Sentimental Paleontology: He Was Here to Change the World

I begin writing this post with very little idea what I am going to say. As far as I am concerned, the ultimate, definitive, never-to-be-surpassed post about Captain EO already exists, courtesy of the superbly insightful FoxxFur. You can read it here, and you should. I won't be offended if you read it before, or even instead of, my post. It really is a masterful summation of why Captain EO works, or if it doesn't exactly work, why it nonetheless achieves a sort of endearing somethingness that I don't even have words for.

See, I'm barely one paragraph into this thing and I'm already at loose ends. Am I finally in over my head? Have I at last discovered my limits when it comes to Disneyland blogging?

Has Captain EO defeated me?

The answer is contained within the question. No, Captain EO has not defeated me. Captain EO is not a defeating kind of character; that is the whole point.

Let me start over.

I vividly remember when this short film debuted in Tomorrowland's Magic Eye Theater. How could I not? The TV ad spot showed up in pretty much every commercial break that summer. As a nine-year-old with very little celebrity awareness, I was only vaguely aware of George Lucas and had never heard of Francis Ford Coppola, but Michael Jackson? Now that name had cachet, even with me.

But maybe—and this is where this narrative goes off the rails—not enough.

My readers are not my therapists and now is not the time to go into the reasons behind my lack of celebrity awareness as a child, but let's just say that I knew Jackson more by reputation than any personal appreciation of his art. I knew what he looked and sounded like, but I didn't own any of his albums, never watched any of his videos (except Thriller, 'cause everyone watched Thriller), and at any given point until well into my teens, I probably couldn't have named more than three or four of his songs off the top of my head.

In short, while I certainly understood on an intellectual level that Captain EO was a big freakin' deal, the thought gave me no visceral thrill. I was interested in the attraction out of curiosity, but I balked at the massive queue it garnered, and my parents—both of them, on separate occasions—vetoed the very idea. They hadn't spent all that money on Disneyland tickets to sit down and watch a movie. With Michael Jackson in it.* I think I only wound up seeing the show once during its initial run from 1986 to 1993, and I remember thinking “Well, that...happened.”** I hardly retained any of it. It came and went without leaving much of an impression on me.

That was then. Time passed. Cue the rise of the internet, the phenomenon of online media-sharing in general , and eventually the birth of YouTube. Years after the fact, well into adulthood and with a greater familiarity with the now-faded star's portfolio garnered through time alone...I finally got a chance to revisit this thoroughly odd little film.

It must be a fairly rare condition to be able to interpret Captain EO through a lens of nostalgia for the 1980s without any special nostalgic affection for the show itself. When I do so, the sheer Eighties-ness of it, especially the visual design, is frankly jaw-dropping, nigh-overwhelming. Mullets on backup dancers ain't the half of it. Equally jaw-dropping is the recurring realization that none of it was meant to be as camp as it now appears.

The whole thing is laced with a sincerity, an earnestness even, that is as bizarre as it is heartwarming. Not only is Captain EO, the film, a shoddy piece of work by almost any objective measure, but Captain EO, the character, is a ridiculous premise: a Manic Pixie Space Hero with a magical rainbow tee-shirt and excellent dance moves. While watching, we are constantly forced to reconcile the notion of a performer portraying this absurd character with the fact that said performer takes himself too seriously not to play said character straight.

I mean, what?

And then there's the Michael Jackson mystique. When you watch the video linked below (because you are going to watch it, right?), take note of the framing when EO arrives on set—rising out of the floor, his back to the camera, only cutting to a view of his face after we have had ample time for anticipatory geeking out. Because OMG, it's Michael Jackson! This is even more pronounced in the preshow film, which I finally (re-) discovered yet more years down the line, when the star's sudden death occasioned the revival of the film as the “Captain EO Tribute” in both Disneyland and Epcot. The preshow has aspects of a miniature “making of” special, with shots of dancers rehearsing,*** George Lucas overseeing creature sculpting and set design, camera operators at work, etc....but only fleeting, shadowy glimpses of Jackson. It's only the preshow, you see. It isn't time yet.

King of Pop? More like a junior god.

It's tempting to veer off into pontifications about Jackson's private life, the drama and scandal that accompanied his fall from stardom and the tragedy of his later years and life's end, but that would be off-topic for this blog. It's worth noting, however, that in portraying EO he was really doing nothing more than playing himself—or his internal image of himself at that point in time. Look at EO's radiant smile after he transforms the Supreme Leader. That's not acting. MJ was no actor. That's a real feeling of triumph on display.

That's why it feels tacky to mock Captain EO, even though it is so very mockable. It's that sincerity I mentioned. You can't approach it with the same detached irony you might apply to similarly campy works that aren't so unabashedly idealistic. Thematically and tonally, EO reminds me of nothing so much as a Saturday morning cartoon of the same era, while utterly lacking the latter's merchandise-driven reasons for existing. It's crappy art, but it was made to be art, first and foremost. Its twin messages about inner beauty and the power of good music may be corny, but they are, again, sincere.

Is that why Disney hasn't leveraged the film for merchandise tie-ins as much as we might have expected? I'm sure the foremost issue is a legal one regarding the use of Jackson's image, but I should think there's more to market about this concept than a few plushies and grossly overpriced copies of the rainbow tee-shirt. If they could sort out the image thing, it would be a great candidate for a comic mini-series like the ones that have been launched for the Haunted Mansion, Big Thunder Mountain, and other attractions. Just as an example.

In the meantime, I'll guess we'll have to create our own merch:

Oh, don't act so surprised.

I'm running dry on specific thoughts (that weren't amply covered by Foxxfur) here, so I'll close by noting that Captain EO is one of a handful of Disney attractions to have its own TV Tropes page. That's got to be worth something, right?

What a strange little film. And how lucky we were to have something that brazenly weird, not just once but twice. I'd take it back again over anything else that the Magic Eye Theater has ever shown us.

* Baby Boomers, amirite?

** Or whatever it was we thought in the Eighties that meant roughly the same thing.

*** Including a woman wearing a Cats tee-shirt with the sleeves and collar torn off, because Eighties.