liked the songs and the movie was OK
I luff 'em.
I found it to be more a parody of documentaries about the Beatles than a parody of the Beatles. As in, the film maker is absolutely clueless about the reasons for the popularity of the band but reports on it just the same.
Watching All You Need Is Cash without a thorough immersion in every second of the Beatles’ history would be like reading Bored of the Rings without knowing Tolkien. You had to be there.
Eric Idle got everything right. It’s perhaps the most perfect parody of anything ever. And Neil Innis’ songs deserve all the praise given here. They sound like Beatles songs. As Elmer J. Fudd said, not even the individual Beatles were able to recapture that magic.
True, I haven’t rewatched it in many years. Maybe it doesn’t hold up. Humor can be timely or timeless. Who listens to Vaughn Meader’s parodies of the Kennedy family today? At the time it was the fastest selling record of the 60s and seemed hilarious and immortal. Meader was so timely that his time ended the exact second that Kennedy’s did. Monty Python had a dozen skits that are truly timeless. And they had a bunch that require knowing about British politicians and tv shows of the 60s. I’ll bet Paul and Ringo still find those just as funny as on first viewing.
Nobody writes comedy - or anything else - for people 50 years in the future. All You Need Is Cash is probably the best post-Python product. Idle should take a lot of pride in that alone.
I think DrFidelius has a good point. I was about a year old when the Beatles broke up, but I understood all the Rutles jokes because when I was a teen-ager in the 1980s, you couldn’t turn on the television without seeing a retrospective or documentary about the Beatles.
One of the first things I did with our new videocassette player (we were always behind on technology—my parents didn’t get cable until the 21st century) was to record a PBS documentary about the 20th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper. I watched that probably a dozen times.
Whoops. I had Neil Innes’ name spelled correctly, then looked up the thread and saw that someone spelled it Innis and figured I was misremembering.
Note to self: double-chceck everything. 
A fun parody with great songs. Just never quite as surreally true as Spinal Tap, which far overshadowed it for me.
Great movie, great songs. Yellow Submarine Sandwich is a perfect parody of the actual film. Even the stuff that goes by fast, like the songs on the album: Denny Lane, The Fool on the Pill.
I had no idea who Ron Decline was supposed to be parodying until Wikipedia came along, but I got the rest.
I quote the movie all the time. Pre-fab Four, the aforementioned “stunned…very stunned” I call actual Beatles songs by their parody names. The cameos were great, Mick, Paul, Gilda, George.
Did you notice that Stig, the quiet one, doesn’t have a single line of dialog in the whole movie?
My only complaint is that the DVD is a different edit than the version I had on VHS. they “Lucased” the movie, and I prefer the original. Some jokes are different, some scenes missing.
Hmmm, I guess between the Rutles and Utopia, my favorite Beatles songs are parodies…
Utopia is Todd Rundgren’s band, and they did a spot-on Beatles album, Deface The Music. It was a quick tour through the Beatles sounds, from Liverpool to LSD.
Here’s the first cut “I Just Want to Touch You” (“live”, where they’re introduced as The Band That Started The American Invasion!)
The parodies of the later psychedelic phase are excellent, too. Especially “Life Goes On”, kind of an Elenor Rigby/Day in the Life pastische.
And here’s the whole album.
Gear, baby! It was tremendously funny, and still is to me.
Agreed. (14 year old Beatlemaniac in 1964)
I have nothing original to add. It’s been a long time since I saw it, but laughed my head off at the time. The songs were fantastic.
I’ve just listened to some of that Utopia album. Why have I never heard of that before? I know of Utopia and some of their prog work, and I’m a Todd Rundgren fan, so that’s surprising to me.
I liked the original album, but loved the reunion album.
I’m eagerly awaiting Peter Jackson’s new version of Let It Rot, due in September.
(oops, my mistake…Jackson is re-doing the film by that other band )
Being the hugest Barry Wom fan, of course I loved them.
Who are the Rutles? 
Russian currency typo.
I thought their original album was brilliant when I first heard it, and still love it to this day. I didn’t see the actual show until many years later. Was not impressed.
They had another album a long time later. I found it not nearly as good as the original.
The Rutles were a mop-top English pop quartet of the 60s who set the foot of the world a-tapping with their catchy melodies, their wacky Liverpool humor*, and their zany off the wall antics, epitomized in such movies as A Hard Day’s Rut and Ouch!. Dirk and Nasty, the acknowledged leaders of the group were perfectly complemented by Stig, the quiet one, and Barry, the noisy one, to form a heartwarming, cheeky, lovable, talented, non-Jewish group, who gladdened the hearts of the world.
*not wacky Rutland humor? Either the writer or Gilda forgot who was being talked about! 
Me too.