When the Beatles albums were officially canonized on compact disc in the eighties, only one of the thirteen albums was American rather than English – Magical Mystery Tour. In the UK in 1967, this “album” was released not as an LP, but rather a double-EP. In America, where EPs were nearly non-existent and double-EPs were completely ludicrous, Capitol took the six songs from Magical Mystery Tour to make up one side of an LP and filled side two with all the singles and B-sides that hadn’t appeared on an album yet: Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane, All You Need Is Love, Baby You’re A Rich Man, and Hello Goodbye.

However in my hypothetical scenario, four of those five songs had already been used by previous LPs, so Capitol was going to have to do something different. Or rather United Artists. Since this was a film soundtrack, they would be the ones in charge of putting together this particular album. And so they followed the template that worked for them for A Hard Day’s Night and Help! First they found a couple of instrumental Muzak covers of Beatles songs from the actual film’s score to add (Arthur Wilkinson’s All My Loving and a calliope version of She Loves You). They also felt obligated to include the song Death Cab For Cutie by the Bonzo Dog Band since it was featured in the burlesque scene.

On the plus side, the Beatles themselves recorded a number of instrumentals for this film’s score. One of which, Flying, was used in the actual double-EP and original American release and has been available ever since. The other two, surprisingly, have never been officially released in audio form. These are Jessie’s Dream an pre-Revolution no. 9 bit of musique concrète created by John and Ringo and a snatch of double-tracked accordion playing called Shirley’s Wild Accordion.

Luckily, there’s enough of a snatch of Hello Goodbye at the end of the film to justify United Artists/Capitol closing out the album with that known hit, even if it hadn’t been on one of their albums previously. Having a previous hit on the record was not going to be a problem for the next film soundtrack.

Using these bits of ephemera and other odds’n’ends, United Artists would be able to cobble together a full “soundtrack” album for the TV movie, even though the film’s 52 minute runtime was a fair bit shorter than your usual feature.

But now what was going to happen to the Beatles’ next film, an animated movie that the Beatles were largely disconnected and distant from? Would there still be enough material to finish that project?