When The Beatles skied down an Austrian mountain during the filming of “Help!” they were the forerunners to the music videos more than a decade later. MTV officials told director Richard Lester as much, calling him “the father of MTV.” “I immediately cabled back and demanded a blood test,” Lester said on a special features disc that accompanies a remastered DVD of “Help!” released in 2007. The ski scenes accompany the song “Ticket to Ride,” which was a No. 1 hit in both Britain and the United States. Lester said the ski shots required surprisingly little editing.

The challenge, he said, was getting the omnipresent mobs of fans to stay in the trees and out of the background. And a bit of creative editing placed musical notes on utility wires seen over the heads of The Beatles, who also were improvising their way down the slopes in Obertauern, Austria. It was a new experience for the Fab Four. “None had ever skied before,” Lester said. “I said ‘don’t try until we get the cameras rolling.’ ”

“Help!” was a satire of the popular James Bonds movies, filmed in the spirit of the Marx brothers’ “Duck Soup.” It is a precursor to “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” which also came from England, and it was the inspiration for the U.S. television program “The Monkees.”

John Lennon became a fan of Lester’s work with actor Peter Sellers. Lester also directed The Beatles’ first movie, “A Hard Day’s Night,” a satirical black-and-white documentary of the band. Lester explained the idea behind his first color film, “Help!” “We didn’t wanted to make another movie about their working lives, and we couldn’t do it about their private lives because that would have been X-rated,” he said. “So we made them passive recipients of an outside threat.” In the movie, Ringo is given a ring coveted by a cult and a couple of mad scientists. Ringo can’t remove the ring, and the evildoers want to remove it by chopping off his hand. The bungling bad guys chase The Beatles across the globe from England to Austria to the Bahamas. Moreover, the movie harkens back to the innocent pre-Vietnam War period of the early ’60s, when the fun-loving Beatles were on top of the world.

Ringo explained why the boys giggled so much. “A hell of a lot of pot was being smoked while we were making the film,” Wikipedia quoted him as saying. He recalled one scene when he and Paul had to run away from an exploding rock. “We ran and ran, just so we could stop and have a joint before we came back.”