HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A YELLOW SUBMARINE- IN 3D?

Look what Harmonix hath wrought. Everyone’s going Beatles-crazy once again, with the band enjoying more popularity (and cold, hard cash) than ever before! But there’s only so much money to be made from repackaging and remastering the same old songs or sticking them into video games, so how would a smart man wring even more money out of the most famous band in the world?

Why, make a 3D remake of Yellow Submarine and merchandise the shit out of it, of course.

Robert Zemeckis and Disney have announced plans to redo the trippy 1968 cartoon and spin it off into a ton of merch, a Broadway musical, and a Cirque du Soleil stage production. They hope to have it ready to go in 2012.

Zemeckis will use the same creepy 3-D performance capture that he used in the upcoming Jim Carrey-starring A Christmas Carol, which already sounds like the thing of nightmares. Somehow this seems fitting for the weird, bizarre dreamworld of Yellow Submarine, a movie that terrified me as a young boy that giants were going to throw apples at me, turn me into a statue, and take away all my Beatles records. The Blue Meanies were bad enough, never mind that guy with a mouth for a stomach, or the glove going around punching people and laughing. A truly awesome and traumatizing experience for a child. But I digress…

Along with the rights to remake the film they’ve also gained access to 16 Beatles songs, including “Yellow Submarine”, “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” “All You Need Is Love,” “When I’m 64,” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Since actors already did the voices of the Beatles in the original the fact that there are only two remaining won’t be a problem, but it will be interesting to see if they have any involvement at all.

I haven’t seen Yellow Submarine in years so I have no idea if it holds up, but this remake actually doesn’t bother me too much. While 3D is already tired the technology seems like the right way to redo it if it has to be done, and hell, what’s wrong with turning even more kids on to The Beatles?