Special ‘Moonwalk’ Shoes, 2 Walk Of Fame Stars & More: 6 Lesser-Known Facts About Michael Jackson

The King of Pop, in all probability, the only music artist who has not one, but two stars on the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles.

While one star belongs solely to him for his chart-topping hits, the other belongs to musical group The Jackson 5, later known as The Jacksons, an American boyband which MJ was a part of in his childhood. In 1980 the brothers were honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as the Jacksons and were inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.

Moonwalk is one dance move by MJ that will always be remembered for ages to come. Whether or not the popstar invented the dance move is subject to debate and much contention, but we can all agree that no one aced the Moonwalk quite like Jackson did.

However, the magic of the Moonwalk has a lot to do with the shoes the popstar wore. In MJ’s music video for the song ‘Smooth Criminal’, he wore a special pair of shoes that involved hooking retractable pegs with a slot in the heels. It was so special, Michael had the design patented to dissuade impersonators from recreating the move.

The popstar’s legendary ‘Moonwalk’ shoes were put up for auction in 2018 by GWC Auctions for an estimated $10,000.

The music video for MJ’s classic hit ‘Thriller’ is still regarded as one of the most iconic and innovative music videos to grace our TV screens. However, getting the music video into public domain wasn’t an easy task for the King of Pop.

The music video, which had horror themes, had hit a wrong note with Jehovah's Witnesses who threatened to banish MJ when they found out about the video idea.

The popstar, however, agreed to film the music video and put out a disclaimer clarifying that he, in no way, ‘endorses the occult’.

Michael Jackson, soon, became a force to be reckoned with in the music industry and scripted history with his song ‘Billie Jean’. Right up till the release of the song, MTV, a music channel in the US, was known for airing music videos by white artists.

MJ’s ‘Billie Jean’ became the first music video by a black artist to air on MTV.

The day Michael Jackson passed away, major tech websites around the world crashed including Google, Twitter and AOL search, so much so that a CNN article headline read, ‘Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him.’

On June 25, 2009, when the news of his death broke at 3:15 pm, Google, Twitter and AOL suffered an outage due to a large volume of people searching about MJ’s death.

As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton's blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.

After Jackson died on June 25, 2009, several conspiracy theories about the actor’s death started surfacing., The actor had reportedly died of a drug overdose. However, there are allegations that his doctor could have possibly poisoned him.

Jackson's personal physician, Conrad Murray, was charged with involuntary manslaughter for the pop singer's death, from a massive overdose of the general anesthetic propofol and was jailed for two years.