Customer Reviews

Impact! Songs That Changed the World / Elvis Presley - Heartbreak Hotel

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This is one of a series of 12 reasonably priced ($9.99 list) DVDs released in the US by SRO (Part of Kultur International) under the umbrella "Impact: Songs That Changed The World". Each runs about 24 minutes as it was co-produced by Canadain TV and broadcast on the cable CMT network in the US in 2002 and 2003.

I could cell from the quality of the editing - even before I saw the end credits - that this was produced by Gregory Hall. Hall - who also makes music documentaries under his own Hallmark Productions banner - has been cranking these out for about 20 years years now. I first saw his Country Music bios. They've always been well edited and usually contain great interview "sound bites". The four volumes in this series that I;ve watched so far are no exception. Some of the interviews were recent at the time of the show's production while some go back to the 80s and 90s and have appeared in other Hall productions. (You can tell by the locations where they were taped.)

Most of the Impact series DVDs cover more than the single records that are the topics. They also cover the impact that artist - at that point in time - had on our culture from style of dress to style of music.

In the case of the "Heartbreak Hotel" volume, the focus is on the hard rock sound of Elvis' big hit. Little Richard said that Elvis was "the door that white kids walked through to discover black music". And that's what we learn from video sound bites - many from earlier Hall produced interviews - from Chet Atkins, Carl Perkins, Sam Phillips, and more. Members of Elvis' band are here too as well as Levon Helm of The Band. There are a few rock historians and music critics and - like the Madonna volume - we get Jeanne Baker of Fashion TV taking about how Elvis influenced fashion in the late 1950s.

Like the others in this series the DVD does a really nice job of presenting a sociological study of how one single pop record can affect a whole culture, without belaboring the point. These DVDS will leave a legacy to the next generation and can be very useful in, not only music history classes but in the study of late 20th century "pop culture"

Steve Ramm
"Anything Phonographic"

I have seen a lot better DVD's of Elvis. This was not a favorite of mine. It was some of the same things that have done over & over & over. Not something I would recommend to an Elvis fan. I would not suggest that Impact! Songs That Changed The World / Elvis Presley - Heartbreak Hotel to be something that I would watch over again.