Disney's Captain EO Captured Michael Jackson at the Height of His Powers and Was a Fascinating, Maddening Glimpse at Empty Spectacles to Come
As readers here are perhaps aware, I am fascinated by the musician Michael Jackson, who I consider to be extremely talented but also a little odd. I wrote about his strangely obscure 1996 short film Michael Jackson’s Ghosts for My World of Flops at The A.V. Club and covered Moonwalker and Michael Jackson’s Halloween for The Happy Place.
Despite my enduring fascination with Jackson it has somehow taken me thirty-six years and a quarter century as a pop culture writer to finally get around to seeing 1986’s Captain EO, a legendary 4-D science-fiction short film directed by Francis Ford Coppola and co-written and Executive Produced by George Lucas that has played at Disney theme parks throughout the decades.
Why did it take so long for me to avail myself of this important piece of pop culture? It’s probably because my brain is weird and also a little screwy, and thought, correctly, that Captain EO was very specifically created to be a theme park ride to be experienced rather than something to be watched in 2-D on a television.
The ideal time to watch Captain EO, consequently, was in 1986, when I was ten years old, Michael Jackson was the biggest star in the world, the seismic aftershocks of Thriller were still being felt, George Lucas was just a few years removed from triumphantly concluding the original trilogy with Return of the Jedi and I could not think of a more magical place than Disney Land.
Captain EO should be watched by children hopped up on caffeine and sugar and the natural high of being in The Happiest Place on Earth who have no idea how tragic the future would prove for the impossibly beautiful, gifted genius at its core.
Unfortunately no can watch Captain EO in that context anymore but you can log onto Youtube and watch it in an infinitely lesser, degraded form.
My main takeaway from watching Captain EO in 2-D on my television is that watching it in its original form must have been an incredible experience. I can only imagine how exhilarating it must have been.
It was shot to showcase cutting-edge 3-D technology that’s so impressive and audacious that even in 2-D, I got a strong sense of how it must have looked and felt (4-D being a step beyond 3-D in adding a physical dimension of wind and lights and precipitation and whatnot) and what an overwhelming experience it must have been.
Some things should only be seen in 3-D, or 4-D. Captain EO is one of them.
Captain EO casts Jackson as the notorious title character, the leader of a ragtag band of aliens who look like the fantastical creatures of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth but with an unmistakable Jar Jar Binks quality that renders them both visually impressive and obnoxious.
According to IMDB Trivia, “Disney wanted to change Michael Jackson's voice because they felt his voice was too high-pitched and were afraid people would not take him seriously. Jackson was unaware of this decision until he was told writer/producer George Lucas vetoed it.”
The idea that Disney would change the voice of the most famous entertainer in the world seems crazy on the surface but Roberto Benigni had a similarly distinctive, unmistakable voice and Breckin Meyer dubbed him for the ill-fated English version of his Pinocchio.
Captain EO establishes immediately that its star is no actor.It doesn’t help that a screenplay co-written by director Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Electric Dreams’ Rusty Lemorade burdens Jackson with wooden dialogue that would defeat even seasoned thespians like, “The Command considers us a bunch of losers. But we're gonna do it right this time! Cause we're the best. If we don't we'll be drummed out of the corps!”
Watching Jackson wrestle bravely but unsuccessfully with those lines you can see, feel and hear him rehearsing endlessly, understandably nervous that he wouldn’t do a good job because he was fundamentally incapable of playing anyone other than Michael Jackson.
Jackson may ostensibly be playing dashing, world-saving cosmic hero Captain EO but he’s really just Michael Jackson in outer space playing with his muppety little space buddies particularly Hooter, an elephantine comic relief sidekick and tiresome bore.
Yes, Captain EO contains plenty of what The Onion has accurately dubbed the George Lucas comedy fans have come to know and reluctantly tolerate.
Jackson ends up in the sinister realm of The Supreme Leader (Anjelica Huston), an icy hellscape out of the feverish wet dreams of H.R. Giger, all silver and black and alien.
Because Captain EO exists to serve Jackson’s ego as well as the needs of the Disney corporation, the handsome hero uses the power of music to transform the Supreme Leader’s henchmen into dancers before ultimately changing the Supreme Leader herself from a Kabuki-like Spider-Woman into a beautiful, gentle Earth Mother.
The awkwardness and stiffness that characterizes Jackson’s performance as an actor dissipates completely when he performs first “We Are Here to Save the World”, yet another solid if less than transcendent anthem about saving humanity from itself and then “You’re Just Another Part of Me.”
Jackson was, if not at the height of his powers when Captain EO was made, very near the height of those extraordinary gifts. Like every Jackson short film that I’ve written about, Captain EO has tremendous value because it prominently features Michael Jackson singing and dancing. Those are two things he was VERY good at. Possibly the best in the history of the world!
As an actor, however, Jackson was cursed to forever remain an amateur. He reportedly was keen on playing Jar Jar Binks, but he wanted to do it in prosthetics and make-up rather than CGI. That clashed with Lucas’ vision of the character yet thanks to Captain EO we never have to wonder what it would be like if Lucas and Jackson were to collaborate on a sub-par space opera that’s technically sophisticated yet dramatically inert and brutally unfunny.
Though Coppola directed, Captain EO feels, for better but primarily for worse, like a post-original trilogy George Lucas production. From a technological perspective it’s a marvel that pushes the medium of 3-D forward by leaps and bounds and essentially created the format of 4-D but from a narrative and storytelling perspective it’s a dud.
The dialogue is awful. The plot is the usual messianic self-mythologizing wedded to idealism at its most wildly narcissistic. The characters are cutesy and annoying. Jackson’s acting is an embarrassment.
Yet I suspect that none of that mattered to people lucky enough to experience Captain EO as it was meant to be experienced. The sheer spectacle of it all must have been so dazzling that it made plot, dialogue and characters seem like minor, irrelevant concerns.
Captain EO feels like the most 1986 movie ever as well as a vision of what was to come. In the decades ahead, many of the biggest and most successful movies would feel unmistakably like theme park rides designed to showcase the latest cutting-edge technology more than human stories about people and emotions.
3-D would have its moment in a very big way, thanks in no small part due to James Cameron and Avatar, which pushed the medium forward in a manner very analogous to Captain EO. Then that moment passed.
If 3-D seems to have come and gone, the age of spectacle and technology is still going strong. Only this time around it’s Marvel and D.C and the post-Lucas Star Wars franchise pushing it forward instead of Lucas or Coppola.
Captain EO runs a mere seventeen minutes yet it cost seventeen million dollars to make. Every dollar is up onscreen. No expense was spared yet the whole thing feels strangely underwhelming without 3-D. Then again, 3-D/4-D was the whole goddamn point so while I have SEEN Captain EO I have not really EXPERIENCED it and it looks like I probably never will.
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