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The Morning GIF: Walk this way

The Beatles' iconic Abbey Road shot gets the Flying Circus treatment

 

Lorraine Murphy

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Posted on Jun 4, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 4:19 pm CDT

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Before there was Bieber, there were Beatles, and before there was Saturday Night Live, there was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Yes, everything was better back then.

In the ‘60s, British band the Beatles became famous for creating hysteria among their extensive fandom and bringing complex, transcendent layers of meaning and melody to popular music. The ‘70s brought Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a British comedy troupe and television show famous for a cheeseless cheese shop, a dead parrot, the Upper Class Twit of the Year competition, and the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Put those together and what do you have? This glorious GIF.

The image is taken from the cover of the penultimate Beatles album, 1969’s Abbey Road. It’s one of the most famous album covers in history not because of any particular aesthetic merit, but rather because it has been the centerpiece of the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory for four decades now. Believing the photo to be loaded with obscure symbolism (as were some of the band’s lyrics) fans read meaning into everything from the fact that Paul is barefoot to…well, it has never really ended, much to Sir Paul McCartney’s chagrin.

So it is high time someone loaded this image with a little light humor. Now we have a denim-clad George Harrison doing a classic club-bopping walk, McCartney performing a languid pimp stroll, Ringo Starr—heck, Ringo probably does walk this way—and John Lennon out in front with a fantastically devil-may-care knees-up stomp. Thanks to the magic of animation, they are always striding, never arriving, something like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass.

Oooh, I think we found another symbol!

I Raff I Ruse posted this to Tumblr on May 31, and it’s had a staggering 72,457 notes.

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*First Published: Jun 4, 2012, 7:31 am CDT