WMG / Help!

John and Ringo were in a relationship.

Why else would Ringo ask a question like, "What was it that first attracted you to me?"

• Hey, you've got to hide your love away....
  • Spider Robinson actually alludes to this WMG in his heavily-annotated short story "Rubber Soul".

The constant bondage in this film inspired Ringo to write "Octopus's Garden."

Over the course of the film Ringo is hooked up to a Mad Scientist machine, trapped in a cage, burritoed up in a blanket and stuffed in a car trunk, Strapped to an Operating Table, and staked to the ground spread-eagle. After the whole misadventure, the other Beatles teased Ringo about all of the kinky situations he'd just been through, and one of them pointed out that with the ocean so nearby in the last few, it was an irony that tentacles never got involved. Naturally, their jokes about hentai flew completely over Ringo's head, and he immediately started musing about how lovely it would be to visit with an octopus in his garden under the sea.

• When he finally decided to write the song, Ringo asked which of the other Beatles would help him write it. George, who had been mesmerized by Ringo's undies in the famous de-pantsing scene, jumped at the chance to join Ringo in the "octopus's garden," and was later disappointed to learn that Ringo just wanted to write a song about platonically socializing with the animal in its garden.

The Beatles weren't always acting.

It's confirmed that all four Beatles were too stoned to remember all their lines, or improvise ones that always made sense. It's not a stretch that at times they forgot they were filming a movie, and, for example, really thought the curling rock was a "fiendish thinggy!" that could kill them.

• Ringo's bug-eyed head-shake when the scientist asks if anyone would want him operating "with a blunt scalpel" could just be great acting, but it could also be a very stoned drummer who has no idea how he ended up strapped to a bed on a boat, or what the surgeon is threatening to cut off.

It was habit forming.

The shrinking serum, that Ringo expressed concerns over, was in fact "habit forming." Paul may have been the first to try it, but he got the other Beatles to try it out as well, and Ringo got hooked. This was the first step to a new stage in Ringo's life.