I'll be editing this post with my thoughts on each puzzle as I go through it. Thanks @vintagepresley for posting about in the first place.
Pre-Hollywood Puzzles (Despite some of these involving elements both during and after his Hollywood career, they all come before the official movies so they'll all go here).
Ultimate/2 min Trivia: Incredible how obvious my interest in the niche of Elvis movies is that I actually struggled with some of the questions. Funny thing but one of them was whether or not his real hair color was blond. I know he had blond hair as a child but he clearly has brown hair as an adult. Does that still count as him being blond? I know I probably thought about the semantics too much, but it's a true/false question. You wouldn't say Elvis was a blond as an adult but he did have blond hair as a child. I would've reworded it by asking if his real hair color was black.
Mix & Match: I'd say this was pretty easy as long as you know some of the bigger hits. Elvis song titles are simple in that if you only need to find one word, you can use the rest of the title to figure it out.
TV Guide Spot the Difference: 2 of the three had an obvious difference that either involve his name or the heading. The second one was a bit of a challenge since the difference was pretty small.
Word Searches: I appreciate that they each follow the theme well and include specific words from the song/album. The difficulty of them are all about the same.
Missing Letters: I like this one since you really need to keep track of the individual letters for each word. Since there's no space between words, it adds to the difficulty since you need to know how many letters make up each word as well.
Ed Sullivan Show: 5 letters scramble is just not my best type of puzzle. I'm not good at it, but for once the word sudoku didn't give me as much issue. I got the mystery word right away. The criss cross was fun because I learned about so many acts that appeared on the show. You don't realize retrospectively how big the show was until you see how many big names were on there.
Elvis' Christmas Album Spot The Difference: This was really easy. There's so many big presents on the cover that you can tell when something was missing.
Elvis' Golden Records Album Trivia: Some of the stats I have no idea how they verified. For instance, how can you possibly figure out if he sold 1 billion records? Some of the metrics like the Billboard 100 didn't even exist yet so a lot of his early records weren't included in some counts or had to be retroactively estimated. I would've used a more easily calculable stat instead.
Aloha from Hawaii Spot The Difference: One difference I wasn't so sure about was the blue circle on the earth. I had to look really close to make sure they were different shades. I know it's rare but I wonder what someone who's color blind would see. Would they even know there was a difference in colors?
Crossword: I thought the clues involving lyrics from Elvis songs were cool. Some of them though made no sense to me like 46 down being "hon" when the clue was cupcake. How does that fit and what does "hon" even mean outside of a variation of honey? I know you need the h from 44 across and the n from 51 across but you could've just used hen or hun.
Love Me Tender: The word scramble was easy since his songs had very simple titles. The word sudoku was a bit challenging since I'm not used to doing those, but the criss cross was very fun. I love how in the summary they talked about how Clint was exempt from service since I mention that in my review. The main takeaway I got was that I surprisingly didn't know a lot of behind the scenes names for this movie. For instance I never knew Ken Darby was the actual writer of the song "Love Me Tender". When I wrote my review, I didn't go into the same detailing of behind the scenes personnel so it was great to learn more about it.
Loving You: Boy was this quite a jump in difficulty. I made a lot of mistakes throughout all of the puzzles. The 5 letters puzzle was a lot harder than it should've been to me since I didn't associate the same words to what the clues were saying. The word sudoku was a nightmare to the point where I had to use the answer key to finish. I knew the mystery word was Lizabeth because the summary already included her name. The criss cross was a little easier but I still made a couple mistakes on it. Overall, I'm just glad Loving You finally got some representation since it's the least talked about of his 50s movies.
Jailhouse Rock: This a bit easier. The Scramble was very easy but again the word sudoku gave me trouble. At this point I know that puzzle will take me a lot of time. The criss cross I only had one mistake because I miscounted the number of letters.
King Creole: This one took longer to do as I had other stuff going on. Once again the 5 letters and word sudoku were difficult to finish. Only one mistake on the criss cross because I was looking at the wrong section. I'm amazed they mentioned the riots in Mexico that occurred because a lot of teens wanted to see the movie without paying.
G.I. Blues: This one was really easy. The tank one was unfamiliar but once I got one word, the rest was easy to finish. Criss cross as usual was easy as well. What I didn't know was that this movie's soundtrack was nominated for 2 Grammys (one for Best Soundtrack and one for Best Male's Vocal Performance) since I didn't mention that in my review.
Flaming Star: The last letter trivia spiral is only hard if you're not that knowledgable of Yellowstone or Dirty Harry's basic production credit details. We do get a change of pace by having a word search about Western tv shows and a find the different image puzzle. I'd say those two are easy, you just need to pay real close attention to what you want to find.
