The year was 1986. The King of Pop was beginning to get wrapped in rumors related to his changing appearance, and the tabloids didn't hesitate to invent stories, heavily using the offensive 'Wacko Jacko'. However, Michael Jackson found room to collaborate with George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola on the development of Captain EO, a 16-minute short film starring him.
The film was shown in the main Disney parks for more than ten years, and thanks to the magic of the Web, today we can enjoy both the final version and the 'behind the scenes', which includes never-before-seen footage.
Rumor has it that the relationship between George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola became a bit cooler after Lucas turned down the offer to direct Apocalypse Now. From a certain point of view, Lucas had his hands full with his Star Wars universe (Apocalypse Now is from '79, and The Empire Strikes Back from '80), but several years later they worked together again, and there were two very powerful reasons: Michael Jackson and Disney.
Michael had special appearances in projects like the Moonwalker games (based on his film from '88), and even became associated with the music development of Sonic 3, but this was something different: a science fiction short, just 16 and a half minutes long, that would be shown in all the main Disney parks in the Tomorrowland, Future World and Discoveryland areas, combining 3D projection and special effects. The name: Captain EO.
Captain EO, Subtitled in Spanish
Captain EO tells the story of a young captain eager to complete his mission (deliver a gift to the Supreme Leader), but he must face multiple difficulties, including a friendly but definitely incompetent crew. The captain's great power is to transform all those who attack him into dancers, thus revealing their "inner beauty" through music.
The Supreme Leader is none other than Anjelica Huston, and one of the crew members (the elephant Hooter) is Tony Cox, whom some of our readers might remember from Willow (another Lucas project) and Beetlejuice. The official screenings of Captain EO ran from 1986 to 1997, with a second phase that began in 2010 (less than a year after Michael's death) and ended in 2015.
YouTube has done a fairly decent job of saving multiple copies of Captain EO, and for some reason Disney decided not to fire its missiles, but Content ID often blocks the sound when the songs begin. Another alternative is to watch the "behind the scenes" , or rather, all the action before the effects were added (work obviously handled by Industrial Light & Magic). A rawer version, and why not more human, that also reveals the technical limits of the era. If you're a Michael fan, you can't miss this.
