David Bianculli

Our digital media producer is Molly C.V.

Nesper.

Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.

When the Beatles released the original The Beatles Anthology in 1995, it was a next-generation British invasion, attacking on two fronts at the same time.

On the one hand, there was the music.

Three box-set anthology collections released on CD by Apple Records, full of studio outtakes and alternate versions.

And on TV, there was the eight-hour The Beatles Anthology documentary on ABC.

It was shown across the globe and later released on home video.

That was in 1995, 25 years after The Beatles had broken up.

That documentary extended their legend and their impact for several more decades.

It told the story of the group via performance, film, and TV clips, and lots and lots of interviews.

John Lennon, who had been shot and killed 15 years earlier, was represented in vintage interview clips.

So were the other Beatles.

But for the 1995 documentary, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr also sat still for new interviews, separately and together.

So when it comes to the key moment when John meets Paul and invites him to join his group, the Quarrymen, the documentary recounts it by having Paul, in 1995, playing on guitar and singing the song he sang for John as a sort of audition when they met.

Then John, in an old interview, is heard picking up the story.

It's told the same way in the new The Beatles Anthology 2025 as in the original.

Peter Jackson and his team, who turned outtake footage from the 1970 Let It Be documentary into his superb multi-part Get Back Beatles miniseries for Disney+, did some of the restoration work here.

So did engineer Jeff Emmerich and music producer Giles Martin, the son of Beatles producer George Martin.