Elvis: What Happened?

So, Part 1 of the 4-hour Elvis mini-series aired on Sunday night.

The guy looked pretty good, and the movie is OK. I find the use of the actual recordings to be very distracting. In most of the cases, he’s supposed to be singing live and he obviously isn’t.

For instance, The Dorsey Bros and Milton Berle appearances. You heard piano, but didn’t see it. And I’ve seen and heard the original TV appearances often enough, that it just came across as fake. Inexplicably, they used real footage of the Army draft. If they’re going to mix in footage, the time to do it would have been the TV appearances.

I am unfairly comparing it to the Elvis TV series, which didn’t use the real music, but it was close, and sounded live when it needed to. That show was great, but it got into more day-to-day stuff, and hadn’t even gotten to the point where he made Love Me Tender before it was cancelled. That guy looked so much like Elvis, and the guys playing Scotty and Bill looked like them. If it comes out on DVD, I may get it.

This was much broader. The guys doing Scotty and Bill here, there’s not even an attempt to resemble . In fact, they should have switched actors, it would have been a little closer. I like how the Dad is played, but I think both his mother and Col. Tom are being way overplayed as the ones who ruined Elvis. Granted, they did, but there are no shades of gray here at all. The music was the one area the Col. stayed out of – except for Scotty and Bill, because they had too much influence on Elvis.

I think that in the beginning. Col. Tom was good for Elvis – he got him on TV, got him national attention, got him to RCA., got him the movie contract (a mixed blessing, that)

Actually, the interesting take I got from it was, that Parker never expected Elvis to last more than a few years at best, and was trying to get all the money they could while he could do it. Things like consequences to a long-term career were not a consideration.

In retrospect, he seems like this awful human being (and he probably was), but his decisions were sound, business-wise. However, he didn’t know how to sustain the popularity properly. He never adapted his style, and never evolved beyond a carnival huckster. And he never cared about Elvis as more than a product.

But Elvis should have dumped him when he got out of the army. Almost everything between 1961 and 1968 was awful. His first album after the army was good (with "Such a Night", "Mess o’ Blues", etc), but until the Comeback Special and the album now known as "Suspicious Minds" (originally “From Elvis in Memphis” I think), it was just bad. Viva Las Vegas is campy fun, but not really good – in 1964, the same year the Beatles hit America!. Elvis was SO irrelevant.

Part 1 skipped over Jailhouse Rock and King Creole, movies where Elvis showed potential as an actor. The next movies they’ll probably show is GI Blues and Blue Hawaii (skipping over Flaming Star and Follow That Dream, where he tired to stretch a little ). Then they’ll probably do a bad movie montage until they get to Viva Las Vegas, so they can do stuff with Rose McGowan as Ann Margaret. I wonder if they’’ show the Sinatra special, or that first post-army album

I think Part 2 will be more interesting, though all the reviews said Part 1 is better. The clips they showed of the Comeback Special looked pretty cool actually. Col. Tom is going to come off even worse here – the bad movies, the lack of touring, the ignoring of the drug problem.

I give it a C+.