Elvis Presley's stock has risen in recent years, with a spate of televisual and cinematic projects devoted to the singer's remarkable career and colorful private life. Documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki's 2017 work The King profiled Elvis's rise and fall as a metaphor for the decline of American exceptionalism, while Thom Zimny's HBO film Elvis Presley: The Searcher (2018) more squarely focused on Presley's musical and artistic development.
Fictional depictions have also been abundant, and the most recent, Baz Luhrmann's hotly-anticipated biopic Elvis, was released in the United States earlier this week, starring Once Upon A Time In Hollywood star Austin Butler in the lead role and Tom Hanks playing against type as Presley's overbearing manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker. Early reviews have been largely positive.
Now, Netflix is entering the fray, with the animated series Agent King due for release in the near future. Details are scarce, but the premise makes Elvis a superhero, playing his repertoire of hits to delighted audiences by day and donning a jetpack as part of a top-secret government spying program at night.
Here's why this unique take on Elvis Presley's story makes perfect sense.
Elvis Presley, an American Patriot
The concept of The King of Rock 'N' Roll as a secret spy sounds so far-fetched as to be ridiculous, but in a way, it is all in keeping with Presley's flag-waving, patriotic persona, which was evident even at the very beginning of his career. The singer famously joined the Army in 1958 and was posted to Germany, serving for two years before returning to entertainment with films such as Flaming Star, Wild In The Country, and It Happened At The World's Fair.
Even while Presley was serving, however, the singer -- with some encouragement from "Colonel" Parker -- found ways to capitalize on his status as America's favorite soldier. When G.I. Blues, a lighthearted story about a tank driver with a talent for music, was released in 1960, it received mixed reviews but did good box office and cemented Presley's burgeoning status as a bankable Hollywood actor.
On his return to the United States, he was given the warmest of welcomes, including a stint on prime-time TV by none other than Frank Sinatra, whose sniffish attitude to the singer in the 1950s had dissipated in the meantime.
Agent King Finds a Niche in Elvis’s Mythology
Later, however, Presley began to grow concerned with what he saw as the moral corruption of American youth. In 1970, having successfully rejuvenated his career with the Comeback Special two years previously, he sought and was granted a private meeting with Richard Nixon with the intention of discussing what Presley referred to as "Communist brainwashing techniques" that he felt were linked to the hippie counterculture.
The meeting had proven fertile ground for writers and directors alike, most recently in 2016, when Liza Johnson's Elvis & Nixon was released by Amazon, starring Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead) as Elvis, Kevin Spacey as Nixon, Jackass's Johnny Knoxville as Elvis's bodyguard Sonny West, and Tom Hanks' son Colin (King Kong, Jumanji) as White House lawyer and mastermind of Elvis's visit, Bud Krogh.
For our purposes, the most tantalizing aspect of Presley's (unrecorded) meeting with the President was that he asked Nixon for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and for Nixon to name him as a "federal agent at large." Needless to say, Nixon politely demurred, but the episode has intrigued Elvis fans ever since and provides an obvious jumping-off point in Elvis mythology for the animated series.
In fact, Elvis's ex-wife Priscilla is on record as saying that Agent King was inspired in part by Elvis's boyhood dreams of becoming a crime-fighting superhero.
What to Expect From Agent King
Netflix has remained tight-lipped about Agent King's plot and casting, a consequence in part of the series' somewhat tortured gestation. The project was confirmed as far back as August 2019, when it was announced that Priscilla would act as executive producer for the show alongside singer-songwriter John Eddie in association with Sony Pictures, with John Arnold hired as showrunner and writer.
Less than six months later, however, the Covid pandemic reared its head, and the project was seemingly shelved. It was one more casualty of the profound disruption that threw the TV industry for a loop.
However, this summer, the series appears to have picked up the pace again. According to reports, a clip was shown at this year's Annecy International Animation Festival in Annecy in the French Alps. And with Netflix now teasing stills from the series, it seems the project is nearing completion.