SPEAKER_02: New, immune-supporting Emergen-C crystals brings you the goodness of Emergen-C and a fun new popping experience. There is no water needed so it's super convenient, just throw it back in your mouth. Feel the pop, hear the fizz, and taste the delicious natural fruit flavors. Emergen-C crystals orange vitality and strawberry burst flavors for ages 9 and up have 500 mg of vitamin C per stick pack. Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1992, a historic election captivated the nation. The race pitted a young up-and-comer against an old guard establishment candidate. And I'm not talking about the 1992 presidential election between Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and the incumbent George H.W. Bush.
SPEAKER_11: Instead, this was the highly publicized race between young Elvis and old Elvis. Best reporter Gabe Bullard. Over a decade after Elvis Presley's death, the King of Rock and Roll took over headlines once again, as Americans weighed in on which portrait of Elvis would be forever immortalized on a 29-cent U.S. postage stamp. It was put to a popular vote, should the stamp feature an image of young Elvis at the start of his rise, or an older Elvis in his iconic white jumpsuit.
SPEAKER_02: The Elvis stamp vote grabbed the nation's attention, playing out not just in newspapers and on late-night TV, but in the actual 1992 presidential election. And by the time the final vote was cast and every ballot had been counted, U.S. postage stamps had been changed forever.
SPEAKER_11: When you mail a letter, you have a lot of options for stamps. You can go the traditional route and use an American flag, or you can choose a stamp that fits your personality. The Postal Service has issued stamps for Selena, the Star Wars droids, the Simpsons, and so many other pop culture icons. But this kind of hundred-flavor variety in stamps is pretty new.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, it wasn't until the mid-19th century that we had postage stamps at all.
SPEAKER_11: In the early years of the post office, mail was often sent cash on delivery, like a collect call. If someone sent you a letter, you paid for it when you picked it up at the post office. But postage was expensive, and the system for calculating fees was complicated. It was hard to know what a letter would end up costing in the end.
SPEAKER_02: When the U.S. implemented standardized postage rates, the cost to mail letters became more predictable and less expensive. Now a person could pay to send a letter in advance, and the recipient could get it without a fee. A stamp was proof that a sender had paid for the mail.
SPEAKER_11: The U.S. issued its first national stamps in 1847, one with George Washington and one with the first U.S. postmaster, Benjamin Franklin. In the decades that followed, the U.S. issued more and more varieties of stamps. Stamps marked anniversaries, celebrated big events, and honored historical figures.
SPEAKER_13: Presidents and military heroes and national wonders and technological achievements and flight milestones.
SPEAKER_11: I'm Daniel Piazza, curator of the Philatelic Collections at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. For much of their history, stamp designs were traditional, institutional, and patriotic. Because no matter what's on a stamp, it's still an official document issued by the United States government. Like paper currency or like a bond or something like that, it's meant to represent the country.
SPEAKER_11: And so putting someone on a stamp is essentially a government endorsement, and a lot of subjects didn't make the cut. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, America's biggest cultural contributions—like jazz, rock and roll, Hollywood—were mostly absent from envelopes.
SPEAKER_13: Part of it had to do, I think, with the fact that stamps in this period, most of them are designed and printed at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which also prints the money. And of course, our money is very conservative as well. So there was a lot of hesitancy about getting into these frivolous topics.
SPEAKER_02: But there was also an incentive for the post office to design stamps that were new and novel. Because along with the first stamps came the first stamp collectors, and they presented a unique value to the Postal Service.
SPEAKER_13: Postage stamps that are sold to collectors are pure profit for the Postal Service because they never have to deliver the service. Postage stamps are an IOU.
SPEAKER_11: Because of the way stamps work, as payment for a service not yet delivered, every stamp in a collector's album and not on an envelope represents money the post office gets to hold on to. A new stamp has the potential to make money, keep collectors happy, or even encourage new hobbyists to start a collection. And the Postal Service wants this. Since the 1950s, the post office has had philatelists—stamp collectors—sit on a committee that weighs in on stamp design.
SPEAKER_13: I think the needs and the desires of collectors figure fairly prominently in that, just because it's a, you know, as in any other business enterprise, that's a niche market. That's your base.
