Stuff You Should Know - How the Moonwalk Works

Episode Date: July 21, 2016

When Michael Jackson debuted the moonwalk in 1983 the world was enrapt. The dance goes back farther, to the 1930s, and pops up again in the 50s, before reappearing via mimes and West Coast poppers in the 70s. Follow the circuitous route of an iconic move. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HouseStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry.

So it's just moonwalk right in this joint. Can you moonwalk? No. I think everybody at the Bell House on June 30th knows I can moonwalk. Cannot. I didn't moonwalk. But I think you could just based on my moves,

you could make the assumption that I'm an awesome moonwalker. I've seen your moonwalk. It's, you know, herky-jerky. You know, it's that kind of moonwalk that guys like us do. I don't understand.

You know, it kind of simulates the moonwalk. I see. You know what I mean? It's a echo of a moonwalk. I wouldn't call it smooth and floaty. Oh, I would. Yeah? No, I know.

It's not a great moonwalk. It's all right. I never learned the moonwalk because I didn't try to practice the moonwalk more than like once. And I was like, ugh, I can't do that. Oh yeah? Oh, I just bailed on it.

Like my brother practiced and got okay at it. Oh, I'm surprised he didn't like to teach it as a class for free to children in need. No, he got okay at it. But I just, I don't know if I, I think I bail on things that aren't easy for me. Well, that's definitely a candidate for that. Yeah, I think that's a trait I have.

I don't like to spend a lot of time on something that I don't think I'm good at. I'm not one that's like, no man, I'm gonna try to moonwalk until I learn it. I see. I was like, nah, maybe I'll just, I'm not a moonwalker. Didn't you say you bail on books too that don't like capture your attention at this point in your life?

Was that you? I don't think I said that, but I, nah, I didn't say that. Okay. So you, will you work your way through a book? Well, I'll give it a fair shot. It's been a while since I've bailed on a book though, because I'd usually just pick good books.

Like I said, I know are really good. Right. I don't know how long I give a book. How long do you give a book? I will give a book. Two pages. Yeah, but like three or four times. Right, like what am I missing?

Let me try that again. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. I just tried a book called Head Full of Ghosts, which is pretty neat. It's like a psychological thriller. Oh yeah?

Uh-huh. I haven't read a fiction book in forever. And then right now I'm reading the right stuff. Tom Wolf. Classic. And it's that, I think Tom Wolf might be the greatest reporter of all time. Oh yeah?

Oh yeah. I don't think there's anybody better. Our buddy Joe Randazzo. Oh yeah. Of At Midnight fame. People are like, wait a minute, I thought he was at The Onion. No, he's at Midnight.

He used to work at The Onion. He just recommended a book, which I'm really interested in, that I wanted to tell you about. Okay. Cause it sounds like it's right up your 1491 alley. Okay. Sapiens.

All right. A brief history of humankind. Oh, that sounds neat. By Yuval Noah Harari. Love that guy. And the, it has a pretty remarkable thesis, which is that humans can,

humans didn't kill each other off because they can cooperate in large numbers. Because we have a ability, a unique ability animals don't have to believe in things that exist only in our imagination. Like government and money and God. And he said, all of these things allow us to cooperate.

Like we talked about in our money episode. It's like money has that paper has no value. We just all agreed. So it's essentially fiction. The whole concept of money. It's just something we've all agreed on. And he said, it's this cooperation by believing in these fictional things

that is the only reason that humans didn't kill each other off like any other weird species. Yeah, I've got to check that out. It sounds super interesting. Thanks, Joe. And he said it was amazing, so. And thank you for relating that. Yeah, I wanna,

maybe you should read it and just tell me about it. Okay. Because I'm not- You still have never read 14.91, huh? No man, I'm a fiction reader. I try to read nonfiction and it's, I don't know, I just like a good fictional yarn more. I'm quite the opposite.

Like I told you I wanted to be a Civil War buff and I got one of those huge books that's supposed to be great and I just can't do it. You're the opposite. You're the opposite. Like the moonwalk. You don't like fiction. I do like it.

It's just for so much of the time I'm reading for work that- See, I think you would enjoy fiction as a break. Well, that's why I read Headful of Ghosts. Right. I was like, I'm reading a fiction book. I need to just like read something different and use my imagination again.

