Michael Jackson The making of Black or White

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• published: 05 Jul 2017
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The music video for "Black or White" was first broadcast on MTV, BET, VH1, and Fox (giving them their highest Nielsen ratings ever)as well as the BBC's Top Of The Pops in the UK on November 14, 1991.Along with Jackson, it featured Macaulay Culkin, Tess Harper, and George Wendt.[The video was directed by John Landis, who previously directed Thriller. It was choreographed by Vincent Paterson. It premiered simultaneously in 27 countries, with an audience of 500 million viewers, the most ever for a music video.[23] The first few minutes of the video feature an extended version of the song's intro. During this interlude (sometimes compared to Marty Callner's 1984 "We're Not Gonna Take It" video for Twisted Sister[25]) an 11-year-old kid (Macaulay Culkin) is dancing to rock music in his bedroom at night, causing four baseball team bobbleheads (from left to right, the Giants, the Pirates, the Dodgers, and the Rangers) to bobble. This attracts the attention of his grouchy father (George Wendt), who furiously orders him to stop playing the music and go to bed. After his father storms out and slams the door behind him (causing a Michael Jackson poster on the door to fall off and its glass frame to smash), the boy retaliates by setting up large speaker cabinets (with levels of "LOUD", "LOUDER", and "ARE YOU NUTS!?!", respectively; with the dial turned up all the way to "ARE YOU NUTS!?!") behind his father's reclining chair, donning leather gloves and sunglasses, strapping on a Wolfgang guitar and playing a power chord, and telling the father to "Eat this!".The sound then shatters and destroys the house windows and sends his father (seated in the chair) halfway around the world, where the actual song begins.[21] The kid's mother (Tess Harper), comments that his father will be very upset when he gets back. The album version of the song does not feature Culkin's nor Wendt's voice; they are replaced by voice actors performing a similar intro. The boy's father crashes in Africa, and Jackson sings "Black or White", surrounded by various cultures scene-by-scene The video shows scenes in which African hunters begin dancing by using moves from West African dance, with Jackson following their moves and them mirroring his; as do, in sequence, traditional Thai dancers, Plains Native Americans (located at the Vasquez Rocks formation in California), an Odissi dancer from India and a group of Russians (wearing Ukrainian clothing and dancing Hopak). Jackson walks through visual collages of fire (defiantly declaring "I ain't scared of no sheets; I ain't scared of nobody"), referring to KKK torch ceremonies before a mock rap scene shared with Culkin and other children. The group collectively states, "I'm not gonna spend my life being a color." The final verse is performed by Jackson on a large sculpted torch, which the camera pans out to reveal as the Statue of Liberty. Jackson is seen singing on Lady Liberty's torch surrounded by other famous world edifices including The Giza Sphinx, Hagia Sophia, Pamukkale, The Parthenon, Taj Mahal, St. Basil's Cathedral, Pyramids of Giza, Golden Gate Bridge, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower. At the end of the song, several different people, of differing races and nationalities, including actor Glen Chin, model Tyra Banks, actress Khrystyne Haje, and actor Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter dance as they morph into one another (shown as "talking heads"). This technique, previously executed without digital assistance in the Godley & Creme video for "Cry", known as morphing, had been previously used only in films such as Willow and Terminator 2. The morphing visual effects were created by Pacific Data Images. The music video of the song appears on the video albums: Dangerous: The Short Films (long version), Video Greatest Hits – HIStory (long version, without graffiti on VHS version but with graffiti on DVD version), Number Ones (short version), and Michael Jackson's Vision (long version without graffiti).