SPEAKER_02: And the need for the post office to make money wherever it can has only intensified over time. In 1970, Congress passed a law requiring the Postal Service to operate as a self-funded agency. That means that all its funding, even today, comes from the sale of postage products. A hit stamp can be a big deal financially for the post office.
SPEAKER_11: But the USPS also has a fine line to walk. Keep the stamps traditional enough to befit a government document, and also keep the crowds of collectors happy with new stamps that generate money.
SPEAKER_02: To further protect the dignity of government-issued stamps, the post office also had a rule that anyone except presidents whose likeness appeared on a stamp needed to have been dead for at least 10 years. The idea was to give enough time for any unsavory details to emerge.
SPEAKER_11: The 10-year rule meant that a lot of celebrities weren't eligible for stamps at the peak of their influence. But it also meant that with each passing year, a new crop of honorees became eligible.
SPEAKER_02: Which is exactly what happened in the mid-1980s, when a group of dedicated fans started floating the idea of a stamp fit for a king.
SPEAKER_08: I guess we would have been called stalkers, you know. But that word wasn't around then.
SPEAKER_11: This is Joan Ganske. She's been a fan of Elvis Presley since she first heard his music as a kid in England in the 50s. She even met Elvis a few times, hanging out outside of his house in LA after work. But most always, if you saw there were fans around, he would stop and talk to them.
SPEAKER_08: He never really forgot his fans.
SPEAKER_11: And his fans never forgot him. Elvis died in 1977, and not long after, fans began agitating for a stamp. Joan and her husband Paul joined a letter-writing campaign and recruited fellow members of their fan club, the Jailhouse Rockers, to help. They even made envelopes that said, I'm in favor of the Elvis stamp.
SPEAKER_04: We'd have meetings every month, and we'd write letters. And a big pitch was, look, you issue an Elvis stamp, you're going to make a lot of people happy, you're going to make a huge profit.
SPEAKER_04: And finally, the penny dropped with Anthony Frank.
SPEAKER_02: Anthony Frank took office as Postmaster General in 1988, the year after Elvis became legally eligible to appear on a stamp. Almost immediately, he acknowledged the campaign for the Elvis stamp, and even encouraged the idea.
SPEAKER_11: Frank's endorsement energized fans, but it also challenged the longstanding cautiousness the Post Office had around stamps. Until this point, the USPS had tread carefully, putting out commemorative stamps interesting enough to attract some new collectors, while still sticking with their traditionally conservative look.
SPEAKER_02: If the USPS did put Elvis on a stamp, it would represent a fundamental change in what stamps looked like and who was allowed to be on them. Because Elvis Presley wasn't a war hero or a respected composer. He was a rock star, with a rock star lifestyle.
SPEAKER_13: A lot of the concerns around the Elvis stamp did center on his drug use, which was well-known and well-publicized and contributed to his death.
SPEAKER_11: That's Daniel Piazza again at the Postal Museum. After the Postmaster General said he would support an Elvis stamp, newspaper columns appeared with headlines like, "'Return to Cinder.'" They argued that an Elvis stamp would be a government endorsement of drug use.
SPEAKER_13: This is the middle of Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaigns.
SPEAKER_08: The thrill can kill. Say no to drugs, and say yes to life.
SPEAKER_13: Other school specials about latchkey kids and getting into drugs and all this sort of thing.
SPEAKER_11: And it wasn't just fans of Nancy Reagan who had reservations about putting Elvis on a stamp.
SPEAKER_10: Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me. As he straight out racist, the sucker was simple and plain.
SPEAKER_11: Public Enemy's song, Fight the Power, came out in 1989, and it calls out Elvis for co-opting the work of Black artists. Later in that same verse, Chuck D also says this.
SPEAKER_01: Most of my heroes don't appear in no stamp. Stamp all up at you, looking fine up in my head.
SPEAKER_11: But despite resistance from newspaper columnists, anti-drug activists, and Public Enemy, Postmaster Frank didn't back down. In the early 90s, the Post Office began recruiting artists to illustrate a series of stamps that would feature famous musicians.
SPEAKER_12: As the art director told me, he said, we're kind of done with the whole poets and philosophers and ex-presidents. He said we're trying to go in a different direction.