And it worked. It was like, it had an effect on me. What was that? What was it? Yeah, what was it about? It was about a girl who may or may not be possessed and like how her family unravels around her. Is it like Pop Lit?

I don't know that it's- You know, like- Easy to read. Dean Koontz and John Bishop. No, no, it was a little more literary than that. Okay. And I do, I wish, I'm sorry to the author who wrote the book.

I don't remember the dude's name, but yeah, he does a good job. I'm sorry to Dean Koontz and John Grisham all of a sudden. They know, they know what they are. Those guys know what they are. Although Dean Koontz, man, that guy's imagination is fantastic. And I always assumed that he was better than Stephen King

because he could finish the story. I've never read a Stephen King book. Chuck, what? I don't read a lot of that stuff. Okay. I read one Dean Koontz book in my early 20s and one night. It's the only time I've ever done that. Well, yeah, that was a good thing about it.

Koontz book is you can go through it like crazy. Yep, started reading it at like eight or nine and I stopped at like five in the morning. But each one is way different than the others. I mean, really different. Like the guy's got a great imagination. You should read some of Stephen King's work. Like-

I know. He is, he's so unfairly. I was actually talking to Hodgman about this the other day. He's like very unfairly criticized as a hack. But he's actually- Is he? Oh yeah. A lot of people are like, Stephen King sucks.

But if you, just because he's so prolific. Right. And because he very famously has trouble finishing a story. Oh really? Yeah. But he's like, nobody can get inside the mind. Like the dark side of a person's, the average person's mind better than Stephen King.

Yeah. He's just a, he's a great storyteller aside from the ending part. So what's the, the shining is probably the one I should read? Probably not because you're so used to Kubrick's shining. Oh right. And it's just so radically different. Or the stand, that's the big one, right?

That's a big one. I've never read the stand. I would start with the short stories. They're fantastic. All right. Those he can finish. It's the large- What do you mean not finish?

Like- Just amazing buildup and then the resolutions like- So he finishes, you just mean it's, okay. Right, right. It's not left unfinished. It's just the resolution is the payoff- Is not so great. Yeah.

Interesting. And it's still fine, but it's, he's so good at building things up that it's almost, it would be almost impossible to finish it. I don't know if we should call this beginning a book talk with Josh and Chuck or patting the episode. You want to talk moonwalk?

Yeah. We needed a little something. This is a short one. Well, you were saying that, that you were like, you just couldn't do it. Yeah, couldn't do it. Yes. Let me, let me tell you how I approached the moonwalk.

All right. My left hand was covered in a white glove with sequins sewn on that my mom made for me. Did you really? Wearing the thriller jacket. Wow. Little black pants. Yeah.

That's how I moonwalked. Wow. I was still not that great at it. So you were, you were in. Man, this is so in my wheelhouse. Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't, I mean, I listened to pop music, but I was also the influence by my,

well, he's now my brother-in-law, but. The general? The general started dating my sister when I was 12. Oh, okay. So like he was always around. Yeah. And he was like, you're 12 years old, you need to listen to the Almond Brothers

and Leonard Skinnerd and Molly Hatchet and Blackfoot and the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Black and the Dovey Brothers. Yeah. I was like, heck yeah. Yeah. But I also listened to the American Top 40 every week. So I mean, I was an MTV, I was glued to.

Sure. So you can't be glued to MTV and not like digest, ingest some of that stuff. Sure. But I was never, I never owned parachute pants or sequined anything. But so that was the only sequined thing I ever owned. But the.

That's very sweet that your mom did that. I think so too. That is very sweet. It was a very sweet gesture. But I think one of the other reasons the moonwalk spoke to me and I didn't realize it until researching this article, Chuck, that I was also super into breakdancing at the time.

Yeah. And the moonwalk is actually not a breaking move. It's a poppin' move. But for all but actual breakin' and poppin' dancers, it was the same thing. Yeah, I don't see how it's a poppin' move. I saw that in the article and I couldn't put it together. Because.

Poppin' is so herky jerky. Right. And a good moonwalk is so smooth and buttery. Well, so lockin' is herky jerky. Right. Well, no, poppin' is too. Poppin' is that like. Yeah, but it's also.

