Monthly Archives: February 2021

This October 31, 2010 post continues the series on Elvis Mr. Potato Head.

Most Elvis websites and blogs noted the announcement of Elvis Mr. Potato Head back in June.  Some were actually hostile to the idea, but I liked it and said so.  I may be old, but I like my Elvis toys, and this is a good one.

In my previous ElvisBlog article, I dug a little deeper and reported on PPW Toys, the company that manufactures Elvis Mr. Potato Head as a licensee of Hasbro.  This prompted a nice comment by Dean Gorby, business development manager for PPW.  He was impressed that I understood his toy represented Mr. Potato Head dressing as Elvis and was meant as a humorous homage.

Four months later, Mr. Gorby went even further.  He sent me four images and told me I was welcome to use them on ElvisBlog.  Here they are.

This is an image you will see a lot pretty soon.  As previously announced, the second Elvis Mr. Potato Head will be dressed in black leather from the ’68 Comeback Special.  Unfortunately, it will not be available for the 2010 Christmas season, but we can get it starting in February 2011.

This is a super artist’s rendering of the final design selected for the first Elvis Mr. Potato Head dressed in a white jumpsuit.

This is a design that didn’t make it, and I think we can see why.  The optional sunglasses are a nice design, but the buck-teeth are a no-no. 

This is impressive – views from the front, back, both sides, top and bottom.  Elvis Mr. Potato Head may be a toy, but designing it is a serious business.

Mr. Gorby also advised me that there will be a third Elvis Mr. Potato Head introduced in late 2011.  To pump up interest, Hasbro/PPW will let the fans choose what iconic Elvis image will be featured.  They will offer three choices and have a vote to determine which one they will actually make.

If it works out like the other series of Elvis collectibles, these choices will be from the usual group of images – Jailhouse Rock, gold lamé, Blue Hawaii flowered shirt, etc.  I would like to propose some other options that are often overlooked.

This could inspire a “Hound Dog” version, so named because this is the shirt and coat Elvis wore when he appeared on the Milton Berle Show, June 5, 1956, and introduced “Hound Dog,”  

This performance was the one that created a firestorm of negative reaction across the country.  It was a TV event just as momentous in Elvis’ legacy as the Comeback Special and Aloha From Hawaii, but his outfit never gets the same notoriety.

This outfit could be called either “Loving You” or “Teddy Bear” because Elvis wore it in the movie Loving You when he sang “Teddy Bear.” 

It has a part in the story line when it is a gift to celebrate Elvis moving up to co-headliner of the travelling concert troupe.  He is also wearing it when a very aggressive groupie sneaks into his dressing room and puts some moves on him.

The teddy bear outfit has also been featured on various CD, album and 45 record covers, but it never shows up on Elvis collectible figurines.

This one could be called “Karate Elvis.”   I actually have a refrigerator magnet set that includes this Karate Gi as one of the clothing options.  Wouldn’t a Karate Elvis Mr. Potato Head be cool?

No matter what the choices for design # 3 are, Hasbro and PPW will have a great run of success with Elvis.  If the series continues on to additional designs, I’ll bet you’ll someday see a boxed set of mini Elvis Mr. Potato Heads.  If so, you can count me as a customer.

©  2010    Philip R Arnold, Original Elvis Blogmeister    All Rights Reserved    www.ElvisBlog.net

Elvis, Elvis Presley, and Graceland are registered trademarks of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.

I’m sure you all know about Mr. Potato Head being in the news lately.  The media coverage reminded me that Hasbro introduced Elvis Mr. Potato head over a decade ago, and I had come up with enough photos to create three ElvisBlog posts about it.  In the next few days, all three will be reposted here.

Mr. Potato Head Elvis — Yikes!

Posted June 13, 2010

I told my wife that they were coming out with an Elvis Mr. Potato Head, and she replied, “Oh God, what’s next.”  I think I have the answer to that question, but first let’s take a look at the latest in themed Elvis collectibles.

Elvis Mr. Potato Head

According to a report on www.elvis.com/news dated 6/9/10, Elvis Mr. Potato Head will be unveiled at Elvis Week this year.  Want to bet they will sell a lot of them – even at the inflated price of $20.

Of course, Elvis Mr. Potato Head is just the latest in a long line of Elvis figures in white jumpsuits you can buy:

M&M Elvis

Elvis Whisky Decanter

Elvis Teddy Bear

Bobble-Head Elvis

Pez Elvis

The news release stated that a second version of Elvis Mr. Potato Head wearing his ‘68 Special black leather outfit will be out in time for the 2010 Christmas season.  It was unstated, but you can be sure there will be other iconic themes to follow.  All the Elvis collectibles pictured above have several models, including Jailhouse Rock, Army Private Elvis, 50s Rocker, etc.  I’ll bet the third Elvis Mr. Potato Head is decked out in gold lamé.

The news release also stated:  “components such as hairstyles, costumes, faces and musical instruments will be compatible with every version so fans can mix and match the styles with hilarious results.”   That doesn’t sound so hilarious to me, but it might be if you used other available Mr. Potato Head accessories.