SPEAKER_11: Mark Stutzman is an illustrator based in western Maryland. He's designed movie posters drawn from Ad Magazine, and if you drank soda out of a Batman Returns cup from McDonald's in the 90s, that was him. In the early part of the decade, he was one of a handful of artists tapped to submit work for the new series of stamps. An art director gave Stutzman a long list of candidates for stamps, including Elvis.
SPEAKER_12: But they were toying with him not being on the list. Even at that point, they were really afraid of treading in this area for fear that they would alienate tried and true collectors.
SPEAKER_11: In fact, at first, the art director asked Stutzman to work on a stamp honoring Count Basie. But then, a few days later, the director called back. He said, put down what you're doing, and I want you to submit your best Elvis Presley.
SPEAKER_11: And so after he got the assignment, Stutzman set about trying to capture the king's likeness in miniature form.
SPEAKER_02: Even though postage stamps are basically receipts for spending a few cents with the government, they're also works of art. It's part of what makes them so appealing to collectors. And like any work of art, they can tell a story. They just have to do it on a very tiny canvas.
SPEAKER_11: Stutzman was limited to 5 by 7 inches, and because it would be shrunk down further after that, his art director told him to keep it simple.
SPEAKER_12: The format is terribly small, and he said it can't be complicated, and my work has a tendency to be somewhat detailed and all of that stuff. He says don't make it, and he used the term fussy. He said you can't get fussy, it has to be very direct.
SPEAKER_11: Still, Stutzman wanted to capture as much about Elvis's life and appeal as possible.
SPEAKER_12: So I had to rush to the library. This was before the internet. Rush to the library, go to magazine stands, get Elvis Presley fan magazines, and just start compiling as much stuff as I could to kind of see what direction I would go in.
SPEAKER_11: He read about how Elvis performed, where he got his clothes tailored, the color schemes of the era.
SPEAKER_02: Stutzman drew young Elvis Presley in a gold jacket with a dark fleck pattern in front of a pink background. His necktie is loose, he holds a microphone in his hand, and he's leaning forward.
SPEAKER_12: I wanted Elvis's sex appeal to come through because I think that was a big part of why he was so controversial and successful. And then I had the little tassel of hair that was loose that showed that he was active on stage, and he's a little perspiry, but that's like too subtle for stamp worlds.
SPEAKER_11: Stutzman only handed in this one design. Other artists submitted multiple versions, to the point that the Postal Service ended up with a total of 60 Elvis portraits to choose from.
SPEAKER_12: And I submitted one, because I was young and dumb and didn't know that I could do more than one version.
SPEAKER_11: Of these 60 options, the Postal Service narrowed their choices down to Stutzman's and one other. The finalists represented two very different periods of Elvis's life, and two very different versions of an American icon.
SPEAKER_09: What is the meaning of the young Elvis? Well, first, just eye candy. Let's be real, come on, young Elvis was super cute.
SPEAKER_11: Ann Powers is a critic and correspondent for NPR Music. Stutzman's Elvis portrait is of a poor kid from Mississippi on his way to becoming the biggest star in the world, powered by rock and roll. And of course, his famously scandalous dance moves.
SPEAKER_09: Young Elvis is, you know, youthful virility and spirit, but also young Elvis is irreverent. Young Elvis is, you know, wearing pink. And I think that's one of the great appeals of that image of Elvis and his youth is that he is a soft boy that we can all love.
SPEAKER_02: Young soft boy Elvis was a far cry from the second Elvis portrait made by an artist named John Berkey.
SPEAKER_11: Berkey's design shows Elvis in his later years. He has sideburns growing past the high collar of his white leather jumpsuit. This quote-unquote old Elvis is not quite facing the viewer. He's almost in profile. Berkey was reportedly inspired by an image of Elvis from his 1973 concert in Hawaii, though this portrait is widely associated with his Las Vegas residency.
SPEAKER_02: Berkey's old Elvis was closer to the one that critics made fun of. This was the Elvis who people joked about faking his death and hiding out in a trailer park. The Elvis who was immortalized in velvet paintings. Joan Ganske again.
SPEAKER_08: The naysayers, they would bring out, well, you know, that he was, you know, on drugs, he was fat, and all these, you know, ridicule him for the jumpsuits that he wore.
