(Editor's Note) To see what Hollywood thinks a 75 year old Elvis looks like, click here.
I got up early on the morning of January 8, Elvis’ birthday, so I could watch Harum Scarum on Turner Classic Movies. They were doing an all-day marathon of Elvis movies, but I knew my wife would give me a lot of grief about wasting so much time watching films I had seen many times already. At least, she would still be asleep while I took in the first one.
However, because I had seen Harum Scarum quite a few times, I also turned on my laptop and opened e-mail. You know, multi-tasking. To my surprise, there was a message form Chris Kensler, Director of Entertainment/Style at FoxNews.com. They were putting the finishing touches on their article celebrating Elvis 75th Birthday, and they wanted permission to use a picture of old Elvis from a 2008 ElvisBlog article titled “Fun With Elvis on Photoshop – 2”.
Well, I had to be honest with FoxNews. It wasn’t my photo. I found it somewhere on the web and have seen it numerous places since. So, I wrote back and told him that the picture belonged to the tabloid Weekly World News and that they had used it on at least two of their covers over the years.
The first one appeared during the 2004 Presidential campaign between George Bush and John Kerry. Don’t you just love the headline: “Alien Slimes Teresa Heinz Kerry – With Ketchup” I bought the second issue a year later. And it was the inspiration for the ElvisBlog article “Elvis Is Alive – and Running for President.” I also enjoyed reading about the “Seeing Eye Squirrels for Dogs.”
As I stated in my article, old Elvis looked really good in this picture. Unfortunately, that is not the case with most of the other depictions of 70 or 75 year-old Elvis that have appeared on the web. Here is probably the one where he looks the worse.
From a technical standpoint, this one is very well done. You can still see recognizable elements of Elvis, but why the bald head? Elvis’ dad, Vernon, still had a full head of wavy hair when he died, so I’d like to believe Elvis would have retained lots of good looking hair had he lived until his seventies.
Here is a different attempt. In a quickie Photoshop effort, someone simply changed Elvis’ hair color to gray. However, nothing else is altered, so it doesn’t look very realistic.
Here is the reverse. This picture still keeps the young Elvis hair but has aged all the facial features. Given the choice, I would pick the one above. Maybe, it’s the jumpsuit.
The last two old Elvises are interesting because they show the original “before” Elvis picture alongside the altered “old” Elvis picture.
I guess this is a pretty accurate illustration of the aging process, but I don’t like it. Maybe, it’s because I see a little of George Wallace in it.
This could be the most accurate guess at what Elvis would look like at 75. Do you see a little resemblance to Arnold Palmer?
The handsome Elvis picture from Weekly World News is probably too good to be true, but you can see why FoxNews.com would have wanted to use it in their story. I’m sorry I couldn’t help them, because I would have asked for a link to ElvisBlog, which might have brought lots of people to the site. But things turned out OK, anyway. ElvisBlog had 6,214 hits on Elvis' birthday, so I had two things to celebrate.
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