Story Highlights
- Michael Jackson created a dance move that defied gravity
- To accomplish it he patented a special shoe
(CNN) — Michael Jackson's musical achievements are legend: the first artist to win eight Grammys in one night; the first artist to sell more than a million digital tracks in one week.
His impact on dance has been just as powerful. Fans around the world have tried to imitate his smooth slides and spins, his racy crotch grab and pelvic thrust and, of course, his trademark moonwalk, with varying degrees of success.
But there's one move that stunned the watching world: the gravity-defying tilt he debuted in his 1988 music video for "Smooth Criminal." In one scene, Jackson and a few of his dancers lean forward 45 degrees, backs straight, feet flat upon the floor, and hold the pose until they return upright with little apparent effort.
"It's not really possible physically to do it," said neurosurgeon Dr. Nishant Yagnick, a longtime Jackson fan who practices at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India. "He was cheating gravity."
"You can bend a maximum of 25 or 30 degrees forward before you fall on your face," added his colleague Dr. Manjul Tripathi, another fan. "I tried to do it, and I fell."