SPEAKER_11: But even though old Elvis was an easy target for jokes, and was past his prime hit-making Berkey's image was far more familiar in the 1990s. It's the image so many Elvis impersonators tried to copy. Even a decade after his death, this Elvis, with the sequins and the hair, seemed to be everywhere.
SPEAKER_08: In the early 90s, you didn't see many young Elvis. In the general public's eyes, if you said, you know, you're going to see Elvis perform, they'd expect a jumpsuit.
SPEAKER_11: To fans, the Las Vegas residency, the tours, it all showed stamina and devotion to the people who loved him. The press might have dubbed this design Old Elvis, but he was only 42 when he died, and there was something poignant to the image of him in his last years, a flawed hero.
SPEAKER_09: You know, it plays into this idea that wealth will not make you happy, that fame will not make you happy, which is always important to articulate as a kind of a safety valve for America's relentless craving for fame. You know, it humanizes the icon.
SPEAKER_02: The Postal Service unveiled Stutzman and Berkey's designs in February of 1992. The young Elvis, full of promise, and the old Elvis in all of his rhinestone glory.
SPEAKER_11: The Postal Service was already taking a risk issuing an Elvis stamp to begin with. To choose one image over another would be even more controversy to take on. Rather than make a decision, they decided to make a splash. The first rock and roll stamp would be a populist choice.
SPEAKER_01: By a mail-in ballot available at post offices in April, the public will decide whether a younger leaner Elvis or an older plumper Elvis is the one that goes into circulation.
SPEAKER_11: Piazza says the choice not only let the Postal Service off the hook for deciding which Elvis to enshrine, it also generated publicity for the shift toward pop culture stamps.
SPEAKER_13: It has this sort of build-up leading up to the issue, and the public feels involved in the stamp issue. You know, maybe part of the consideration too is that helps to blunt some of the criticism because it's obviously wildly popular.
SPEAKER_02: As hard as it might be to imagine, a federally sponsored mail-in poll about postage stamps took off in a huge way, and not just among philatelists.
SPEAKER_11: Postcard ballots went out in People Magazine and were available to pick up at local post offices. People lined up to get them. Some took stacks of ballots as keepsakes or to try to sway the election. Just because this was a government vote didn't mean the usual rules applied.
SPEAKER_04: I voted at least a hundred times, and I suspect I'm not the only one.
SPEAKER_02: That's Paul Gansky again, with some casual voter fraud.
SPEAKER_04: I think we all voted multiple times, like on American Idol, you know.
SPEAKER_11: There are a few reasons the Elvis vote became such an unlikely phenomenon. First, this is when baby boomers were rising in political power and influence. Boomers were more steeped in pop culture than previous generations, and they took it more seriously. Earlier generations might have seen pop culture as frivolous, but for boomers, it was generation defining, a side effect of growing up at a time with more mass media than ever. As the vote unfolded, people wrote letters to their local newspapers commenting on the stamp. Reporters interviewed impersonators, fans, detractors. The phrase all shook up was everywhere.
SPEAKER_02: It was anyone's guess which version of the King of Rock and Roll would win out, but one presidential candidate of that year made no mystery about where he was placing his chips.
SPEAKER_00: Bill Clinton of Arkansas has been nicknamed Elvis by reporters. A man who would be president is a fan of the king, and he was persuaded... Clinton was in his 40s.
SPEAKER_02: Old for an Elvis, but young for a presidential candidate. And like other baby boomers, he engaged with pop culture in a new way. He went on MTV. He used Fleetwood Mac for his campaign song, and he loved Elvis. Clinton welcomed the comparisons. The press called his plane Air Elvis, and he sang Elvis on the campaign trail.
SPEAKER_04: You know I can be found.
SPEAKER_05: That's all I can do. Sit home all alone.
SPEAKER_05: If you can't come around, at least please telephone my message to the New York press. Don't be cruel. I got two horns.
SPEAKER_02: And on top of that, Clinton referenced Elvis during one of the most iconic campaign appearances in political history.
SPEAKER_11: The Arsenio Hall Show opens and there's Bill Clinton, wearing sunglasses and playing saxophone with the show's band. This was in June of 92, the day after Clinton secured the Democratic nomination. And just as Arsenio walks on stage waving, Clinton starts playing a solo. The song he's playing is, of course, Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley.