I wish we could see this. This is really not good for audio. But it's also, so you know the one where you hold out one hand and make a wave? The wave goes through your body to the other hand? Yeah, yeah. The classic wave. That's poppin'.

Is it? Yeah. And I was like, oh, okay, I'll bet the worm's poppin'. Wrong. The worm's a breakin' move. I clearly don't know. But the average person who's doing these dances is probably poppin' lockin' and breakin'.

Yeah, it all kind of worked together. At the same time. Yeah, and I know we covered breakdancing some in the hip-hop episode, but we should do a total breakdance, like give it its full do. Okay. And we're gonna call it the total breakdance episode.

But we, I mean, we gotta cover some of it here because there's such a basis of it in the moonwalk. Or the moonwalk has such a basis in it. But the moonwalk goes even further back than poppin' and lockin', which we'll talk about in a minute. It goes all the way back to the 30s. Yeah.

Should we take a break? Oh, man. Yes. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. You, you, you know, stop, stop, stop, you shouldn't know. All right, Josh just taught me how to moonwalk, and now I'm great at it. Yeah, and this. I can't remember what that's called, the wave. The wave is where you stand up at a baseball game. So what is this?

I don't know. I mean, people that don't know what Josh is doing right now are probably frustrated. But it's that, you know, that move you do where you wave the one arm, and it goes to your body, and the other arm waves, and then you pass it to your friend. Yes, it's a pop-in move. Is it?

Yeah, I don't know. Body popping. It clearly doesn't. I don't know what popping means. I think the name's a bit of a misnomer. Yeah, probably. All right, and by the way, people, we might as well get to this.

I'm not going to be able to gush much about Michael Jackson, because I'm one of the people that thinks he did bad things in his private life. So if you don't hear me talking about how awesome he is, that's why. Yeah. I have a hard time separating the art from the artist. Well, yeah.

I just want to throw it out there. Man, if you believe that, how could you? Yeah. I'm unconvinced at this point. All right. But I mean. I'm just seeing my own A. Yeah, that's a good one.

Good one. A bunch of people are like, that's what COA means. Yeah, I'm covering my own A, speaking for myself. But anyway, if you hear a little bit of callousness in my voice, that's why. So going back in time, it was not invented by that man. It was, like you said, it goes back to the 1930s. If you look on the YouTubes, there

like history of the moonwalk, you will see a nice video that shows the evolution of this dance starting with Cab Calloway in the 1930s doing something called the Buzz, the great band leader, jazz big band leader. He remains unaccused of anything. He was also awesome in the Blues Brothers. Oh, yeah.

Wow, he was still around for that. That's right. Forgot about that. About 50 years on. Yeah. So in the 1930s, he did something called the Buzz, and it was a little more herky jerky and not as smooth. Then there was something that this article mentions

called the Camel Walk, which I looked into, or the Collegiate Walk. Yeah. Like Sammy Davis, Jr. did in this video. I don't think it looks anything like the moonwalk. Not really. I think you're going forward, first of all. Right, which is a big one.

And it's cool. It's a cool move. Sure. James Brown dares Sammy to do it. Sammy's like, all right, I'll do it. Yeah, so you saw the same laugh. Awesome. Boy, could you imagine being in that audience?

Man. Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown on the same stage. I know. Who do we have now? Bieber and whoever else. I don't even know. Him. Bieber and Bieber.

It's a nightmare group. Yeah. So sorry, man. We sound old. We're not old because we're trash and Justin Bieber. Yeah, you're just saying. It's a jerk. You know, he really has done a lot of stuff to earn that.

Yeah, it's not like he's some super nice guy people are just unfair to. Right. Look at some of the videos. Him peeing in a bucket in a restaurant. Do you ever see that one? No, I heard about that one. It's wrong with that guy.

Well, I think he's just too much wealth and not enough guidance. Yeah, and probably too much booze and stuff. I think maybe he might be somewhat reformed now, but. Oh, really? I think he's grown up a little bit, but I don't follow it that closely. I see. Just the pee in the bucket thing.

