Thenk ya very much little paper boy (Tiny Elvis)

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Thenk ya very much little paper boy (Tiny Elvis)

28 Jan

I don’t know what it is, or why, but I’ve always gotten a chuckle out of anything with short quirky references to Elvis. The Movie “Death Becomes Her”, The TV Series “Eerie Indiana” – Where Mars, the main character narrates the intro – “Item; Elvis lives on my paper route….” [Elvis]: Thenk Ya little paper boy” as he picks up his paper, and each and every appearance of Elvis in that show.

The Saturday Night Live skits about Elvis, including the “Tiny Elvis” skits, (one of which was Nicholas Cage), and the small windows application inspired by those “Tiny Elvis” skits, “Tiny Elvis for Windows”

Tiny Elvis for Windows became a family favorite. My Mother, step father, sisters and other relatives asked me to install Tiny Elvis on each of their computers, and I’d chuckle each time it came up, and each time they saw it and laughed. Tiny Elvis was an icon of Elvis lying back on one elbow that resided in the windows system tray.

The program had time settings so you could set Tiny Elvis to pop up at certain times. When the time occurred Elvis would jump to his feet, do a little dance and point upward and exclaim, “Whoaaaaa, look at the size of that icon, man that sucker’s huge!” then sit back down, or “Man, get a load of that desktop!”

Tiny Elvis was designed for Windows 95/98. As a joke, to play on a co-worker who would practical joke me all the time, after being called upon to take a look at an issue his computer was having, I secretly installed Tiny Elvis onto his Windows XP desktop and set it to pop up every 2 minutes.

I soon got a call “Hey, it’s Quang….. Dude, what the hell? What is this thing that keeps popping up on my computer?”

Me: – “What, something is popping up?”

Quang: “Haha, yeah, don’t play dumb with me, I know you put it on here.”

Me: “Not me, I don’t even like Elvis……DOH!” – laughs. “I’ll come down and uninstall it”

Quang: “Nah, don’t, I kinda like it and want to leave it on there.” and he did.

This being said, I know it works with XP, and it will run on Windows 7 32 bit, not x64. It’s not as effective on Windows 7, as the windows 7 “Taskbar Preview” function causes Tiny Elvis to not pop up in full view, like on previous versions of windows, but if you hover your mouse over the Tiny Elvis taskbar icon you can see the animation, even so, you can still hear his exclamations.

I am posting this because I was recently asked to resurrect Tiny Elvis for family members who had it before, and also those who hadn’t seen it. “Is it still available anywhere?” I wasn’t sure, but the answer after checking is “Yes” I’ve posted the Download link here for all those who would like a copy of Tiny Elvis for their desktop. I’ve also included links to the original SNL skit with Nicholas Cage, Rob Schneider, and Kevin Neelan. Enjoy!