Animation director Chuck Braverman won an Oscar in 1974 for Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, his 14-minute animated history of The Beatles and their preeminent place in the turbulent decade of the 1960s.
It’s a celebration of Beatlemania that is moving, amazing and inspiring.
I saw this three times when I was a kid. It used to come around once a year in the mid-1970s as part of a weekend matinee movie “roadshow” that was four hours of Beatles films for $4. Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles at Shea Stadium, and Japan ‘66 were some of the other films I recall seeing, but the clear highlight of the show each time was Braverman’s Condensed Cream of the Beatles, which used footage of the group combined with flashy pop art photo-montage animation.
Trust me, this was a pretty astonishing thing to see at the time. Produced by Apple (who else could have gotten all the rights to this material?) and Braverman Productions, it aired on TV one time on Geraldo Rivera’s late-night ABC program Good Night America, which his also where the ‘Zapruder Film’ was first seen on television in 1975.
It’s a seriously cool film, but for whatever reason, it’s practically disappeared off the face of the earth.
Even in the internet age – where it feels like every grainy bootleg, every fan project, and every mid-70s oddity has been uploaded to YouTube in five different qualities – this thing has remained stubbornly elusive. You’ll find people swearing they saw it on a battered VHS in the ‘80s, or catching a blurry nth-generation copy at a fan club screening, but pristine versions? Forget it.
A minor footnote to this film’s history is that it was picked apart for clues to the whole dumb “Paul is Dead” theory at the time. Braverman also made the opening montage to the dystopian sci-fi cult favourite, Soylent Green.
Braverman’s style in Condensed Cream is a collision of art school audacity and TV commercial slickness. He crams the entire Beatles saga—Hamburg grit to rooftop swan song—into a rapid-fire visual essay, using collage, colourised stills, kaleidoscopic animations, and snippets of archival film. The editing is brutal in its pace; the whole thing feels like it’s been cut together by someone mainlining the nervous energy of the 1960s itself.
One of its most striking achievements is how it nails the emotional arc of Beatlemania without a single talking head. You see the leather-jacketed rockers morph into cheeky mop-tops, then into psychedelic visionaries, then finally into the slightly weary, long-haired cultural elders of the late ‘60s. Braverman captures the screaming, the joy, the fatigue—the way the band became a mirror for the decade’s own growing pains.
Maybe that’s why its absence feels so strange. In an era where Beatles nostalgia is practically its own industry, Condensed Cream of the Beatles was a reminder that their story can still be told in ways that feel fresh, strange, and a little bit dangerous. Braverman distilled the madness, the beauty, and the pop-art energy of the Beatles into 14 minutes, and then—poof—it was gone. If someone at Apple has a clean print, here’s hoping they one day let it see the light again. Until then, it remains a phantom from a time when even nostalgia felt cutting-edge.
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