Party Spud Accessories

Halloween Spud Accessories

Can you imagine Elvis with buck teeth, Dracula hair, or a clown hat?

Hasbro Toys has been making Mr. Potato Head since 1952, and they have developed many versions over the years.  Here are a few that are pretty cool:

Santa Potato Head

Darth Tater

Princess Sweet Potato

Unlike these examples, Elvis Mr. Potato Head is actually produced by PPW Toys as a licensee of Hasbro.  PPW has previously developed a series of sports-themed Mr. Potato Head figures.

Dallas Cowboys

Atlanta Braves

Duke Blue Devils

Elvis was not the first rock and roll Mr. Potato Head produced by PPW Toys.

KISS Potato Heads

EPE has been trying to find as many ways as possible to get youngsters interested in Elvis, and I think Elvis Mr. Potato Head will work just fine.  However, to answer my wife’s question about what’s next, Graceland should look at the latest craze with the kids — Silly Bandz.  They are wearing hundreds of different shapes on their wrists.  There are the only a few available shapes with a musical theme, so here’s a tip for EPE.  Sign up Silly Bandz as yet another licensed vendor and add this to their product line.

Musical Silly Bandz

Future Elvis Silly Bandz?

                                                                                                                            I’m too old to ever wear an Elvis Silly Bandz, but this big kid has already told his wife he wants one of those Elvis Mr. Potato Heads for Christmas.  I will put it on the shelf above my desk, right next to my set of Elvis M&Ms and my Pez Elvis.

©  2010    Philip R Arnold, Original Elvis Blogmeister    All Rights Reserved    www.ElvisBlog.net

.

Elvis, Elvis Presley, and Graceland are registered trademarks of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.

Look what came into my email yesterday. Ever since I started searching Pinterest for Elvis photos to use in blog posts, they send me a dozen or so emails every week. Usually the email header says something like:

We think you might like these 17 ideas

Two days ago, this was the header:

Nose Jobs, Photos Of Puppies and more ideas to search for

I don’t know why Pinterest thought I would be interested in photos of nose jobs, but I did enjoy looking at the puppy pictures.

But the email I got yesterday had a very different message:

Hey, Phil Arnold! Don’t miss out on these Pins

That direct salutation to me definitely got my attention. Above, you can see the first three photos (Pins) in the scroll. I immediately recognized the one of Elvis wearing his karate Gi and nothing else as a photo I had created. It is from an Elvis refrigerator magnet set I sold last year. I scrolled down, did a little clicking, and found out that 12 of the 16 photos in this email had appeared on ElvisBlog. I don’t know why, but I thought it was pretty cool to have Pinterest presenting ElvisBlog photos in an email to the guy that is ElvisBlog.

Before we look at some of the rest, please note the altered photo of young Marilyn Monroe and young Elvis came from a post just a month ago. If my old Pinterest searches had yielded the middle picture, I would have used it in the series called, Elvis Pictures I’ve Never Seen Before. It turns out, it came from eBay.

All three of these pictures came from ElvisBlog. One of my sales included Elvis trading cards, and this picture shows the back of two of them. The projection TV was in a 2016 post titled like it reads below the picture: Graceland Quiz – What Room are These Items In?

On the other hand, the label under the right picture is totally wrong. That old guy was the way I envisioned the villain in my book, BIG E and the SANTA MAN. That reminds me. I should do one more promotion for it this year. There’s been a lot of new Subscribers added since the last push back in December 2018.

Two of these were also photos illustrating ElvisBlog sales, and the ring picture came from the series Elvis’ Fabulous Rings.

Speaking of Elvis photos from my files, check this out:

That’s a lot of numbers, but 2/3 of the way down you will see Contains: 19,884 Files. These files are pictures. I have added nearly 20 thousand photos to my collection since I began doing ElvisBlog. They are organized into 176 folders and 1,046 subfolders.

If anyone reading this has an interest in owning a flash drive containing all of these images, contact me at philarnold@charter.net, and we’ll see what we can work out.

When a prominent person dies, typically I would put the person’s name plus Elvis in the Google search box to see what pictures would come up.  I tried it today after learning that Rush Limbaugh had died, and this is what came up:

This is obviously a Photoshopped picture, and someone was trying to be funny. Then writing in blue says:

Elvis tells President Nixon Billy Clinton’s “Watergate Breakin” Idea

So, three of the men are named.  The fourth is identified with an arrow as Rusty Limbo.  I wondered if this could be what Rush Limbaugh looked like as a young man, so I searched some more.

Ys, it is.

If you look back at the group picture, you can tell the original is one of the shots taken by the White House photographer when Elvis met Nixon.

So, someone replaced Sonny West’s head with Bill Clinton and replaced Jerry Schilling’s head with Rush Limbaugh.  Pretty strange.  One last look.

I wonder if Jerry Schilling has ever seen this picture.

R.I.P Rush

Do you think The Guinness Book of World Records would consider a category for:

The Most Blog Posts About Elvis Presley

I should look into getting an application. If I need to get a lot of names on a petition, can I count on you guys?

