Elvis Lives

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    I don't care what it says, said the tall biker in the helmet, I never laid a finger on him.
    —Death, Good Omens

    In common fiction, and in the minds of some in reality, Elvis Presley is not dead. Whether through conspiracy, alien abduction (and later return), or retirement, he's still on Earth (or a variation thereof).

    While originally an actual Conspiracy Theory, it is rarely taken seriously anymore, serving to lampoon similar theories about celebrities faking death. After all, if Elvis he really did fake his death, he'd be over eighty years old, not an easy feat for someone notorious for having a bad diet and an addiction to prescription-strength barbiturates.

    See Also: Elvis Has Left the Planet, where he is outside Earth.

    Examples of Elvis Lives include:

    Comic Books

    • In Preacher, Jesse gives a ride to someone who never gives his name, but wears blue suede shoes and looks like an older and fatter version of The King. What we hear of his life story sounds suspiciously familiar as well.

    Fan Works

    Film

    • In Bubba Ho-Tep, Presley retired to a East Texas retirement home. The person who died was an Elvis impersonator whom Presley switched with when he grew tired of the lifestyle, and the paperwork that proves it was destroyed in a fire. Or so the character insisted, anyway.
    • In Death Becomes Her, Elvis is shown to be one of the many who took the immortality potions but had to fake his death to play the The Masquerade. He did come back occasionally to grab a headline or two.
    • As discussed in Man on the Moon, Andy Kaufman's death was thought by many to be another one of his elaborate hoaxes, and played with when his alter ego Tony Clifton put on an appearance a year after he died. In Real Life, it was his friend Bob Zmuda, who took over the role from Andy long before he died; the movie twists this by having Zmuda watch the performance, thus begging the question of who's playing Clifton. On top of all this, Kaufman was reportedly Elvis's favorite impersonator!
    • Inverted in a roundabout way in Paul: The titular alien claims his government-supplied pot is so strong that it killed Bob Dylan. The others point out that Dylan isn't dead, but Paul implies otherwise.

    Literature

    • Good Omens has a Brick Joke to this effect.
      • First, a tabloid is described by saying that a typical issue would "tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world." There's a footnote saying, "Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true."
      • Shortly after, there's a scene set in a Burger Lord in Des Moines. The Burger Lord exec who's inspecting it (who happens to be Famine) makes a mental note to fire the cook, because he's singing "Love Me Tender" to himself and it's clashing with the franchise-mandated canned music.
      • Finally, there's a scene in which a mysterious stranger is playing an arcade trivia game. The stranger reveals himself to be DEATH when the trivia game asks him "What year did Elvis Presley die in?" and he refuses to answer, saying the page quote.
    • The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries: Presley is now a vampire. Ish.
    • In Comeback Tour, a novel set in Games Workshop's Dark Future setting, Elvis is a Sanctioned Operative - a private law-enforcement officer - working in the backwater areas of the Deep South. At the climax of the novel, he ends up using his music to defeat the machinations of a Religion of Evil.
    • Time Scout has the Church of the Living Elvis, which insists he's a living Messiah.
    • One of the Highlander novels, 'Scotland The Brave', said he was an immortal who 'died' because he was getting too famous, also explaining the continuing Elvis sightings through the years.
    • Robert Rankin's Armageddon Trilogy has Elvis alive and bonded to Barry The Time Sprout, granting him greatly extended lifespan and the ability to travel through time. He maintains several Paper-Thin Disguise identities such as Mr. T. H. E. King and Noah Never.
    • An act of the omnibus novel The Tumbleweed Dossier pays tribute to this trope. It is strongly implied that Felix Faraday is Elvis Presley living under an assumed identity are being infected with the Curse of the Vampire in 1977.

