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Hot Shots And Cool Clips Volume 1

January 10, 2002 | Video
Design

The design for this DVD is o.k. A classic sixties promo photo on the cover. Looking at the content, all kind of film footage, we expected a shot from the footage. The DVD menu looks nice, fully animated, but the navigation colours don't match the "buttons", and the colours used for the information bars are very bright to put it mildly.

A real minor is the montage of the DVD, it looks like it's "home made". The transitions between the different parts of the footage isn't fluently, but more "cut and paste" with sometimes little leftovers between them. This is very annoying. The content is presented with three different backing tracks, country style, no Elvis, so we turned that off pretty fast.

Content

More important than the design is the content of this release. In contrary to the design we can only be positive about that! The DVD contains footage from all eras of Elvis career. To put it in the title of one of Elvis' albums, there's "Something For Everybody".

Footage from 1956 with Liberace is nice to watch, but it's obviously shot for commercial purposes back then, and it shows: the quality is very good.

The Tupelo '57 is always great to watch, and on this release we see the build-up to Elvis performance from the ticket-office to the fans anticipating Elvis' performance. The text telling us what we're looking at is very annoying.

Over to the sixties we see clips from March and May 1960 and a promotional gathering with fans from July 1961 at Weeki Wachee Springs, FL. This is very original material, probably shot by a fan. Too bad that the Colonel, who organised it, didn't have his own camera people there. The footage on the "Follow That Dream" premiere is a nice insight in the way of life of the sixties, but since there's no Elvis it's not too interesting. The clips with Bobby Darin and Danny Thomas backstage are great to watch. Performers among each other.

The marriage footage from May 1st 1967 is good, we even saw some things from different angles, and it's pretty complete. The August 1968 8mm footage taken by a fan at the gates of Graceland is nice to see since it's very original. We haven't seen the April 1969 footage of Elvis signing his Las Vegas contract on the construction site of the International Hotel this complete.

The last era of Elvis career contains one item, the June 9th 1972 Press conference. The quality is good, but the editing is very annoying since we get some answers without the questions. Also it is not complete, e.g. the best know part (about "shy, humble country boy") is not in it.

From the bonus section the "News in Brief" doesn't contain to much Elvis, but it gives a good impression of how news on Elvis was presented in those days. The photograph's from Memphis are good, but we're still not getting used to watching pictures on TV. we rather look at them hardcopy.

Conclusion

Overall this review may look a bit on the negative side on the way the content of this release is presented, but we very much love the actual content of this DVD. A lot of very original fifties (our favourite) and early sixties footage is good quality and more complete than we have seen it elsewhere. Our advice is to put a good collector CD with fifties and sixties music in you CD player and this disk in you DVD-player with audio off. You'll have a great time.

This release may be a bit expensive for non U.S. fans / buyers, but it is worth the money. We're looking forward to volume two.