The King

News about this Canadian budget DVD never made it to the news section of magazines and websites, but on eBay we found a copy.

Design

The design of the package is good, a standard picture of Elvis on the cover, a “country”-like font that somehow makes us think of “Charro”. Two great pictures of our man on the back, live on stage in the fifties and live on stage in the seventies, and the basic, yet nice looking, navigation menu raised our expectations and anticipation. The package contained no booklet and chapters, and there is no description of the content on the box. This information is available on the DVD itself, but you have to buy it before you see it … was this a warning of things to come?

Content

The DVD contains a biography, the movie years and so called “memorable moments”. The biography is standard, using photos and footage from the movie trailers and newsreels. A pro is that it contains original Elvis music, the con is that all music is from the sit-down sessions from the 1968 Comeback special, excluding the fragments fifties television appearances. The story jumps up and down in the timeline of Elvis’ life, and the same goes for the musical fragments by using footage from 1968 to illustrate a story from 1958. We prefer a biography telling the story in chronological order.

The movie years section is told through the use of the movie trailers and standard newsreel footage, so nothing new here. And finally the memorable moments section shows various clips from the fifties (television appearances) and sixties (Comeback Special) and “An American Trilogy” from the Aloha Special.

The footage from the fifties television appearances is shown in a very poor sound and video quality in the first section of this three-program-disc. The same footage, Elvis and Milton Berle on the U.S.S. Hancock, used in the “memorable moments” section is of very good quality. The least they could have done is cut and paste the same quality footage in both sections. All footage from the Comeback Special is in black and white, and sometimes “green” making Elvis look like a future character of one of his movie co-stars Bill Bixby a.k.a. The Hulk. The footage from the Aloha Special is a straight copy taken from another special; they didn’t even care to take out the design of the original for the announcement of the title. The ancient home-video-editing-effects used on this release don’t add to our appreciation of this disc.

Conclusion

This is another one of those titles you can skip easily, the $2.99 price and additional $6 for shipping and handling we paid through eBay for this release is way to much for what you get. We added it as a shelf-filler to the now close to one hundred available DVD’s of Elvis.