Michael Jackson Didn’t Invent The Moonwalk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQMSv9GE68U
Michael Jackson performs the moonwalk (at 3:39) for the first time in his career at the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever special on March 25, 1983.
When the biggest pop star in the world is at the biggest point in his career on one of the biggest stages he’s played, and he unveils a mind-blowing move that would become his signature, no one questions who may have done that move before — and it’s hard to blame them.
That’s Bill Bailey moonwalking at New York’s Apollo Theater in 1955. And while that might be the oldest extant recording of a moonwalk, the dance was reportedly performed countless times by dozens of famous entertainers (including Marcel Marceau, James Brown, Dick Van Dyke, Cab Calloway, and many more) as far back as the 1930s.
The thing is, while we all gave Michael Jackson credit for the move, he’d scarcely deny that it wasn’t really his. The evidence is pretty solid that Jackson knowingly sought out Shalamar’s Jeffrey Daniel to teach him in the move in the early 1980s.
After this look at famous inventors, check out five inventors killed by their own inventions, the war inventions you use every day, and history’s strangest inventions. Then, discover some Leonardo da Vinci inventions that changed history forever.
