Digipak Review: The Bealtes - Magical Mystery Tour (Re-Mastered In 2010)

This is a digipak for The Beatles album: Magical Mystery tour. This album had an accompanying film made in 1968 and the album was the soundtrack. This digipak features many aspects closely related or taken straight from the film.

The from cover of the album is the same as the film poster, and shows all four of the band members dressed up in outfits from the film with the band name and title around them. The costumes the band is wearing seem very random and strange but this matches with aspects of the songs on the album as some of them don’t make much sense either. The cover has a very psychedelic feel, and fist in with the 60s time period it was made in. The colours are very vibrant and the cover as a whole is busy with many different things to look at, but it all fits in with the house style of the film.

The inside three windows have a very different approach to the cover. The vibrant colours and masses of text are gone and other than the photographs there is no colour at all. The far right hand window is completely blank apart from the logo of the record company that the band belongs to in the centre of the page. This makes the digipak seem much more minimalistic and stylish and is almost the opposite of the cover.

The right hand window and centre window show a single image of the band climbing out of the top of the bus that is a big feature in the film. Although the photograph has many colours, the fact that it I a single image showing the whole band continues the minimalistic feel as it takes up the majority of space within the inside area and only gives the viewer two aspects to look at on the inside. Also, they have added a slot for the disc to slip into; I feel that this is so the disc does not disturb the large image on the two windows.

The Disc itself seems like a halfway point between the busy front cover and the simple, minimalistic inside. There is a vibrant spectrum of colours around the outside of the disc, but other than that it is plain black background with white text explaining the details of the record and track listing, and a logo.

Overall I like the way the designers have made the digipak. As it is a re-mastered version form 2010 they have kept the original cover from the 60s but modernised the inside to make it look more stylish and sophisticated. I think it has been done well and the mixture of old and new compliments each of the different styles.