“Captain EO”

It is really, really hard to explain “Captain EO” to anyone who doesn’t remember it. And by “doesn’t remember it,” I mean from its original release. For preference you should remember Thriller. The whole phenomenon of Michael Jackson is a bit like that, honestly. This is because he doesn’t have the same cultural footprint as a lot of other phenomena along those lines. You still hear the Beatles and Frank Sinatra, but Jackson has few lasting hits for someone with his level of musical fame. There’s a history there that takes unpacking.

Captain Eo (Jackson) and his ragtag bunch of puppets are on some mission or another. It’s implied that they aren’t always good at this. You can tell, because the word “ragtag” appears in a lot of plot descriptions from a lot of people. They’re under attack from forces for reasons. They manage to crash into the homing beacon that will take them where they want to go, and they sneak out to do a thing. They are taken captive by the forces of it doesn’t matter. They are brought to the Supreme Leader (Anjelica Huston), and Eo tells her that he has a way to unlock her beauty. How else but by musical number.

So okay, you’re not expecting high drama from a gimmicky 3D Michael Jackson short that aired at the Disney parks. True enough. It’s also true that we are likely looking at Yet Another Reference To The Serials, which means starting in the middle of things is fine. It’s just that it doesn’t feel as though you’d understand more of it if you’d seen the previous episode. It’s a marginal set-up to the two songs, one of which only feels like half a song. That’s it. That’s the film.

It was, on the other hand, extraordinarily expensive. Almost everyone involved pulled in an enormous salary. You’ll have noticed Jackson and Huston, of course. It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It was executive-produced and written by George Lucas. Its cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, has won three Oscars and worked with some of the biggest names in the business. Peter Anderson, who filmed it, has developed any number of the modern 3D techniques. Beyond Jackson’s songs, there is score by James Horner. All that money before a single costume is made (by Broadway legend John Napier) or drop of makeup is applied (by Rick Baker).

All for, let’s be clear, a seventeen-minute film that aired in a theatre at a theme park. Okay, several theme parks, but still. Did anyone go to a Disney park just for “Captain EO”? It seems unlikely. There was plenty of merchandising, but the movie is only accessible on YouTube; it has never had a formal release. It did not get a soundtrack release. The main song would not have an official release until 2004. So it’s true that Space Mountain cost more to build, but at the time, it was the most expensive short film ever made.

It’s also true that a seventeen-minute film holds guests in place for seventeen minutes. The theatre at Epcot seats 550, it seems, which works out, if my math is right, to about an average ride capacity of not-quite two thousand people an hour. On the other hand, that’s a maximum capacity and not an average one, and if you show up during the show and it turns out there’s a theatre’s full of people already there and you have to wait through one full extra show, I can’t imagine you’d care that much about seeing it again. Even with a pre-show telling you about the making-of and including yet more Disney park music by Richard Bellis.

Which is one of the reasons it went away, of course. There’s another. The show closed in the mid-’90s, when its star’s legacy was . . . complicated. I’m not getting into it. Believe what you want to believe about it. On the other hand, it’s true that viewership was down from its height and the film was playing in valuable Tomorrowland real estate, and “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience” took its place until “Captain EO” returned after Jackson’s death. Now, the theatre is just a theatre, and maybe it’ll be something interesting in the days to come. It’d be a nice change.