Wild In The Country: I admit that I'm not that knowledgable in country music either. There was a clue about the leading man from A Star Is Born for the scramble and I have no idea how to spell his last name. Same with a country music legend who grew up with 11 siblings. I got both of their first names but no clue on their last names lol. There was another word search that I had a better time with. Now what was a weird choice was an add 'em up puzzle. The final number doesn't have any significance to the movie so I have no idea why it was included for this movie. I would've changed the given numbers so that the top of the pyramid added up to 1961 (the year the movie was released).
Blue Hawaii: Interestingly there's only 2 puzzles that take up the double page spread: Fill in the Blanks and a word search. The word search I think makes up for having one less puzzle because you're finding a lot more words compared to previous movies that had one.
Follow That Dream: Also only has 2 puzzles that are Fill in the Blanks and a word search. This time though, the word search wasn't that hard. About a third of the page was just a full body shot of Toby which is absolutely necessary. The only thing I wonder though is what exactly is the ceremony from the word search? I wouldn't call the governor seeing part of the highway a ceremony. The court scene at the end definitely isn't one either. If anyone had just seen the movie, let me know if I'm missing something.
Girls! Girls! Girls!: We completely skip Kid Galahad which stinks since I would've loved to see boxing themed puzzles. Only 2 puzzles but this time it's missing letters and a maze. Mazes to me can be tricky since you almost need to start off on both ends and try to meet in the middle. I'd say it makes up for not have 3 puzzles.
It Happened At The World's Fair: After taking a break in the middle of a word search I think that really helped my concentration. It was a decent sized word search since you had to find really long words like paddleboat rides. We also got a new puzzle with code words. I love this puzzle. You got the trivia aspect where you have to find cities that hosted a world's fair and the puzzle aspect where you need to figure out what the other letters are. Definitely makes up for only having 2 puzzles.
Viva Las Vegas: We skip a couple movies and only get 2 puzzles. A Cluefinder puzzle that's only 3x3 for each category is a bit too easy. Since you also only have a word search I think this was a bit underwhelming. I would've added another puzzle like a word scramble that included trivia about Ann Margret.
Girl Happy: We skip Roustabout and only get 2 puzzles. The word search is standard but it was interesting to see the names of some famous pin up girls that I've never heard of. The code puzzle is good in that you're using the alphabet's number positions to spell out the names of songs used in the movie.
Harum Scarum: We skip Tickle Me and still have 2 puzzles. Word builder is fun since you have to remember how to spell certain words. The one word word search shouldn't even be part of this since you're only finding Elvis. It's a general Elvis puzzle when this is supposed to be about the movie. It would make more sense if you're finding his character's name Johnny.
Change of Habit: This is the last movie and even in an Elvis magazine all of his movies past 1965 except for this one was skipped. It's not even a big send off to his movie career. Only one puzzle and it's a measly word search. I feel like they could've done a better job. I understand that this was made by the editors of TV Guide and it won't be a complete package, but the ending of this section is so underwhelming. I might make my own puzzles for the movies that weren't included some day.
Post-Hollywood Puzzles (I know some of them were made during his movie career but that's how it's set up in the magazine).
'68 Comeback Special: Trivia Cross was pretty easy, but Both Directions and Sudoku were hard for me. Only having 3 small puzzles make sense because of the difficulty.
Elvis: TTWII: Only having two puzzles is fair because you have the word search with 18 different Vegas performers throughout history and Hidden Alphabet. That second puzzle can be difficult if you don't know what exact word you're looking for.
From the Archives: Both of these are crosswords and I had to give up by using the answer key. Some of these clues I had no idea what the answer was and made mistakes. What doesn't help is that these were from time periods where I simply wasn't alive to know American culture. I'm not going to know who Mr. Television was or every single movie that came out in 1950s/90s.
Elvis' Giant Xword: For a puzzle this big, I did fairly well. I did have to look up his discography and names to get the spelling right. I'd say for a catch all puzzle involving Elvis, this was pretty good.
Spot The Differences: All fairly easy but I love how we got to see Elvis through his adult life starting with his Army years. I did think some of the differences were a bit too obvious such as having Priscilla's entire shirt be a different color.
Elvis Hit Song Rebus: I thought it was pretty easy for an "end credits" puzzle since it comes after the answer key. As long as you know what his hit singles were, the pictures are pretty easy to put together.
Back Cover Fill in the Blank: As long as you know the quote word for word this should be easy. I admit I wasn't expecting to have a puzzle be on the back cover, so it made for a nice little surprise.
I thought this was a great magazine even if there were some missteps. I don't get TV Guide so if these puzzles came directly from issues over the decades, I can't really complain as much. If these were made from scratch, I wish we had at least every movie represented since I was bummed that some movies I enjoyed were missing when others I didn't like as much made it in.
If you haven't gotten one, I high recommend buying one while you still can.
