Smooth Criminal was released as the seventh single from the Bad album on October 24, 1988. The accompanying short film, directed by Colin Chilvers, was a 40-minute production built around a 1930s speakeasy aesthetic, inspired by the Fred Astaire film The Band Wagon (1953).
The signature move in the choreography is the anti-gravity lean — a moment where Michael and his dancers tip forward from the ankles to roughly 45 degrees off vertical, with no apparent loss of balance. In the original short film, the effect was achieved using harnesses and wires hidden in their costumes.
But Michael wanted to perform the same move live on tour, where wires were not practical. He spent the better part of 1992 working with the Bush and Tompkins costume team on a mechanical solution. The result, patented on October 26, 1993 as U.S. Patent No. 5,255,452 — Method and Means for Creating Anti-Gravity Illusion — was a custom shoe with a slotted heel that locked onto a peg that rose from the stage at the exact moment of the lean.
The patent lists Michael Jackson, Michael L. Bush, and Dennis Tompkins as co-inventors. The mechanism is genuinely ingenious: the dancer steps forward onto the peg, the heel slot engages, and the leg muscles take the load while the upper body tips forward. When the lean is complete and the music cue arrives, the dancer rocks the heel off the peg and steps free, and the move is over before the audience has time to figure out what happened.
The live version of Smooth Criminal on the Dangerous and HIStory tours used this system every night. Michael held the U.S. patent until his death in 2009. It is one of the very few cases in entertainment history of a performance technique being protected by hard intellectual property law.