Apparently You Can See Elvis's Boner in "Girls! Girls! Girls!"

You’d think anything involving the penis of noted heartthrob Elvis Presley would be a pretty big fucking deal, but apparently some obvious Elvis wood has been on full display for the world to see for decades now and we all somehow missed it. According to a recent report from the New York Post by way of the Mirror, the star can be seen clearly pitching a tent during a dance scene with actress Laurel Goodwin in the 1962 musical comedy Girls! Girls! Girls! — and no one bothered to edit it out.

Former Elvis manager Joe Esposito detailed the incident in his 2016 memoir, claiming the star blamed the ill-timed erection on his pants. “Damn pants were rubbing me the wrong way and I couldn’t stop the feeling,” the star reportedly told Esposito.

Elvis, for his part, was pretty frazzled by the incident, reportedly running over to Esposito after the scene wrapped asking if he’d noticed “what happened below the belt.” Based on the final cut of the scene that remains in the movie to this day, it seems pretty unlikely that anyone wouldn’t have noticed, and yet, for some reason, no one bothered to reshoot the scene or even edit out Elvis’s uninvited co-star.

“I was hoping it wouldn’t show because the pants were black,” Elvis reportedly told Esposito after seeing the final cut. “But there it is, sticking out like a sore thumb … well, sort of like a sore thumb.”

“I couldn’t believe it when the movie came out,” Esposito recalled. “There was Elvis, dancing around the apartment with Little Elvis at attention and aimed directly at Laurel!”

While I, too, am surprised that no one responsible for making this movie did literally anything to hide Elvis’s boner from the world, I am honestly more shocked that this very obvious onscreen Elvis boner isn’t a more recognizable fixture of our cultural consciousness. Everyone knows about the priest’s boner in the original version of The Little Mermaid, and that’s just a cartoon. How did we miss a real, live, surprise boner from the King himself? Were 1960s audiences just so scandalized by the sight of Elvis wood on the big screen that everyone just looked the other way? Were people more mature back then and able to handle the sight of an obviously unplanned erection without turning into middle schoolers?

We may never have answers. What we do have, however, is an unedited Elvis boner, and the comforting knowledge that even the biggest star of the 20th century — one literally best known for grooving in tight pants with beautiful women — is not immune to the occasional inconvenient boner. Stars, they really are just like us.