't fill stadiums. Nobody except Elvis had that sort of unearthly popularity and even he was dwarfed by the hysteria of the Fab Four.

Another amusing segment has an old game show called "I've Got a Secret" in which a person comes on and tells the host a secret and then the contestants have to figure out what the secret was that was whispered in the hosts ear by questioning. The person in question for this show is Pete Best, the Beatles ex-drummer. It's funny because he says that he QUIT the Beatles because he wanted to start his own band. In reality, he was fired.

The last major segment is an interview with the Beatles in 1966 right before Candlestick Park, their last tour stop. It's quite entertaining when one interviewer asks "Is the song 'Day Tripper' about a prostitute?" In fact, he should have been asking about what drug it was about!

Overall, this disc should only be bought by a real Beatles fan. The poor quality of the concert is nothing a casual fan would want. It's more of historical interest. So I guess if you want the gameshow bit and the interview at the end, its worth 5$. The sound and picture is television of the era quality which is decent.

I would recommend The Beatles Anthology over this. Also, Good Times has another DVD composed entirely of non-musical bits of the Beatles called Fun with the Fab Four. That disc is much better. Sometimes you can find both in a two disc set.

Why would I give five stars to a DVD set that isn't even out yet and I know nothing about? SImply to help the thing along. Although I saw the Beatles cartoon show when it initially aired, I had a chance to see a few episodes recently and was surprised at how great it was. I'll qualify that for those viewers who compare everything to films like Snow White that took thirty years to break even.

As most viewers know, TV animation had far smaller budgets, shorter deadlines and smaller staffs than the comparably large funding for lavish theatrical cartoons. Despite a few attempts at very short, limited-animation 'toons, usually shown by a live host to keep the cartoon segments short, nobody thought TV animation could really be done. Hanna-Barbera proved that it could be, but only by taking short-cuts, which is to say, cutting corners somewhere. Later Cartoon Network 'toons would parody the well-known H-B characters running past the same tree or barber pole ten times in an effort to reuse backgrounds and scenery.

Other studios took different tacks to limited animation. UPA developed a much-admired modern, graphic style. DePatie-Freleng, with the Pink Panther, came up with a style all its own. Jay Ward studios are instantly recognizable for Rocky and Bullwinkle, and so on.

Al Brodax came up with a very limited but compelling look for the Beatles in this popular series, and a simple but sure-fire formula: each episode is based around a Beatles' song. Al Brodax also made the later film, Yellow Submarine, awash with wonderfully psychedelic art and animation synched to numbers by the Fab Four. Whoever owns the copyrights to all those songs now, whether it's Michael Jackson or Yoko or Paul McCartney, would have to license these cartoons to appear on DVD. But hopefully, with Beatlemania resurging and interest in animation at an all-time high, they will soon do so, and let more fans (re)discover this light-hearted, good-natured cartoon.

Save for some of the commentaries made by John Lennon's sister and the Beatles ex-chauffeur it is a totaly inept documentary, most of the people interviewed seam to be more interested in telling their story than that of the Beatles, if you are a Beatles fan you will learn nothing new. Particularly irritating is the background music which is not Beatles music (go figure!!!) but some cheap approximation, they probably did not have permission to use original Beatles songs. Spend your hard earned money on the Anthology if you don't allready have it

In my mind's memory, they were clever stories, good animation, full of Liverpudlian accents, and zany/campy madcap adventures, a la the Monkees.

In reality, they are goofy, campy, irreverent, and show evidence of being dashed off to cash in on Beatlemania. That's part of the charm. The "plots" are developed to frame the music, which of course is superb. Ringo sports an authentic sounding Liverpudlian accent. Some songs are used, like a music video, to illustrate a simple story. Others are played as a singalong, while the lyrics are displayed over the screen.

These really take me back to a simpler time in our culture. The caricatures of the Beatles' faces are cute, too.

I have watched this DVD several times now. Yes, the visual & audio portions are of very poor quality. But, you know what? That is how I remember them! Seeing 'The Beatles' on TV in B&W was the only way to see the ""Fab Four" back in 1964-1960. Only the rich, big shots had color. lol! After reading the Beatles forum here on Amazon, to most of you, I say 'Nay, Nay! All this remastering and such changes the original sound of my childhood & that of millions of Beatles fans! Leave it alone. Remastering has it's place, but don't take away the original. By the way, you can find this DVD almost anywhere else for around $5.00. You would be silly to pay more than that. I have enjoyed it everytime I've seen it. Get it, but watch what you pay for it! Papa Larry H