Yeah, I mean, that was enough to turn me off forever. Win him back, Justin. Win him back. Good luck. So we were talking about the Camel Walker. The Camel Walker, right? So you were saying it doesn't look like a moonwalk. In fact, it looks kind of like a reverse moonwalk.

Sort of. But the point is, it's somebody, Sammy Davis, Jr., floating. Their feet are floating a little bit. They appear to be floating while they move. All right. So it's related to the moonwalk, right? I'll give you that. The one that's dead on, though, is Bill Bailey in 1955.

Full on moonwalks off the stage. Yeah, in 1955 at the Apollo. Yeah, and there's a great video. And it's at the very end of the video, but I urge you to not just skip to the end, because you've got two or three minutes of some sweet, sweet tap dancing, which I didn't realize how much I loved until I saw this guy.

And he was supposedly trained by Mr. Bojangles himself. Really? Yeah. That was a real person? Yeah, I don't remember his name, but it was Bojangles. Yeah, I loved tap dancing. I didn't know it. I watched it, and I was like, man, that's amazing.

You should go see Gregory Hines. Is he still doing it? Probably. There's no way he's just like, I'm done tapping. Yeah. It was all about tap was life for that guy. Yeah, I mean, that stuff's amazing. And what's the guy's name?

I can't remember. That looks like that. Mikhail Baryshnikov? White Knights? Well, I did see that movie. Yeah. No, there was a guy, Sabion Glover? Oh, I know who you're talking about.

Like much more recent? Yeah, like mean, mean tap dancer. Yeah. Like he'd just shout insults while he was dancing. You're fat. You look stupid. But watch me dance. It's a Bill Bailey in 1955, like legit moonwalk.

And it's hard to say, like he's the guy that invented it, because dance, like any art form, is just borrowed and changed and morphs along the years to where I don't know that anyone can specifically say, like Bill Bailey might have seen it from someone else. I've been like, that's a hot move. Yeah, he seems like the type of talent that he could have come up with it himself.

Yeah, sure. But what's weird, Chuck, is that that's apparently where it went and died. Like he created the moonwalk, and it stopped with him. For a while, sure. No, if you go back in the history of it, the people who popularized the moonwalk didn't know that he had done that.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. So simultaneously, there's also some movement that's similar called the airwalk, but it's mime. Yeah. Like Marcel Marceau's Walking Against the Wind. Very famous mime routine. Where his feet are floating, it's called airwalking, and it's strictly mime, right?

Yeah, the difference between that and the moonwalk is that they're stationary and acting like they're walking forward. Right. And the wind is blowing them, but they're not going backwards. But it's also not part of a dance, either. Correct. Some weird.

Because mimes don't dance. But this is a weird little thing that I didn't realize. There was apparently a mime. There was a period of the 70s where mimes were cool. Did you know that? Yeah, I mean, I remember watching Chills and Yarnel as a kid on television on major network TV. I was all brainstem at the time, because I was totally

unaware of that. Yeah, mimeing was a big deal. And I would practice that a little bit. Not for years, but yeah, I practiced mimeing. What a bizarre period of American pop culture. Oh, yeah. Chills and Yarnel, this mime couple, had a, were they two dudes or?

That was a man and a woman, I think they were married. OK, that they had their own TV show. Oh, yeah. Chills and Yarnel was watched, apparently, by a lot of people, including you. Sure. It was also watched by a dude named Jeffrey Daniel. Yeah, man.

Jeffrey Daniel was a great dancer, probably still is. He is. Not only was he on solid gold, he was in the band Shalamar with Jody Watley. Yeah, Jody Watley. And Shalamar was created by the great Don Cornelius of Soul Train, RIP, I believe, didn't he die a few years ago?

Yes, he did. And Gary Mumford was the original singer. And then on album number two, Gerald Brown took over, like you said, with Jody Watley of Shalamar fame, I guess. And then later on, her own fame. Yeah, she had her own solo career, right? For sure. And this guy, Jeffrey Daniel.

Right. So Jeffrey Daniel was. Dancing in the Sheets, remember that hit? Yes, this great Footloose soundtrack song. Dancing in the Sheets. But that was the 80s stuff. They came around in the 70s with more disco stuff. It was super disco-y to start with.

