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10 DVD SET:
Precisely where this ten-DVD set originated is anyone's guess, but one assumes
that with work-tapes of the official Beatles Anthology video/DVD floating around
while it was a work-in-progress, someone got hold of some unfinished masters,
and here we have the result -- over 12 hours of an expanded and somewhat different
working cut of the biographical epic, featuring much longer interviews and fuller
versions of clips that appear in abbreviated form on the finished release, and clips
(mostly of other artists) that were not used at all. The "Director's Cut" is a slightly
closer look at the band's history than the group's business organization probably ever
intended, including an extended recollection of the near-debacle of the group's 1966
appearance in the Philippines and other missteps in their history, Paul McCartney's
very entertaining recollection -- based on his first time seeing him perform -- of John
Lennon's ability to improvise blues lyrics, and a hundred other little pieces of information
that weren't deemed necessary for the final edit of the special. The quality is a bit variable,
with poor resolution at times and questionable color levels, as these were obviously
work-tapes (complete with visible time-code), but for completists and serious fans of
the group, the set provides a better look at the "un-neat" side of the group's history,
and the odd wrinkles to who and what they were as musicians and people that might've
taken too long to explain on network television. Each disc containes a breakdown of
chapters similar to the official version of the documentary, with an extra running time
of as much as six to eight minutes and lots of differences within that length.