The first of several movies in which Angela Lansbury played a mother and a rare maternal Lansbury role: more typical would be her mother-from-hell role in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Ten years Elvis Presley's senior, Lansbury predated her ''Manchurian...'' son Laurence Harvey by three years.
When this movie (and its soundtrack album) proved to be enormous hits, Elvis Presley's manager Colonel Tom Parker decided to use it as a blueprint for all future Presley movies - put him in an exotic setting, give him one or more pretty co-stars, and make sure he sang enough songs to fill both sides of an LP. And the formula worked - Elvis ranked among the Top Ten Box-Office Stars seven times in the 1960s.
The soundtrack album for this movie was not only Elvis Presley's most successful chart album, but it is also the number one album overall for 1961. "Blue Hawaii" spent twenty consecutive weeks at the number one spot on the Billboard Top LPs chart in 1961-1962 (a record to be broken only in 1977 by Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors" album), and it stayed on the charts for seventy-nine weeks.
Turn the sound up loud when Chad (Elvis Presley) is first seen leaving the plane and you will hear hundreds of screaming fans who were watching the shoot.
Hilo Hattie: Famous Hawaiian entertainer, as the lei bearing tutu (grandmother) who meets the plane.