SPEAKER_02: Clinton's saxophone solo has been seared into public memory. But what you might not remember about his appearance was that the very first question Arsenio Hall asked Clinton was about the Elvis stamp.
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_05: The raw, new, fresh power. I mean, you know, it would be a shame to do the old stamp.
SPEAKER_11: The public didn't need to wait long to find out if Bill Clinton's prediction would bear out. Because the next day, in Memphis, they announced the results. 1.2 million ballots were cast for the Elvis stamp.
SPEAKER_02: And at the podium in front of network cameras, Anthony Frank made the announcement.
SPEAKER_03: The winner is… It is the Young Elvis.
SPEAKER_02: Young Elvis won by a landslide, taking 75 percent of the vote.
SPEAKER_11: Speaking to reporters the day of the unveiling, Postmaster Frank used this attention to say the stamp was the start of a change for the post office.
SPEAKER_03: We're not elitist anymore. We're not only doing symphonies and we're not only doing dead poets, but we're doing people that contributed to the culture of our country, the pop culture, if you will.
SPEAKER_11: The Elvis stamp went on sale just a couple weeks before Clinton's inauguration, on what would have been Elvis's 58th birthday. The Ganske's were in line, along with thousands of other fans. I know I bought at least 50 sheets.
SPEAKER_04: I seem to recall writing a check for $700.
SPEAKER_08: That's a lot of money back then.
SPEAKER_02: Stamps were 29 cents, and the post office went on to sell over a half a billion Elvis stamps. It outsold every single commemorative stamp before and since. And with many of those stamps heading towards collector's albums, that was a lot of profits for the Postal Service.
SPEAKER_04: A few people didn't like the idea of Elvis being a stamp, but what the hell? It worked out good.
SPEAKER_11: On top of the stamp sales, the post office also made money licensing Stutzman's Young Elvis image.
SPEAKER_13: There were mugs and keychains and, I don't know, belt buckles and tote bags and probably baseball caps and who knows what else.
SPEAKER_11: Soon, the post office launched the Legends of American Music series, with stamps for Otis Redding, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Dinah Washington, and of course Elvis. The series went on to include over 70 artists and opened the doors to a whole new wave of black musicians on US stamps.
SPEAKER_02: Since the Elvis stamp came out, a lot of concerns about propriety have gone out the window. Famously, anti-drug artists like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin got stamps with little to no blowback. So have movie stars, athletes, and even cartoon characters. Stamps were never the same again.
SPEAKER_13: This absolutely opened the door to the pop culture stamps of the 20th century, for good or ill. I mean, whether you like that or not.
SPEAKER_02: America might not have been ready in 1992, but today I think it's safe to say that an old Elvis stamp would be an easy sell for the post office, jumpsuit and all. Coming up, the strange world of international Elvis stamps.
SPEAKER_01: If you run as part of your weekly routine for therapeutic reasons or for body and health
SPEAKER_02: benefits, Brooks has the perfect running shoes for you. Brooks creates the best running gear, tools, and experiences to move you along your path. Let Brooks do the research and sweat the details to help you find your best run. You can find Brooks' softest cushioning in their Glisterin 20 shoes. I have a pair of those. I love them. The Glisterin 20 shoes are designed to deliver comfort on the run and designed to be lightweight, responsive, and durable. Several years ago, I was running regularly for the first time and I was in constant pain, and someone in the know suggested Brooks to me. And my foot pain when I was running went away immediately, and I've never looked back. I run exclusively in Brooks to this day. They are the best. Find your perfect pair of running shoes now at brooksrunning.com. That's brooksrunning.com. There's a big difference between talking and reporting, especially right now with a
SPEAKER_10: fire hose worth of news coming your way. You know what helps? Having reporters in the field. I'm Brad Milkey from ABC News, and that's what we've got on ABC's daily podcast, Start Here. Every morning, Start Here takes you across the country and around the world for a quick, smart look at the stories that matter. It's fast, it's straightforward, and sometimes, gasp, news can even be fun. So let's meet up tomorrow morning. Listen to Start Here wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_02: Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses, or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter? Or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new blogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geom sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Article dot com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. So we're back with Gabe Bullard and Gabe, we were talking about the Elvis stamp, but I should specify we're talking about the US Elvis stamp because the one you reported on is not the only Elvis stamp out there.