But this dude, Jeffrey Daniels, who was in Shalamar, who's also a solid gold dancer, he had a pretty awesome move called the Backslide. And when you watch him backslide, he's moonwalking. Yes, total moonwalk. It totally is. And later on, he was interviewed, like, where did you get this, where did you come up with the idea?

He was like, I was super into Shields and Yarnel at the time. So miming influenced the backslide, which, as we'll find out in a second, directly led to the moonwalk. We'll get to that finally after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, Chuck, we're back. Yes. Jeffrey Daniel, I watched that interview. That's on the YouTube. It was on a British talk show called Soccer AM. Oh, the 2007 thing? Yeah. They had him on Soccer AM?

Apparently, it's not just about sports, but they have like comedy bits and pop culture stuff. OK. So he was surprised on that show. They showed the clip of Bailey in the 50s. And he was like, what's that? He was like, I've never even seen that. He was surprised to see that someone was

legit moonwalking. Yeah. Whatever, 50-something years earlier. Yeah, the same move. It's not like, oh, that's kind of close, like maybe the Camel Walker, the Buzz, like Cab Calloway. It was a moonwalk. It was the moonwalk.

But that's what I'm saying. That's what's so bizarre is that this guy invented the moonwalk in 1955, and it began and ended with him. And it took mimes getting a TV show to create the moonwalk as we understand it today. Like, what a radically different. About it. Talk about chaos theory.

You know what I'm saying, though? Other people could have influenced the mimes that knew about Bill Bailey like it could have all been tied. I guess that's entirely possible. But Marcel Marceau was doing the airwalk as far back as the 30s before Bill Bailey. Was he around in the 30s? From what I understand.

OK. Which is weird because. Well, he was pretty old in the 70s when he hit it big. So yeah, I think then he was doing it in the 30s. Because that's what this article says. I didn't find anything. Yeah, it said the 30s. I didn't find any footage of him from the 30s.

Like, all of it seemed to be from the 70s or early 80s. Well, the heyday of mimes. Also, I was curious why people hate mimes. And I did a little research. And of course, there's no definitive thing. It's not like a phobia. No, but everything I saw came down to a few things. They look like clowns.

Yeah. And clowns, we did a whole episode on that. Chlorophobia. And the silent thing seems to bug people. And then just the notion that they'll get up all on your face in the park. You're out just enjoying your day. And a mime will come up and be like,

do you start intruding upon you to do their act? Which I don't even know if that's the case. Could do your act over there. Oh, it is. Believe me. Yeah. Mimes. Very intrusive.

Like to start static. And I finish it. So back to Jeffrey Daniel. He's dancing on Soul Train. He's dancing on Solid Gold. There's another couple of dancers named Jaron Casper, candidate. Yep.

Great name. And Derek Cooley Jackson, J-A-X-S-O-N. Another cool name. And they were moonwalking around or backsliding around. And so all these dudes were basically kind of laying the foundation for what the moonwalk would come to be. It got real like, even if you watch Bayleys, it's a legit moonwalk.

But it's not as smooth as Daniel ended up doing it. Yeah. You know? Right. Like when you see him on Solid Gold, he like, that's one of the smoother moonwalks you'll ever see. And he probably debuted it for the first time in American history on TV on Top of the Pops in 1982.

That's the one I was talking about. Yeah. Yeah, that's so smooth. So people thought he was cheating. Yeah, they were like, is the floor oiled or something? Like, what is that? They were kind of witchcraft rewatching. Right.

It blew everybody away, right? Yeah. But nobody knew who this guy was really. He was a Solid Gold dancer. At the time, everybody knew who Michael Jackson was. Sure. So about a year later, almost exactly a year later, NBC broadcast this special called Motown 25.

Yeah, big retrospective. And it was a huge, huge thing. Diana Ross did her first appearance with the Supreme since 1969. Oh, wow. Marvin Gaye played. I need to see that. There was a battle of the bands between the Temptations

and the Four Tops. Who won? Stevie Wonder. I'm sure everybody won. It was like a soccer game. Yeah. And Michael Jackson comes out, right? People are like, who's he?

