MTV didn’t go on the air until August 1981. A few months before that, Michael Jackson and his brothers already had a music video that looked more like a movie than a TV clip.
The song was “Can You Feel It.” Michael wrote it with his older brother Jackie, and it opened the Jacksons’ 1980 album “Triumph.” Michael and his younger brother Randy sang the lead. It’s a big, booming song with a simple message. Tito Jackson has said it’s one of those songs that tell people we’re all equal.
Michael wanted a video big enough to match it. He was only 22, and he’s reportedly the one who came up with the idea.
So the brothers didn’t just stand on a stage and sing. The video was reportedly only the second one the Jacksons had ever shot on real film instead of videotape.
The original film was called “The Triumph,” and it ran about nine minutes. It opens with a narrator with a deep, smooth voice setting the scene. Then the brothers show up in shiny satin. They glow against a sky full of stars and sprinkle gold dust down on the city and the people below. Two of Tito’s young sons, Taj and Taryll, reportedly turn up in it too.
All five brothers are in it: Jackie, Tito, Marlon, Michael and Randy. Here it is.
The Jacksons light up the sky
For 1981, those effects were a very big deal. Billboard later called the video “a cinematic masterpiece with strikingly advanced visual effects for its time.”
In 2001, it was voted one of the 100 best music videos of all time in a poll for MTV’s 20th birthday. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 12 on its list of Michael’s greatest videos. The song did well too. It went all the way to No. 1 on the US dance chart and No. 6 in the UK.
So who built that glowing world? It was a Hollywood effects studio called Robert Abel and Associates, best known back then for award-winning TV commercials.
Soon after the Jacksons’ video, that same team helped create scenes for Disney’s “Tron,” the 1982 movie about a man who gets pulled inside a computer. The studio worked on the movie’s opening titles and on one of its big scenes inside the computer world.
So the people who made Michael and his brothers glow in the sky were also part of one of the most famous sci-fi movies of the 1980s. You can still find the video on Michael’s official collections today, including the bonus disc of the 2010 box set “Michael Jackson’s Vision.”