The Super Bowl halftime show is now one of the biggest stages in entertainment. Artists build entire album campaigns around getting it. None of that existed before 31 January 1993. Before that day, halftime was a break — marching bands, drill teams, a bit of filler while people went to the fridge. Then Michael Jackson walked onto the field at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, stood completely motionless for around 90 seconds, and the entire thing changed permanently.
The NFL only booked him because they had been humiliated the year before. At the 1992 Super Bowl, a rival network aired a live special of the comedy show In Living Color directly opposite halftime — and roughly 20 million viewers switched over. The NFL’s then executive director of special events, Jim Steeg, put it plainly: they knew they had to step it up a notch. Four weeks later, he and the producers were sitting in a Beverly Hills meeting with Jackson’s manager. Their mission was simple. Get Michael Jackson.
Super Bowl 27 1993 Halftime Show Full – Michael Jackson
Persuading him took a while, but what he delivered was worth it. The show opened with the voice of James Earl Jones — Darth Vader himself — introducing him. Then Jackson appeared to shoot up out of a giant video screen on one side of the stadium, then out of a second screen on the other side, before the real Jackson launched up through the stage floor in a burst of smoke.
And then he did nothing at all.
He stood there. Sunglasses on, arms at his sides, absolutely still, while nearly 98,000 people in that stadium lost their minds around him. He held it for roughly a minute and a half — an eternity on live television — before finally moving. It remains one of the most audacious things any performer has done on that stage, and it worked because he had the confidence to trust silence.
Don Mischer on Directing Michael Jackson’s Legendary Super Bowl Halftime Show | The Rich Eisen Show
What followed was a 13-minute medley of “Jam,” “Billie Jean,” “Black or White” and “We Are the World,” before an ending nobody expected from a football broadcast. 3,500 local children filled the field to form a giant mosaic, an enormous inflatable globe rose in the middle, and Jackson performed “Heal the World.” Those closing moments were, at the time, among the most-watched minutes in the history of television.
33.4 million Americans watched, and it became the first Super Bowl in history in which viewership rose during halftime.
The NFL never looked back. Every stadium-scale halftime spectacle since — Prince, Beyoncé, Rihanna, all of it — traces to that afternoon in Pasadena. And Jackson’s own view of what he was doing was characteristically blunt. He had told the organizers he was not interested in simply entertaining a football crowd. He wanted to do something for the world.