Is it just me, or was the whole thing actually a lot funnier back in 1978?
You had to be there.
[sub]Ouch! Please don’t hurt me! [/sub]
I was there.
It’s not so much that it’s funny. To me, it’s the near-perfection of the song parodies that make them so awesome.
Narrator: Do you think they’ll ever get back together again?
Mick Jagger: I hope not.
I believe that most people have misinterpreted The Rutles.
They were not a parody of the Beatles; it was a parody of superficial documentaries about the Beatles. The songs themselves were not bad or funny.
Simply listening to the Rutles will not give you a proper appreciation for the phenomenon. It was the trousers.
I like Todd Rundgren’s Beatles parodies from “Deface the Music”. Here’s a bunch of them if you’re not familiar with the album:
There’s a song for many of the Beatle’s periods. Try “Everybody Else is Wrong” if you only have time for one.
I completely forgot about “Deface the Music”! Another brilliant “style parody” that I used to love. Thanks for the reminder…
“Cheese and Onions” is the best song John Lennon never recorded.
I miss Leggy Mountbatten.
Please, please, hold my hand.
Hold my hand, yeah, yeah
Hold my hand, yeah, yeah
Hold my hand and I’ll see you home
Right out of the Cavern, that one coulda been.
(I know, it’s a different song than “Cheese and Onions,” but it’s the one I always remember from All You Need Is Cash.)
Love that song! But I think it’s got some competition for “the best song John Lennon never recorded” from “Have you Heard the Word” by “The Fut” (Maurice Gibb, actually).
I’ll see your “Cheese and Onions” and raise you “Get Up and Go,” the greatest song that McCartney never recorded.
(I couldn’t find the album version, but this is a “rehearsal” take which sounds more raw and live and is probably closer to what it would have sounded like if they had actually played it on top of a building.)
I didn’t much care for portraying Yoko Ono as a Nazi and I like that even less now. I haven’t seen it in years but I think it was one of those “you had to be there” movies. I’ll stick with “This is Spinal Tap” and “A Mighty Wind” for parodies,
RIP Maurice.
Depending on what spurious internet news source you subscribe to, Robin is next on the chopping block. 
I prefer “Piggy in the Middle.”
Neil Innes (who wrote all the songs for the Rutles) is an underappreciated musical talent. The songs are perfect pastiches of Beatles songs, and can probably fool the unsuspecting into thinking they were real.
Everything was funnier in '78.
You might just be right about that. I’ve also been viewing old episodes of SNL. I remember laughing uproariously with my high school friends at the antics of Belushi, Radner, at.al. Very little in the typical original cast episode even makes me crack a smile now. The guest host monologues are particularly lame.
I thought someone on this board shared that growing up, he had an older brother who constantly played the Rutles album and who had no idea they were a parody band of the Beatles.
Such that, later down the road when he first heard Beatles music his impression was, “Who the hell are these guys, some Rutles wanna-be group?” He also said that he preferred some of their tracks over the Fab Four.