25 years ago yesterday Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” debuted. Yesterday, 73 fans reenacted the dance at Madame Tussaud‘s in Times Square in an attempt to break the Guinness record for the most people to do the dance at once. Local ABC report, with video, here, and a nice account from the Times‘s City Room blog here. (Photo credit goes to the latter.)
Alas, the Times story contains the bad news that the record had already been broken last weekend by a group of over 800 dancers in Austin, Texas, part of a worldwide “Thriller” dance-off that included over 4,000 people across the globe. The Texans, as the Village Voice‘s news blog snarked, “presumably [danced] with their thumbs in their beltloops.”
The full 13-minute original, which I tried to pretend I hated in the 8th grade but like everyone else was actually blown away by, is here (sorry, embedding disabled).