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McKenna, AT (2024) Flashes in the Pan: Short Lived Trends, Television Star Specials, and the Transmedia Contexts of Elvis Presley’s 1968 “Comeback”. Open Screens, 6 (2).
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Abstract
Using Elvis Presley as a case study, this essay examines the maintenance of transmedia star presence in 1960s America. In December 1968, NBC broadcast the Elvis special, a programme widely understood to be Elvis’s return from obscurity, so much so that it is now better known as the Comeback Special. This essay argues that Elvis’s supposed cultural absence during the 1960s has been overstated, and that he maintained a strong media presence throughout the decade by capitalising on a series of short-lived trends. Once America’s appetite for rock and roll abated, Elvis found success as an actor in the pre-pill sex comedy; later, rock and roll’s mid-1960s rejuvenation renewed interest in Elvis as a rock and roll legacy artist. Subsequently, as Elvis’s films grew less successful in cinemas, Hollywood studios’ sale of screening rights to broadcast networks saw Elvis’s movies become immensely popular on television and, when that selling bubble burst, networks began investing heavily in star specials, another bubble that Elvis caught in its “exuberant” stage. Moving beyond traditional understandings of star image construction, most notably creative agency and distinctiveness, this essay examines the roles industrial forces and cultural trends play in maintaining star presence in uncertain periods. It concludes that, far from being a comeback from nowhere, the 1968 Elvis special presented its audience with a format to which it was accustomed, featuring a personality who was familiar, whose fragmented star image had remained in the public imagination via a series of short-lived trends.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Subjects: | N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general |
| Divisions: | Screen School |
| Publisher: | Open Library of the Humanities |
| SWORD Depositor: | A Symplectic |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Jan 2025 15:37 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Jan 2025 15:45 |
| DOI or ID number: | 10.16995/os.10574 |
| URI: | https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/25369 |
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