This is the second time a 1,000 milestone has been big for me. I remember how excited I was when ElvisBlog reached 1,000 hits for a month. Now it’s 9 thousand. It has been stuck at about that for the last three or four years, because I stopped doing the stuff to build up my SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. If you’re trying to monetize a blog, you care about that stuff, but that’s not what ElvisBlog has been about.

If I had the time, I could do this for a lot longer. I find each new post gives me a sense of satisfaction. Project accomplished, you know. I like doing them, and new post ideas just keep coming. So I’ll hang in for another year, but at a slower pace.

However, post # 1001 will happen soon because It’s about some more Elvis books for sale. The response on previous book sales have been great. Thank you.

When I first started out blogging, I read a couple articles outlining the basics. One thing stressed as most important was to adhere to a regular schedule of posting. Don’t let long periods go by between posts, because you will lose readers. My first tagline under the title was:

       A Weekly Column of News, History and Commentary about Elvis Presley

I committed to posting weekly right from the get go, and I’ve managed to stick with it. The tagline changed, though. It was too long and formal, and my vision for ElvisBlog narrowed to celebrating Elvis as a popular icon. So it got changed to:

All the Cool Stuff Out There in Elvis World

Much better.

Another strong recommendation I got for successful blogging was to answer all Comments.

You can see that there have been 4,443 comments over the past sixteen years. Actually, half of that number are my responses. As you can imagine, answering 2,200 comments takes up a lot of time. There should be a drop-off because posts won’t be as frequent. Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing from you regular commenters. But I will no longer waste time on the ones where they say, “I found this signed picture of Elvis in my aunt’s closet after she died. What’s it worth?”

Writing this turned out to be a lot easier than I originally thought it would. The plan was to have ElvisBlog go static on the day after celebrating 1,000 posts. To be honest, I kind of miss the dramatic departure.

But, it would also have meant writing a goodbye letter. I’m glad to put that off for a year.

I guess a lot of folks have hit 1,000 posts, because there are so many cool images out there. This one is my pick for best, so I’ll end with it.

Thank you for picking ElvisBlog as a regular part of your life. I’m content knowing the stuff I pull together about Elvis is appreciated by so many people.

Phil Arnold

Original ElvisBlogmeister
2005-2021

Editor’s note:  The first bid came in at $100.  I think that is extremely generous and unlikely to be beaten.

So, this auction is over.  Thanks to all those who sent in bids.

You folks have really come through on the Elvis books I’ve been selling. Perhaps you’ve noticed I do research on Google and eBay to see what prices are out there I need to beat.

But I own an Elvis collectible that I can’t find on either one, or anywhere else on the internet. I did find a picture, but the item was no longer available and no price was shown. This is it:

About fifteen years ago, my sister-in-law gave “The King” to me. She secured it because her daughter worked at The New York Times and knew it was available at their Photo Archives department. Over the years, they had produced various commemorative book collections of their photos of celebrities, but this was different.

What they did was reprint every page of The New York Times that contained an Elvis article from 1956 to 2004. All sixty-eight of them.

To make it even cooler, they didn’t just print loose pages. They wove them together into two regular newspaper sections – Elvis’ life in one, and all the news he made after his death in the other. It will be easier to understand if I explain using the second one.

This is the reprint of the front page on the day after Elvis’ death. There are two articles, one by Molly Ivins, and the page where they were continued is on the backside. The next page is from August 18 and has three articles, two by Ivins, again with the continuations next. Another flip of the pages takes you to a September 1977 article about what Elvis left behind. And so on, for forty pages.

The cover of the first section was new creation, and it says at the top, “Commemorative Newspaper from The New York Times.” The cover article is written by Peter Guralnick, who wrote several Elvis books and the forward to Al Wertheimer’s huge book. The Times went out and got the best guy for the job.

The back side is the continuation of Guralnick’s essay. Then the fun starts on the next page with Entertainment Critic Jack Gould blasting Elvis’ performance on the Milton Berle Show. You read that one a few days ago with the pictures I added. That same post also mentioned The Times’ hatchet job on Elvis in Love Me Tender, and of course, that article is in this special section.

Just about every important event in Elvis’ life is covered in the subsequent pages. Here is an index:

I hope that makes it clear what we are talking about here. The first picture in this post is the front of the cardboard packaging the two sections fit into. Note that Elvis’ name does not appear on the box, but “The King” and the photo are all we need.

To me, the quality of the whole production is great, and I think the concept is brilliant. But it’s kind of a mystery why there is nothing about it on the internet. I tried about six different ways to find it on the New York Times website, but came up empty.

So, it seems that all copies of “The King” are in the hands of Elvis fans that do not want to part with them. Which brings us back to the title of this post. I have no idea what price to put on mine, so…

Let’s have an auction.

If you are interested, send your bid to philarnold@charter.net. I will update this post with the first bid and any subsequent higher ones. I will also send emails to all bidders when the top bid changes, so everybody will know where things stand.

I like the idea of trying something different, so this auction starts now.

Thanks in advance to you folks that send in bids.

Phil Arnold

POST # 999