Movie Outtakes – The Comments

Going through my old posts preparing the “manuscript” for my book The Elvis Today Blog Vol. 1, I sometimes stumble across comments made long after a particular post was written. One such comment, from February 22, 2010, was written in conjunction with a post from February 1, 2008, in other words, two years after the post was published.

The post, titled Lost In The Vaults – Movie Outtakes, referred to an article in Elvis Monthly from September 1994. In it, Ernst Jorgensen writes about the possibilities of movie outtakes, such as the original ending of Love Me Tender as well as “Summer Kisses Winter Tears” from Flaming Star.

The comment, posted by Norton McColl who ran an Elvis fan club in Brazil for many years, goes likes this:

One thing I learnt is that most of Elvis movies presented in Brazilian movie theatres had alternative scenes. Here it goes. KING CREOLE has shown the alternative hotel scene where Elvis and Susan Hart actually got inside the room. GI BLUES had the alternative TONIGHT IS ALL RIGHT FOR LOVE (Vienna Woods) scene which is completely different than the one released later. SPEEDWAY had the FIVE SLEEPY HEADS scene where he actually sings to 5 babies. HARUM SCARUM had two extra scenes included which are ANIMAL INSTINCT with a black panther circulating and WISDOM OF THE AGES where Elvis bows to the King at the end of this latter song.
I do not know for sure whatelse we could see in the movie theatres in the 50´s and 60`s. I wish we had VHS sets at that time. But it looks like they always use South America to show alternative scenes. The same happened with Hammer horror movies productions whose bloody scenes in full colour were later cut from released VHS's and DVD's.

And a couple of days later, editing a post called Unreleased Frames from April 13, 2009 dealing with songs shown in trailers but not in the movies themselves, I noticed a comment written two weeks later by a guy named Rick Norman along the same lines:

Well, I can tell you as much :
"Summer kisses winter tears" certainly was filmed as it was only cut after preview (because of test audience laughing at the scene).
"Steppin' out of line" has a short sequence in European prints.
The same with "Anyone" from "Kissin' Cousins".
Both songs from "Harum Scarum" were seen in prints distributed in the Middle East and "Sand castles" was also present in Europe, following the "House of sand" sequence.
Having worked in the movie and tv-world for 42 years, I strongly suspect all songs will have been filmed. They were probably cut for different reasons and some reappeared in different prints to be distributed in countries that had other copyright laws or interests. FTD and EPE must be unable to clear the rights or retrieve the actual scenes, otherwise they sure would have published them in new versions of the movie DVD's.
I know they have severe problems with copy rights for some of the movie song versions and that they're trying like hell to clear those.

It's interesting that both Norton McColl and Rick Norman mentions the inclusion of “Animal Instinct” and “Wisdom Of The Ages” in prints of Harum Scarum shown in South America and the Middle East, respectively. Maybe one day they'll turn up in on a compilation DVD together with the other songs mentioned above. And wouldn't it be something if it would include “Hard Headed Woman” from King Creole as well as the Clambake number “How Can You Loose What You Never Had?”