Moonwalk who invented

Here's Where It Is Now. He saw me do the moonwalk. Manning also went on to add that there was no dancing and no music at all. Though Jackson was not the first person to do this dance, he is the one who made the dance popular as it still is, almost thirty-seven years after it's debut. Not to mention, he really perfected it in every way, which is why it will always be a very memorable dance that will live on forever. Ryan admits at the moment, he felt like a teenage boy, completely uncomfortable.

Via: Twitter. Share Share Tweet Email. Related Topics Celebrity. These three kids taught it to me. They gave me the basics--and I had been doing it a lot in private.

I had practiced it together with certain other steps. All I was really sure of was that on the bridge to 'Billie Jean' I was going to walk backward and forward at the same time, like walking on the moon.

Daniel was a seasoned professional who was actually three years older than Jackson, who was then 24, so you can judge for yourself whether Jackson crediting "kids" was a term of endearment or a deflection meant to bolster his sense of street cred.

Jackson had been a fan of Daniel's. Backstage, they met for the first time, and that began a friendship that led to not only the moonwalk lessons but co-choreography credit for Daniel on the "Bad" and "Smooth Criminal" music videos.

The best existing footage of Daniel doing the moonwalk comes from a "Top Of The Pops" appearance that wowed England.

Daniel does not take credit for inventing the dance, saying it naturally emerged out of the developing popping and locking style, which emphasized sudden halts or pauses in a performance over sheer fluidity of motion.

If you have secretly wondered all these years why the dance was called the moonwalk, but never been able to publicly admit it, rest easy--you're not alone. Jackson may have believed that the illusion of being able to "walk backward and forward at the same time" looked like "walking on the moon," but probably not many other people thought: Aha! Exactly like Neil Armstrong! But the name he coined for it caught on, of course. Michel somehow called the backslide the moonwalk. And commercially, I think, maybe, it worked," he added, chuckling at the understatement of that remark.

It's not a gravity-defiance thing, per se. In the mid-'80s, shortly after Jackson made it the rage, one of the most legendary black entertainers from the first half of the 20th century, Cab Calloway, was reported to have gone into the move while performing in a Manhattan run of shows.

Only it was called The Buzz back then. Footage of some of Calloway's astounding footwork from the '30s shows a lot of moves that would definitely count as part of the evolution that led to popping and locking, though not quite anything that would strike a fan of contemporary hip-hop dance as an exact precedent.

Other performers of that era also had slippery moves that involved illusions of moving while staying in place, if not the backwards-as-forwards magic of the backslide.

But when you look at Bill Bailey from the '50s, it's pretty much all there. At least that "escalator" illusion that Daniel spoke of is. And he does it for almost 15 seconds in the relevant clip, as opposed to the five or so that Jackson spent moonwalking at Motown But Jackson did add some signature arm and shoulder moves to his version of the dance.

David Bowie also did something akin to the moonwalk in the opening moments of a performance of "Aladdin Sane," and although the term hadn't been coined at the time, he had the added benefit of really seeming like he was from the moon.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Jackson's Motown 25 performance, 30 years later, is that his first reaction at the conclusion of his appearance was to feel insecure about it. This is the performance that totally blew everyone away--and he said something didn't come out right.

Whatever was going on in his mind, we would never know it. We all know that it was a mind-blowing performance, and it just took him to another level. In his autobiography, Jackson went into detail about the reasons for his odd dissatisfaction with his Motown 25 performance--which apparently didn't have anything to do with his moonwalk execution. I knew I had done my best and felt good, so good. But at the same time I felt disappointed in myself. His "moonwalk" dance move is just one of them, and the King of Pop had help learning this signature showstopper.

Professional dancer Derek "Cooley" Jaxson says he was one of the people who showed Jackson how to do the "moonwalk," which he said was based on a different move called "the backslide. So it's an illusion," Jaxson said. And you keep continuing in a circle. Jaxson made a name for himself in the early '80s as a regular performer on TV shows like "Solid Gold" and "Soul Train. I can't feel it,' and we're like, 'Feel what? You just do it,'" Jaxson said.