Widely regarded as one of the first album-based longform music films,[3] Imagine was a ground-breaking movie featuring a distinct visual treatment for every song, interspersed with occasional slices of Lennon and Ono's life together and improvised fantasy and comedy sequences[1] featuring John & Yoko, Fred Astaire, Dick Cavett, Miles Davis, George Harrison, Jack Nicholson, Jack Palance, Dan Richter, Andy Warhol and others.
But when I met Yoko she said, ‘Well why don’t you do it seriously?’ So she sort of helped me to develop in that area and I find it's very similar to recording, just visual.
When John first said, ‘Let’s use a helicopter’, I – who was supposed to have sold out in a big way – thought, ‘Oh dear, aren’t we getting a bit Hollywood?’ The result was that beautiful scene in ‘Jealous Guy’.
[2] Bundled with the film, Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon's Imagine Album.
[1] Track listing sourced from 2018 Blu-ray Release, UPC Code: 5051300536978[4] Credits sourced from 2018 Blu-ray Release, UPC Code: 5051300536978[4] Film and Audio Remastering (2010–2018) Film Restoration (2010–2018) Imagine 5.1 and Stereo Audio Remixes (2016–2018) Credits sourced from 2018 Blu-ray Release, UPC Code: 5051300536978[4] John & Yoko's 1972 theatrical version of the film originally ran for 68 minutes.
[2] The VHS version, released in 1985 in the UK and 1986 in the US was trimmed to 55 minutes by the record company without consulting Yoko Ono.
A restored and remastered 70-minute cut of the original version of the film was released in 2018 theatrically, on Blu-ray, DVD and digitally, combined with the 2002 documentary Gimme Some Truth (The Making of Imagine) as part of a massive reissue campaign centered around the Imagine album in 2018.
[5] Between 2010 and 2018 the film was painstakingly reassembled from the original negative, regraded and digitally cleaned frame-by-frame in HD1080, with the audio completely remixed from scratch from the original multitracks by Paul Hicks at Abbey Road Studios in Stereo, 7.1 Surround Sound and Dolby Atmos[2] for a theatrical, Blu-ray, DVD and digital release.