Michael Jackson loved Disney. The King of Pop carried that love from his own childhood, and he wanted his children to feel the same happiness he did. So he told them about it often.
His oldest son remembers those words well.
Prince Jackson, born in 1997, is Michael’s oldest child. These days he’s a grown man who runs a charity in Los Angeles, but back then he was just a small boy on a trip with his dad to one of the happiest places his father knew.
One moment from that day stuck with him. Prince walked up to a window, looked out, and saw a crowd of people below. They were waving. They were pointing cameras up at him and taking his picture.
He was too little to know why.
Years later, Prince sat down for an interview and told the story plainly. “I remember being in Disneyland and I went to the window and there were all these fans waving and taking pictures of me,” he said.
So what does a happy little boy do when a crowd waves up at him?
“I thought it was normal, so I just waved back.”
That’s the part that gets people. Prince had no idea his father was one of the most famous men on earth. To him, this was simply what a day out looked like. It took him years to work out that most kids never had a crowd gather under their window. Once he learned who his dad really was, he said, he realized it wasn’t normal at all.
Michael tried hard to give his children an ordinary life. Prince later explained why they sometimes wore masks in public. “He told us the reason for the masks was he wanted us to have our own life without him,” Prince said. Their father wanted them known for who they were, not just as his kids.
But the love of Disney, that one he passed straight down.
In another interview, Prince talked about where his own joy came from. “When I was younger my dad always told me about how Disney was such a happy place and I grew up on the cartoons,” he said. He still remembered the feeling of being small and seeing the characters come to life. “I remember when I was younger seeing Mickey Mouse and all of [the cartoon characters] and how happy I would feel and I know that was because of my dad.”
It’s a simple thing, a father handing his son something he had loved as a child. Michael did it with Disney, and it stuck.
Prince is older now, and he looks back on that window with a smile. He understands the day in a way the little boy at the glass never could.
Look through the photos of Michael with his children at Disneyland, and you can almost pick out the boy standing at the window.