SPEAKER_11: It isn't the only one and it's not even the first. Other countries, without the same dead for so many years rule as the US, issued their own Elvis stamps years earlier. And so how many are there? So there are dozens out there issued over decades. The earliest I can find was issued in Grenada one year after Elvis died in August 1978. But there have also been Elvis stamps in Tanzania, West Germany, Central African Republic, and many other countries.
SPEAKER_02: And I'm guessing these various Elvis stamps from like Grenada are big among collectors.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, to say the least. Jason Kurdavny, he's a historian and a stamp collector who specializes in music stamps. He showed me his collection. I have a whole album of postage stamps of Elvis from all over the world.
SPEAKER_14: And it's just it's incredible. I mean, Albania, Antigua, Chad, Burkina Faso. I mean, just all of these countries featuring Elvis. And you know that they're doing it for monetary reasons. It's kind of funny and interesting.
SPEAKER_02: And so what do these stamps look like? I mean, did they all decide to do the young Elvis like we did?
SPEAKER_11: No, no, not at all. They run the gamut of Elvis's career and meaning. There are young, old, there's tributes to different movies he was in, there's tributes to events in his life.
SPEAKER_14: There's a postage stamp of Elvis that actually celebrates his service in the military. So it's an image of him holding a gun, actually the stamp itself, and then him in a young uniform there, just sort of in a collector souvenir sheet around it. That's from Liberia. So yeah, so there's some interesting iconographic treatments of Elvis in these global stamps.
SPEAKER_02: So is this a widespread thing to have US celebrities on international stamps? Or is this just like the magic of Elvis? It's just an Elvis thing.
SPEAKER_11: So Elvis changed the game for stamps like this, but he's not the only American celebrity you'll see. To go back a bit, Jason says Louis Armstrong was on other countries' stamps long before Elvis. Within a few months of his death in 1971, Mali, Senegal, and a few other countries put out stamps with Armstrong on them.
SPEAKER_14: I think part of that was the sensation that he was, and jazz was so big in Africa. Part of it was the growth of the Black Power movement and looking at black diaspora writ large and championing these figures across international boundaries.
SPEAKER_02: So some of these countries are putting US figures on their stamps because they have some sort of ideological connection. It's essentially an honor. But as Jason mentioned, you've got to imagine that this is also a ploy to make money, right?
SPEAKER_11: Oh, yeah. One reason to put out stamps with US figures is because the stamps will sell to US collectors. And the US Elvis stamp made it clear just how much money a pop culture stamp can make. Jason says there's this wave of foreign stamps for US pop culture after the Young Elvis stamp in the US was such a hit. And so can you tell me a little bit about what these international stamps typically
SPEAKER_02: look like? Like are they are there any sort of like different or interesting aesthetic choices that they make versus US stamps?
SPEAKER_11: Oh, yeah. There's a wide variety of designs. If you go into stamp buying websites, you'll see a lot of what they call souvenir sheets with a few different faces on them. Typically, when you think of a sheet of stamps, you might think of a tight grid without much space that isn't dedicated to postage. That's how you buy them at the post office here. But souvenir sheets are pages, sometimes they're postcard size, sometimes they're larger, that are meant for collectors. They only have a few stamps on them, but with an illustration around them that expands on the design. So if a stamp is someone's face, the souvenir sheet might show the rest of their body. And relevant to our story about Bill Clinton and Elvis, Jason has a souvenir sheet with two stamps on it.
SPEAKER_14: This is from Chad. It's two stamps, but they're next to each other. And it's an older Elvis wearing one of his jumpsuits playing guitar, but he's standing next to Bill Clinton playing saxophone.
SPEAKER_02: So old Elvis and Clinton, even though, you know, Clinton mentioned that he actually preferred the Young Elvis.
SPEAKER_11: Exactly, exactly. And there's a lot of pairings. Paul and Joan and fellow producer Selena Saya Reynolds looked through a lot of these stamps spotting different celebrities.
SPEAKER_04: This one says Robert Redford. Robert Redford, Marilyn Monroe.