I mean, he was pretty big at the time. No, of course he was. He was huge. But so was Marvin Gaye in the Four Tops and Stevie Wonder, right? Michael Jackson comes out and brings the house down. And one of the reasons he brought the house down was because he was doing Billie Jean, which

when the thing came out was the number one song in America. But during the dance, he did the moonwalk. It was the first time basically anybody who'd seen, had ever seen the moonwalk. Yeah, like no one in America watching this NBC special had been watching Top of the Pops. Yeah, they made a scene stuff on Solid Gold here and there.

But it was definitely like a mindblower for, because it was such a widely watched special. Yeah. For sure. Well, here's the deal. He was taught the moonwalk, depends on who you ask. Right. Some people say he sought out Daniel, said you teach me.

Other people say no. It was Casper Candidate or Cooley Jackson. But from what I gather, it sounds like all those guys eventually worked with him over the years. It's like either choreographers or choreographers slash backup dancers. So he learned it from some or all of those people. Yeah, like Daniel choreographed his smooth criminal video.

And Cooley and Casper are the dudes who lean with him on that very famous crazy side lean that he did in the video. Does he do one of those, the lean move? Yes. The crazy side lean, I think, is what it's called. Can I say what happened to me yesterday? What did you do, Aline?

Well, I was looking at videos on how to moonwalk tutorials to see if I could get it. And when you watch it slow down and broken down, it's like, oh, well, I get it. It's not that complex. But it's hard to master. And we'll get to all that coming up. Like, I'm sure we're going to bumble our way through

the description about a moonwalk. We always do. But we're going to try. But then I started following into that little YouTube vortex of videos. And I saw this guy saying, here's how you do the lean. Right. And I was like, I want to know how to do that because it's cool.

It is. It's like an illusion. It is. Like, it's a camera trick, obviously. Well, it's not. It's real. Yeah. You've got some strong ankles, right?

And there's a guy, well, I don't. And there's a guy named Robert Hoffman, who, it turns out, this guy is great. He does his dance tutorials. And he's kind of funny and does it in such a way that it's interesting to watch. And so I encourage everyone to go watch Robert Hoffman's tutorial on how to do the lean.

And he kind of fully explains the illusion and how to do it well. And I look at it, and I'm like, oh, man, you're about to fall over. And then he pulls it back. And I thought, I'm going to practice the lean. Because I've always wanted to know how to dance, but I'm just not good at it.

But I want to get the lean down, at least so I can bust that out at a party. Plus it's just like standing in place. Yeah. But you shouldn't even do it on a dance floor, is while you're having a conversation with somebody, slowly, slowly just start to lean. And then when they think you're about to go over,

just snap back into place and be like, what? You're totally right. Because I don't go to dance parties anymore. Anyway, what am I talking about? It's just regular parties. Yeah, I would just be in the office one day in the kitchen. And I'll just do my lean. Oh, he's going to go, oh my god, he didn't go over.

He stood back up. Oh, man. All right, so where are we? So we were talking about how there's a discrepancy over who taught Michael Jackson the moonwalk. Correct. The thing is, is Michael Jackson never claimed to have invented the moonwalk.

People just assumed he had. Right. Because he was huge at the time. And he also later said that he didn't know what his dance routine was going to be for Billie Jean for this Motown special. I don't know if I buy that. So a lot of people say, well, obviously,

he just did the spur of the moment or whatever. No, totally untrue. He employed choreographers, and including those three guys, like you said. All three of them worked with him as choreographers. And he also, as far as his sister Janet, I think, says, they went to see Shalamar at Disneyland before this and saw Jeffrey Daniel doing the backslide and said,

dude, you got to teach me that. Here's some money. Teach me the moonwalk. Oh, wait. It's not called the moonwalk yet. And he also said that he never called it the moonwalk, that it was actually the media that came up with that. But he adopted it for sure.

Surely, I mean, obviously, someone named it. Some AP reporters are like, oh, I named it. It was me. For what it's worth, Daniel said, beside Shields and Yarnel, that the electric Boogaloo's is who inspired him as well. And I looked up those guys. They're the ones who originated body popping.

Yeah, and they were a dance group. And I was looking at one of them and I was like, let's rerun. OK, you're talking about locking. Yes. It is rerun. Yes, he was huge in it. He was a member of the lockers, which was at one point the electric Boogaloo's.

