Filming is underway on Nintendo’s first-ever The Legend of Zelda movie, with a seasoned blockbuster director behind the camera and two relative unknowns cast as Link and the titular princess. Photos from the film’s New Zealand set look as lush as one might hope, but I can’t help but wonder if, regardless of quality, the project is destined to be lesser.
It’s not that Zelda’s wonky lore isn’t fit for the screen or that the franchise is better suited for slick 2D animation rather than live-action. No, the problem is that director Wes Ball’s movie, as far as I can tell based on Nintendo’s drips of information, is not a musical loaded wall-to-wall with Beatles songs. It’s just that, after you hear George Harrison doo-doo-doo his way through “Prelude of Light,” there’s really no alternative.
RednasVGM understands this. For the last year, the video game music remixer has been quietly dropping experimental edits of Beatles hits and music from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on YouTube, Soundcloud, and any platform with an upload field. The results range from unexpectedly beautiful…
…to absolutely deranged as Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s vocals are smelted down and recast into Koji Kondo’s original tunes.
A two-minute, 44-second cut of Zora’s Domain with warped lyrics from the Beatles is not the kind of thing most people want to listen to with the spare minutes they have left on this mortal coil. (Case in point: RednasVGM’s video for that one has 130 views at the time of publication.) But honestly, I don’t have time to watch the entire oeuvre of David Lynch for my daily headtrip and this is the next best thing.
If you are not prepared to scroll through the many, many, many audio shitposts RednasVGM has spliced together during his Ocarina of Time/Beatles run (which, it should be noted, is interspersed with Deltarune/Beatles oddities), may I direct you to his first compilation, which rides the edge of melodious vibing and nails on chalkboard fever dream that I think Yoko Ono would truly appreciate if she had any affinity for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
What makes RednasVGM’s entire enterprise even funnier is that there was, at some point, talk of a Beatles musical movie version of The Lord of the Rings.
In 1968, The Beatles reportedly toyed with the idea of casting themselves in the fantasy epic. As the rumors go, McCartney would’ve played Frodo, with Ringo Starr as Sam, Harrison as Gandalf, and Lennon as Gollum. (Eventual The Lord of the Rings movie director Peter Jackson, who went on to make The Beatles Get Back documentary, swears this is true.)
The plan apparently collapsed when J.R.R. Tolkien refused to grant them the rights. Around the time of Get Back’s release, Jackson said the band had been genuinely excited about the idea after reading the books in India, and even had Stanley Kubrick in mind to direct. But Tolkien’s unwillingness to let “a pop group” adapt his story stopped the project cold.
“What would The Beatles have done with a Lord of The Rings soundtrack album?” Jackson told the BBC at the time. “That would have been 14 or 15 Beatles songs that would have been pretty incredible to listen to.”
Well, at least we now have the Beatles singing about the Master Sword. Get this in the movie version, stat!
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