Like everyone else, we were caught by surprise when hearing about Michael Jackson's death.
Today, Derry brought in a bunch of DVDs of MJ - tons and tons of videos. He set up things in the kitchen flatscreen, looping a lot of Jackson's videos throughout the day.
At first, I figured it would be a silly thing, something that would cause people to stop and laugh, looking back at things like Captain EO.
But as it turns out, people paused from the hustle and bustle of their day. And small groups of two or three would linger a little while, trading stories and memories. It was quite nice, actually, and seemed a nice memorial to the man.
In Thriller, I had forgotten than Jackson ended up appearing as both a werewolf and a zombie. It took a lot of discussion with folks (and re-watching the video) to figure out exactly how all that worked itself out.
In particular, it was interesting to find out how many other people were (like me) genuinely scared of the zombies. Watching this on TV, we all remarked how well the makeup held up, over the years.
There were several moments where someone would say "Oh THAT guy, he was so scary" or "That zombie really creeped me out as a kid." It was interesting to see how influential this one video was. And how familiar some of the dance moves looked, even after all these years.
I was also reminded of a fantastic project called The White Glove Tracking Project - an open source project that offers up data from Jackson's famous performance of "Billie Jean."
One of my favorite videos from that project is here.
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