No, those are two different. Well, no, at one point they were merged. OK, then that's where popping and locking came from, because popping and locking are two different types of dancing. Yeah, originally they were the electric Boogaloo lockers. And then I guess they diverged at one point. Maybe they were like, I want to lock. I want to pop.

Well, the dude who invented locking, it was good friends with rerun. And if you think of rerun dancing, like those wrist twists and the jumps and the suspender stuff, that's locking. It totally is. And they were on that dance squad, the lockers. It was Don Campbell who invented locking, rerun.

And then Tony Basil, the girl who sang Mickey. Oh, Mickey. Yeah. So if you don't know who rerun is, you're like, what in the world are you guys talking about? What? You oldsters. Oh, yeah.

It was a TV show called What's Happening about these three friends in South Central LA in the 70s. Great show. Very funny. And rerun was one of the characters played by the great Fred Berry, who was in the lockers, in the electric Boogaloo lockers. Yeah.

And just go watch, go type rerun dancing What's Happening. Yeah. And what you're watching is pure locking. One of the great TV theme songs of all time, too. Now, if you throw what he's doing, it really is. What instrument was that? Like a klezmer or something? I have no idea.

It's weird, but it's a great one. If you throw in that arm movement, that wave, and the worm, you've got pop and locking and breaking. What people think of is break dancing. That's right. Pretty amazing. Like we've, I was thinking the other day about how in our lifetime, as people our age, and there's a range.

But we've seen like two complete, at least two new complete art forms created in hip hop music and break dancing. Created out of whole cloth. It's amazing. And the new sports. Like what? Like, you know, X games and snowboarding and skateboarding. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Like we've seen these new things created, and you always think that, well, music is what else can you do? Right, nothing under the sun. I guess techno and all that stuff, that was created as well. Sure. Jazz? Well, that was before us. A little.

But no, it's true. I just think it's pretty neat to look around. No, I know what you're talking about, too. Like, well, there's grunge. Well, grunge is an offshoot of like rock and roll or whatever. But yeah, no. And these are completely new art forms that some people still think are a fad, which is funny.

Really? Well, you know, you hear, like, old curmudgeon's like a rap was going to be a fad. No, rap is a brand new art form, and it's here forever. And it changes and morphs and is, you know, it's amazing. It's neat. So we did a hip hop episode. You mentioned that, right?

Yeah, it was good, I thought. For, you know, a couple of shamos like us, I think we did a pretty decent job. Agreed. All right, so do we need to explain how to break dance? I want to hear you explain it. No, I can't. You mean moonwalk?

Oh, yeah, what I say, break dance? Break dance. Yeah, yeah, we need to say how to moonwalk. OK. So go ahead. Take it away, Chuck. Well, you're the one who does it so well. All right, all right.

All right, you ready? Yeah. So you start, first of all, you want to take off your shoes and put on some socks on a nice slick floor. Yeah. Don't try to do it on like a pine bark. No, maybe pour yourself a vodka gimlet. Yeah, well, that's the drink of the moonwalk, right?

So you are on a slick floor wearing socks, and you stand straight up and down, right? And you take your right foot and you put it out in front of you with your foot flat on the floor, OK? OK. Bend your left knee and go up on the ball of your left foot. OK. OK?

Now, holding yourself in place with just the ball of your foot, all of everything is on whatever foot you have up, the ball of whatever foot you have up. Yeah, take a sip of that gimlet. All right, maybe another one, too. I need one now. And then you drag your foot back, the foot that's on the floor. And as you drag your right foot back past your left,

you drop your left heel and raise your right. That's right. And then you repeat the same process in your floating. There's the moonwalk, aka the backslide. You're pretty square if you call it the moonwalk these days. We had to title this episode moonwalk because we wanted everybody to know what we were talking about, but it's called the backslide, OK?

That is correct. And I watched the tutorial, which the guy who did the tutorial actually wasn't great at it. Like, he had it down, like how to teach you. But when he did it, I was going, man, it's not great. Was it Steve Brawl? No. God, that would be great.

