The Beatles Anthology (Disc 2 of 5)

Episode 1 & 2
This is the scarcely credible beginning of the Great Adventure, going back, back, back into a great war in a gray time that seems to belong to other beings in other worlds. Britain under Hitler's bomb, boys not yet Beatles struggling for a place in the sun.

The earth is moving fast beneath their speeding boots. Millions of saloon bar prophets who couldn't tell them apart had to "hand it to them": "They've got something! From Liverpool I hear-of all places."
-Derek Taylor

Episode 3 & 4
This was still a time of wonderment on both sides of the equation. The world couldn't believe this magnificent four-headed creation could come to be so delightfully entertaining and impudent and the creature couldn't believe the world could be so nice.

Success, well earned, in the struggles for recognition, is now assumed as a natural state. All the records are number one, both singles and albums and educated America is now in thrall to them.
-Derek Taylor

Episode 5 & 6
There is a real joy within this video...yet now and again we hear the bell of a cash register ringing up some early charges in the price of fame. Within lie 'miles' of archive, of performance and off-duty fun, either unseen or forgotten and certainly never before assembled in such a feast of words, music, sights and sounds.

The glory of this story is that if you don't know it, the surprises are truly astonishing and if you do, the delight is in the detail and this episode contains so many astonishing advances and reverses, setbacks and recoveries and in such quick-time that in fiction many of them would have been edited out.
-Derek Taylor

Episode 7 & 8
It is the summer of Love, and those whom Timothy Leary has called the "avatars" sing All You Need Is Love on black and white television on the first world satellite television program. It is here in full color and precedes the disillusionment of George with Haight Ashbury (San Francisco's hippieville), and the slamming of another door with the death of Brian Epstein, who was rarely alone but often lonely.

All things must pass, as the man said in this final episode, things are passing strange and fairly fast. The music holds out till the end (as good as gold, as good as ever...Better even some might say, bearing in mind the quality of Abbey Road, which ends this stunning story) and the Beatles, having worked through the White album, Let It Be, Hey Jude, and Revolution, two weddings, two busts and the rooftop concert equal Gilbert and Sullivan in the level of acrimony and heightened quality of their work that was done through it and despite it all. The Beatles have survived their success and survived their era to remain modern, timeless and supreme against all comers.
-Derek Taylor