This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ famed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, and that’s made for some great tributes and features, including one on the critic who panned it in The New York Times and later admitted he listened on a system with a busted speaker. One of the best, and certainly the most labor-intensive, comes from two-man parody band Palette-Swap Ninja, which not only rewrote the whole album to be about Star Wars: A New Hope, but then also linked each track up with the corresponding video.
Here’s an example, seeing them convert the opening title track and follow-up “With A Little Help From My Friends” into “Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans/With Illicit Help From Your Friends”:
Oh, but it doesn’t stop there. They manage to tell the vast majority of A New Hope through these parodies, and they’ve created a video for each, from “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” (now “Luke Is In The Desert And Whining“) to “Fixing A Hole” (now “Imperial Holes“) “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” (now “Being From The Spaceport Of Mos Eisley“).
But it’s the closing title track reprise/”A Day In The Life” that might be the standout here, emerging as “Reprise/A Day In The Life Of Red Five” and perfectly telling the story of the climactic A New Hope space battle, from the “One, two, Yavin Four” intro to “I heard a voice today, oh boy”:
This is an impressive labor of love, and a great display of both Beatles nerdery and Star Wars geekery. Well done, guys. You can check out the whole album here, and the whole playlist of videos over here.
