Michael Jackson Moonwalk: The Motown 25 Performance and Its Origins

Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever was a television special marking the 25th anniversary of Berry Gordy's record company. It was taped in front of an audience at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on March 25, 1983 and broadcast by NBC on May 16, 1983. That gap matters, because a lot of retellings describe the moonwalk as a live television moment. The audience in Pasadena saw it live; the country saw it seven weeks later, edited into a two-hour program.

The special was built around reunions. Smokey Robinson rejoined the Miracles, Diana Ross appeared with former Supremes, and the Jacksons reunited with Jermaine, who had stayed at Motown when his brothers left the label in 1975. For viewers the Jackson segment was pitched as nostalgia: the family group that had given Motown four straight number-one singles in 1970 was back on the label's stage.

Jackson agreed to take part in the reunion, and by his own account asked to perform a solo song as well. He chose Billie Jean, a track from Thriller, an album released on Epic Records rather than Motown. That choice is part of the story. On a night celebrating the label's past, the one performance that did not belong to Motown's catalogue became the one people remembered.

The step now called the moonwalk was known among dancers as the backslide. It creates the illusion of walking forward while sliding backward: one foot stays flat and glides back while the other foot rests on its toes, then the roles swap. Illusions of this kind run through twentieth-century performance, from tap and vaudeville dancers to mime artists such as Marcel Marceau, whose 'walking against the wind' Jackson openly admired.

The immediate sources were contemporary. Jeffrey Daniel of the group Shalamar performed the backslide on British television in 1982, and Jackson worked with Daniel and with the dancer Geron "Casper" Candidate while developing his own version. Credit here is not about diminishing Jackson. His achievement was not inventing the step; it was placing a street-dance illusion at the climax of a prime-time network show and performing it with a precision that made millions of viewers try it themselves.

After the Jacksons' medley, the brothers leave and Michael speaks briefly to the audience about the 'good old days' before turning to 'the new songs'. Then the Billie Jean bassline starts. He is dressed in a black sequined jacket, black trousers cut short enough to show white socks, and a single sequined glove. He picks up a black fedora, throws it aside, and for the next few minutes the performance is a sequence of sharp freezes, kicks and spins.

The backslide arrives in the instrumental section, not at the end, and it lasts barely two seconds before he turns into a spin and rises onto his toes. Watching it today, what stands out is how little of the performance is the famous move. It works because everything around it is so controlled: long moments of stillness, then sudden bursts of speed, the glove catching the light, the hat as a prop. The moonwalk is the punchline of a joke that has been set up for two minutes.

Jackson later wrote in Moonwalk that he was unhappy immediately afterward, because he had intended to hold the spin on his toes for longer. He also described a phone call from Fred Astaire praising the performance, a story he told several times. We report both as Jackson's own account rather than independently verified facts.

The NBC broadcast drew a very large audience; figures of around 47 million viewers are widely reported, although exact numbers depend on how the ratings are counted. Billie Jean had already been number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for several weeks by the time of the taping, and Beat It was at number one when the special aired. So the performance did not create Thriller's success, which was already under way. What it did was turn a hit album into a cultural event, and turn Jackson from a singer people heard on the radio into a performer people talked about the next day.

The more lasting effect was on how pop music was presented on television. Motown 25 showed that a single, carefully staged performance could become the defining image of an artist. That idea fed straight into the long-form Thriller video at the end of 1983 and, a decade later, into the stripped-down staging of Jackson's 1993 Super Bowl halftime show.

Most viral dance moments rely on novelty. This one relies on structure. The Jacksons' medley reminds the audience who Michael was; the solo number shows who he had become. Stillness makes the movement readable on a small 1983 television screen. And the step itself is simple enough to attempt in a kitchen, which is exactly what a generation of viewers did.

If you want to understand the Thriller era in one clip, watch this performance before you watch any music video. It explains the persona the videos were built on: a performer who treats a stage as a frame and every pause as part of the choreography.