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Super Bowl XXVII Halftime Show
Date confirmed on NFL
Michael Jackson, speech transcript
Today we stand together all around the world joined in a common purpose, to remake the planet into a planet of joy and understanding and goodness. No one should have to suffer, especially the children. This time we must succeed. This is for the children of the world.
Oprah interview
Oprah: When we were here the last time shooting the commercial, you were like in between shots running off and conceiving the dance, choreographing the dance, you were up all night dancing.
Michael: For the Super Bowl.
Oprah: Yes, yes.
Michael: Yes, well, I'm never satisfied. Even when I see something that I've done and people say, “Oh it was so phenomenal”. When I did Motown 25 and I did the Moonwalk for the first time, I was backstage crying afterwards.
Vincent Paterson, choreographer, “Dancer's Studio - Vol.1” (2003) (listing) (archived listing)
Int: You ended up directing a large number of dancers in “Smooth Criminal”, what was the largest dance ensemble you worked with?
Vincent Paterson: Well I guess the largest group that I’ve ever given any direction to was when I choreographed the Superbowl for Michael Jackson and I had to talk to all of the people at the Superbowl in the stadium because we did a card trick where ..Michael loved children — and so one of the things we did was we had all of the people in the audience begin to hold up these cards and as they went around the whole entire stadium it turned into a chain of almost paper cutouts of little children holding hands you know. That would have been the greatest mass of people, and what is that 50,000 people or something? I don’t even know.
Austin Murphy, Sports Illustrated, “It’s… Halftime!”
For a month they got nowhere. (The NFL's Jim) Steeg sat down with the King of Pop’s manager, Sandy Gallin, 11 months before Super Bowl XXVII. “I remember pitching them,” he says, “and them not really having a clue what we were talking about.” At a subsequent meeting, producer Don Mischer pointed out that the Super Bowl would be broadcast in more than 120 countries. Now he had Jackson’s full attention.
Steeg recalls Jackson saying, “So you’re telling me that this show is going live to all those places where I’ll never do a concert?” A pause. “I’m in.”
“Michael worked harder than anybody [who’s done the halftime show], before or since,” says Steeg, who remembers seeing Jackson still rehearsing his act at seven the night before the game, in a tent outside the Rose Bowl.
And it showed. Jackson, rocking a bandolier-draped frock coat on loan, apparently, from Muammar Gaddafi, was sensational. The final moments of that show were the most viewed in the history of television at the time.
Richard Sandomir, New York Times
Eleven years after Jackson sang, his sister Janet bared her breast (or had it stripped bare by Justin Timberlake), leading the Federal Communications Commission to fine CBS $550,000. Michael was no angel on stage at the Rose Bowl; he grabbed his crotch repeatedly, especially as he sang “Billie Jean.”
“We talked to him about that during rehearsals,” said Jim Steeg, then the league’s executive director of special events and now chief operating officer of the San Diego Chargers. “But he did better than we thought.”
Still, he said, “We got a lot of letters about that.”
Fox, not yet an N.F.L. broadcast partner, directly challenged the ’92 halftime show (Gloria Estefan, Dorothy Hamill and Brian Boitano) with a live edition of its raunchy comedy series “In Living Color.” The ploy did its damage: CBS’s halftime rating fell 10 points from game action in the previous half-hour.
The league needed a game-changing artist who could appeal much more to 18- to 34-year-olds.
“Our thought afterward was we had to step it up a notch,” Steeg said.
A contingent including Steeg and Arlen Kantarian, then the chief executive of Radio City Productions, which would produce the halftime show, met in Beverly Hills with Jackson’s manager, Sandy Gallin.
Steeg and Kantarian sensed that they had to brief Gallin extensively because they surmised that Jackson knew little about football. “We knew we were explaining this to somebody who would then have to explain it to Michael,” Steeg said. In subsequent meetings, Jackson displayed a naïve curiosity about a world he knew little of.
“He’d ask: ‘Who plays in it? What is it?’ ” Kantarian said. Jackson’s interest became riveted on the Super Bowl being broadcast in more than 100 countries, including third world nations, and on United States military bases.
“He said, ‘Man, I’ll never tour there,’ ” Kantarian recalled him saying. “We talked to him about the blue-collar football fan that might not otherwise be a Michael Jackson fan and about how he could build a new fan base. He got that as well. He was very sharp and very shy.”
Gallin said no to the N.F.L.’s proposal three times before saying yes, Kantarian said. At one point, he added, Gallin asked for a $1 million fee. “ ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ ” Kantarian said Gallin told him. “ ‘This is Michael Jackson.’ ” The N.F.L. pays performers only for their expenses, but it donated $100,000 to Jackson’s Heal the World Foundation, which is named for one of the songs he sang at halftime.
Kantarian said that he recalled Jackson pushing to sing newer songs from “Dangerous,” not older songs, like “Billie Jean” and “Black or White.” According to Kantarian, Jackson said, “ ‘Billie Jean’s just a tune, it doesn’t mean anything” and “It’s a new world, this has to be about ‘Heal the World.’ ”
Dick Ebersol, NBC Sports President, unknown source
He was better than our wildest dreams... He's an enormous name with crossover appeal from kids to grandparents, an enormous curiosity even for those for whom he is not star.