This article is for quizzes on Thursday January 14th...
"Smooth Criminal" is the seventh single from American recording artist Michael Jackson's 1987 Bad album. The song contains a fast-paced beat intertwined with Jackson's lyrics about a woman named Annie, who has been violently attacked in her apartment by a "smooth" assailant. First broadcast on television as a video in early October, it was released as a single on October 21, 1988, and peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100.
The refrain of the song contains the phrase "Annie, are you OK?" This is a phrase used in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training courses, and Michael Jackson is known to have taken a CPR course. Resusci Anne, otherwise known as "Annie" in English-speaking countries, is the name of a mannequin commonly used in CPR training. As part of the course, trainees are taught to say "Annie, are you OK?" to the dummy in order to check that the patient is conscious and responsive
In the music video, Michael Jackson and the dancers immediately around him perform a seemingly impossible forward lean. To accomplish this maneuver, a hitching mechanism which Jackson co-patented was built into the floor of the stage and the performers' shoes, thereby allowing performers to lean without needing to keep their centers of mass directly over their feet. The system consists of pegs that rise from the stage at the appropriate moment and special shoes with ankle supports and cutouts in the heels which can slide over the pegs and be temporarily attached to the stage.
In the patent, it is stated that the illusion in the music video was achieved by means of harnesses and cables which had to be connected to and disconnected from the floor by stagehands, a claim that is inconsistent with the footage itself in which shiny objects resembling pegs later used in live performances appear from underneath the dancers' shoes as the illusion is concluded
