Tired Of Beatles Hype? Don’t Expect Any Rest

The band that once sang “You Never Give Me Your Money” will soon be rolling in it.

With this month’s three-part ABC-TV documentary (beginning Nov. 19) and the upcoming release of three compact disc packages of archival material, the Beatles will be everywhere. The hype machine is cranking overtime.

“They’ve really created a plan where everywhere you go, everything you look at and everything you listen to is Beatles, Beatles, Beatles,” said Toni Lee, spokeswoman for Grey Entertainment, the advertising agency putting it together.

Buses decorated as yellow submarines will roam city streets. ABC-TV is calling itself A-Beatles-C. Theaters will show ads before movies.

Beatlemania revisited is expected to be very lucrative for Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono.

Beatle dolls and Beatle wigs of the 1960s pioneered rock ‘n’ roll merchandising, and the amount of Beatles CDs and memorabilia has dwarfed those of such artists as Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.

And more is coming. Home videos of the Beatles documentary, with about four hours of material not used on ABC-TV, will be for sale next year. Capitol Records will put all of the anthology CDs into a boxed set that will be on the market for Christmas 1996.

Late last month, the Beatles’ management firm reached an exclusive merchandising deal with Sony Signatures, a company that has developed products for Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, Janet Jackson and others.

Dell Furano, president of Sony Signatures, is betting that the schoolchildren who toted Beatle lunch boxes to school in the 1960s will pay up to $500 for framed lithographs of Beatles album covers to hang in their offices.

The company soon will be churning out Beatle ties, Beatle watches, Beatle clocks, Beatle greeting cards, Beatle plates and Beatle posters.

Framed wall hangings, of such items as posters advertising Beatle tours and never-before-seen photographs, are expected to be popular. He expects to generate $200 million in retail sales by the end of 1997.