    Live Action TV

    • In the short-lived Sci-Fi series The Chronicle, the vampire hunter the crew thought was Elvis was strongly hinted to be his presumed-stillborn twin, Jessie Garon.
    • Elvis lives on the paper route of the main character of Eerie, Indiana.
    • In an episode of the short lived Canadian TV series Taking The Falls, it turns out that Elvis is still alive, and hiding out at an Elvis impersonator convention.
    • The 1986 Twilight Zone episode "The Once and Future King" has the most awesomely absurd theory on Elvis - he was a wannabe lame easy-listening singer who was replaced by the high-quality time traveling impersonator who accidentally killed him. Elvis is not dead simply because he never actually existed, just the music: the result of a Stable Time Loop.
    • Subverted in the episode of Renegade called "The King and I". Remo meets a man who doesn't introduce himself as Elvis but prefers to be called the King. Remo himself starts wondering when he gets the man to sing one of Elvis's songs. In the end, however, it turns out that it was Elvis's agent who couldn't cope with his friend's death.
    • In the also short-lived series Johnny Bago, the titular character meets Elvis.
    • In Married... with Children, dedicated an episode around when Peggy believed she met Elvis and telling her story to a club who believe He's Just Hiding.
    • One episode of Boy Meets World had a one-off gag where Elvis is one of Alan Matthews' poker buddies.

    Music

    • The Swedish punk band De Lyckliga Kompisarna has a song where the singer reads a newspaper explaining that "Elvis lever! The king is still alive!" and mentioning he now lives in Härnösand, a small town in northeast Sweden. Link
    • Living Colour wrote a fantastically scathing Take That about this.
    • In Bush's song "Everything's Zen" contains the lyric, repeated several times, "I don't believe that Elvis is dead".
    • "God Bless The UFO", The Capitol Steps' parody of "God Bless The USA", includes the line

    Elvis lives, that's clear to me; it's McCartney who is dead.

    Web Comics

    • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja - In the issue, "Punch Dracula," The king of vampires brings Dr. McNinja to his moon base, where the doctor discovers that Dracula has been collecting historical figures over the years, among them is Hitler. One room has Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson and Tupac rehearsing at a piano, where they make terrific music together. Elvis doesn't do shit.
    • The titular character of King of the Unknown is a No Celebrities Were Harmed incarnation of Elvis. Ever since a supernatural mishap transformed him (into a fat slob) and forced him to fake his death, he dedicated his new secret life to a Men in Black-like Government Agency of Fiction known as the IRSU. In the all those years since his "death," he's been protecting a masqueraded world by kicking the collective ass of every supernatural evil imaginable (because All Myths Are True). Agent H, his Mission Control at IRSU, is a similarly still-living Jimi Hendrix.
    • In Sam and Fuzzy, the universe's thinly veiled analogue of Elvis is called "Elton Priestly". He was kidnapped by his recording company and dumped on a deserted tropical island to "save him before he ruined his own image" in 1977 when he wanted to pursue his true musical passion—traditional reggae. The record company claimed he "died", because Dead Artists Are Better, and are trying to make him release "previously unreleased tracks recorded before his death" to make more money. He shares the island with (amongst others) similarly thinly veiled analogues of Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur and what appears to be Christina Aguliera or Britney Spears, who're all there for the same reason as him.

    Web Original

    Western Animation

    • The Fairly OddParents plays with this trope a bit, with one notable instance being that Presley is currently residing in an underground night club underneath Dimmsdale's beach.
    • Eek! The Cat: In the episode "Honey I Shrunk The Cat", Elvis is alive, if overweight... but this is offset by him being of microscopic size and battling germs mano-a-mano.
    • In one Crowning Moment of Funny on Captain Planet, Wheeler reads a newspaper and goes, "Elvis is back!? From the army?"
    • In Funky Cops, Aaron King (a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Elvis) faked his death so the press would stop harassing him. His family's in on it and he still lives at their mansion, though.

    Tabletop Games

    • Over the Edge has someone who obviously is (but is never referred to as) Elvis operating a bar in the non-Euclidian Al-Amarja Airport.

    Other

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