BBC Video has released the unsuccessful 2006 documentary, The Unseen Beatles onto DVD. Purportedly telling the "true story" behind The Beatles' decision to quit touring, The Unseen Beatles throws up a lot of smoke to cover the fact that it has absolutely nothing new to say - and what it does manage to say is generalized and scattershot, at best.

The Beatles' final live tour date was August 29, 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. According to The Unseen Beatles, it was as chaotic and artistically unfulfilling as the rest of the tour dates for the Fab Four, and apparently was the breaking point for the long suffering band. "Beatlemania" had reached critical mass, and the four lads from Liverpool had had enough. Confined to hotel rooms, buses and airplanes, John, Paul, Ringo and George couldn't go into the outside world for fear of being mobbed, with the potential release of performing their songs live stymied by the screaming fans who drowned out even the Beatles' own hearing. After August 29, the Beatles became strictly a recording band.

The Unseen Beatles, utilizing interviews with associates connected with the band at the time, as well as archival footage, home movies and photographs, tries to give the viewer a sense of the absolutely insane hysteria surrounding the band, who were quite correctly labeled the four most famous men on the planet at the time of their biggest successes. And a lot of this padding is necessary, including a rundown of how the band got started, their experiences playing in Germany, as well as countless interviews with minor associates with the band, and their subsequent arcane experiences. The padding is necessary because there's no real meat on the bones of The Unseen Beatles. We hear a lot about the drawbacks of touring, but precious few details are given out.

Where are the specifics that the documentary keeps alluding to, but never really highlights? A dodgy plane, a small hotel room, and cheap equipment set-ups at their concerts are briefly discussed, but that's it. One must assume their had to be more to The Beatles' decision to stop touring, but of course, we'll never know that from The Unseen Beatles because no surviving member of the group speaks on camera. This is an "unauthorized" biography of the group, and hence, it received no cooperation from any of the members, nor the licensing groups that control their music. That's right: The Unseen Beatles contains no Beatle music. Now, you can have a perfectly acceptable documentary on a singing group without incorporating their actual music into the film. But The Unseen Beatles makes the absolutely disastrous decision to put the most morose classical music soundtrack over the material - for no aesthetic reason I can ascertain - tempting the viewer to contemplate not the quandary that The Beatles found themselves in, but the viewer's own suicide. Yes, I know the subject of the piece is the demise of The Beatles' touring role (not exactly the apocalypse, let's be honest), but why should we suffer with the most depressing, gloomy soundtrack I've heard in quite some time?

And since The Beatles themselves won't talk, what's really the point of hearing people marginally connected with the band guess about the group's reasons for ending their touring days? The focus of The Unseen Beatles is all over the map, as well. Clips of the young Beatles vacationing in Jersey are followed by discussions of Lennon's "God" proclamation, followed by tales of untrustworthy planes, followed by a generalized, inaccurate portrait of America as some kind of seething bed of religious intolerance (an unfair slam against America, in any form or fashion, is almost de rigueur in BBC documentaries nowadays), and all to very little effect. If The Unseen Beatles wanted to get at the real truth of their decision to end touring, why not stick to that subject? Too much of The Unseen Beatles is scattershot trivia designed to please fans, while offering precious little new information. Anyone even lightly read on the subject will see nothing original here.

The DVD:

The Video:
The anamorphically enhanced, 1.78:1 widescreen video transfer for The Unseen Beatles is fine, but fairly meaningless for much of the archival footage, which suffers unfortunate cropping due to the resized visual field.

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English 2.0 stereo soundtrack is adequate, but without any actual Beatles music on it, who really cares?

The Extras:
There are extended interviews with some of the people seen in the documentary - most of which are far more entertaining (in the sense of adding trivia to The Beatles fanatic) than the actual documentary. There's also a photo gallery, as well as extended footage of The Beatles vacationing in Jersey (what that has to do with them stopping touring is anybody's guess).

Final Thoughts:
The Unseen Beatles never fully attacks its central question: why did The Beatles stop touring? The slight, short documentary wastes time talking about their early career, and never really achieves a detailed consensus on its thesis. The lack of any Beatles music is a big blow - made even worse by the choice of funeral classical music instead. This is, after all, the end of The Beatles' touring career - not the end of mankind as we know it (the same goes for the unintentionally hilarious narrator, whose solemnity is all out of proportion to the material). Rent The Unseen Beatles if you must see everything connected with The Beatles; otherwise, you can safely skip it.