I just think the guy had the wrong shoes on, personally. But I'll bet that's what he blames it on, too. The thing he stressed for a good moonwalk is a long stride, which is where you're lacking, if I can be honest. Oh, am I doing it too short? Yeah. OK.

Long stride, Josh. OK. I didn't realize you'd had so many formed opinions about my moonwalk. That foot that you're keeping flat needs to be so, so flat to create the illusion. Right, what am I doing? I'm not talking about you now.

Oh, OK. Your foot was pretty good and flat. Yeah. It's your stride. I pretend like it's dead. Like, my foot is dead when I drag it. And then when you go to switch feet, he said you really just snap them both real hard

to create that illusion, like a good, completely synchronized simultaneous snap up and down with those two feet. Right. Your long stride, keep that foot flat, keep that vodka gimlet flowing. Yeah. And you're going to be moonwalking in no time. And then you can also, because what you're doing,

it's supposed to look like you're walking while you're moving backward. You're walking forward but moving backward. Yeah, that's the definition of the moonwalk. So you can add your arms swinging, lean, tilt your body forward a little bit. If you're real good. Michael Jackson used to move his head up and down

in rhythm to his walking or whatever. And it adds to the effect. Totes. Shallow more. I feel like I kind of should try it. Try it right now. Well, I'm not going to do it now. You don't have a vodka gimlet?

Nope. Are you got anything else? I need to go get some cocktail onions. Those are great. Gibson onions? Oh, is that a Gibson I'm thinking of? Yeah, but that's it. Gimlet is the lime juice?

Yes. Rose's lime? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to know more about vodka gimlets, you can type that word in the search part, howstuffworks.com.

And since I said gimlet, it's time for Listener Mail. Before Listener Mail, this is going to call this correction time. OK. We need Lola by music. We do. So we have corrections on the show from time to time. This was sort of a big one, because we really goofed

on the Gettysburg Address episode. And boy, did we hear about it. Remember how I said I wanted to be a Civil War buff? I don't anymore. You had a rough start to your career as a Civil War buff? They're not nice people, as it turns out. No one on the internet's a nice person. No, I was just very surprised if people got angry

that we messed something up, not just like. So what did we mess up? We said 50,000 dead. It was 50,000 total casualties, is that what it was? So we messed up and said, mistake casualties for dead when, in fact, casualties is dead, missing, or wounded. And then we also said that, well, we were talking about the percentage of the army.

Like, it was this much a percentage of 25% of the Union Army and a third of Lee's army. But it was just for the army fighting in that battle, not the total Union Army and the total Confederate Army. And we very specifically were like. Oh, we were, huh? Yeah, this is for the entire army. So we got a little excited and a little ahead of ourselves.

Well, clearly we're the most evil people of the century. Yeah, so very sorry about that, Civil War buffs. Now, don't ever contact Chuck again. Please. All right, listener mail now? Yeah. I'm just going to read this one. Hey, guys, great podcast.

I especially like how you pointed out, but here's something about the bogus studies, how to do good research. I especially like how you guys pointed out the pressure when you're an understudy to do studies that support the current theories of your employer without getting into a ton of detail. I've been there and I left research all together

because I became pretty disillusioned with it all. One thing you did not mention is that entire industries get erected based on the results of a few initial studies. The sexiness of the studies aside, which is what you talked about, the researcher does a good job and does not show anything or has a negative study. Their funding is often at stake.

From my personal experience, this is the largest basis for bias. Whoa, that was a mouthful. It's hard to say when you're missing that, too. Researchers become heavily vested in being right from a face perspective, a face E, and a monetary perspective. We don't really recognize, realize this

because the scope and the impact of the studies are usually small, but that researcher who suddenly lost all their grants is a pretty high price to pay for being ethical. I don't really have any answers to how to clean it up, but science is contrarian and by nature, anti-consensus. Instead, we have a system that rewards, only rewards reinforcement.

Good researchers have to be allowed to say, you did this great study and found nothing without the fear of losing grant money. Hey, man, that's from Trevor. Thanks, Trevor. That was very illuminating and enlightening. Very erudite? Yeah.

Did I say that? Yeah. Erudite. Really? I don't know. Okay. If you want to get in touch with us like Trevor did, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyshadow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy,

teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.