SPEAKER_04: Michelle Pfeiffer. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_10: Who's Taylor? Eddie Murphy.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, Eddie Murphy, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: That's a huge variety of people, many of them living. That's impressive.
SPEAKER_11: It is, it is. And I do want to highlight that there's some controversy around this. So there are some fakes out there where a printer just puts a government's name on a stamp. And there are times when a company completely outside of a country might be in charge of issuing or designing commemorative postage, but with the approval of the country. And sometimes a company might have a contract to make stamps, but they don't really mean for them to ever be used to send letters. Oh, so there might be stamps that, you know, bear the country's name, but they never really
SPEAKER_02: appear in that country at all. Like they're specifically meant to just attract collectors.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, and there's a term for this kind of stamp. It's called a speculative stamp, and collectors are divided on these.
SPEAKER_02: So in what way?
SPEAKER_11: Well, so it could be seen as excessive among some collectors, and this debate goes back a long way. When the U.S. issued its first commemorative stamps to mark the Columbian Exposition in 1893, there was briefly a group called the Society for the Suppression of Speculative Stamps that told collectors not to buy these, but that group didn't last very long.
SPEAKER_02: The SSSS didn't just take off and light the world on fire? Okay. Okay, so some collectors, they still want speculative stamps, even though those stamps might not be meant for the actual purpose of stamps, which is to move mail in the country that they're issued.
SPEAKER_11: Exactly, yeah. And these stamps, even if they're controversial, they're really interesting to see, because U.S. pop culture doesn't just exist in the U.S. It's an international export, and stamps are now part of that too, and so it's kind of cool to see our culture reflected back to us in the form of these international stamps. Yeah, and for collectors, it gives you way more variety than you'd get with U.S. commemorative
SPEAKER_02: stamps.
SPEAKER_11: Definitely, and if you're a fan of an artist, this might be the only chance you'll have to see them on a stamp. For example, we might not see a Tina Turner stamp for a few years in the U.S., if we see one at all, but you can go online and find a stamp from Granada from 1988 with Tina Turner, and that same issue, they have Madonna and Elton John and Bruce Springsteen, and you can buy those and own a little piece of that history for not very much money. So does this influence the U.S. Postal Service, like, to maybe issue more pop culture stamps,
SPEAKER_02: maybe with, you know, stars from other countries too?
SPEAKER_11: Well, so since the 90s, it's become a bit more complicated to put pop culture icons from anywhere on a stamp, in part because of how sophisticated the pop culture industry has become. The Elvis estate worked closely with the Postal Service on an Elvis stamp, but that's not always how these things go. Daniel Piazza at the Smithsonian Postal Museum told me about it.
SPEAKER_13: You don't have to pay royalties for a statue of George Washington in the Capitol building to put it on a stamp, but with all of these sports legends and Hollywood actors and singers, these are years of complicated negotiations sometimes with their estates to get the right licensing and permissions and images, and you have to go to all of the descendants or at least the sort of legally entitled descendants and make sure that they agree with and approve of the image that's used and so forth.
SPEAKER_02: Such a mess. As soon as, like, one thing gets easier, you know, like the idea of, like, what is worth commemorating, all the lawyers get involved to make it worse, so, oh well. So maybe there's just kind of balance in the universe when it comes to celebrity stamps. I think so, yeah. But I do love the idea of getting, like, a Michelle Pfeiffer stamp from somewhere like Sierra Leone. That's just a stunning thing to know that that exists or could exist in the world. Thank you so much, Gabe. This is awesome. Thank you.
SPEAKER_04: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Gabe Bullard and edited by Delaney Hall with additional
SPEAKER_02: editing by Kelly Prime, sound mix by Dara Hirsch, fact-checking by Graham Haysha, music by Suan Riau. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivien Le, Jason De Leon, Loshima Dawn, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI. Okay, text from the wedding planner.
SPEAKER_07: She's talking about a cake pop mural. Ah, exciting. Ooh, it's $8,000. Oh. I don't know. We're trying to save for a house. Well, you only get married once or twice. The three times tops.
SPEAKER_06: There's a lot of bad money advice out there. For knowledge you can trust, come to GISA Credit Union. Whether it's saving for the wedding or everything that comes after, we can help get you where you want to be. Find a healthier approach to money at GISA.
