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Few people know this, but Esperanto has probably never enjoyed more airtime than on June 14 1995, when 60 million people watched Diane Sawyer’s live interview of Michael Jackson and his wife Lisa Marie Presley on American TV (ABC) – and were shown Jackson’s controversial promo/short film "HIStory", which included actors speaking the following lines in Esperanto:

Diversaj nacioj de la mondo konstruas ĉi tiun skulptaĵon en la nomo de tutmonda patrineco kaj amo kaj la kuraca forto de muziko

Venu ĉi tien!

The film itself has been thoroughly analysed (with myself once taking part in a discussion), but one question remains unanswered:

Who helped Michael Jackson with the Esperanto part of the script?

(I would not be surprised if the idea was his, but I would be surprised if he had spent time learning the language, so I guess somebody in his team must have had an Esperanto connection somewhere, somehow… It would be interesting to know the story!)

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  • This might interest you it will explain a lot of things as to why MJ used it dancingwiththeelephant.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/…
    – elke hassell
    May 10, 2017 at 0:07
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    I don't know either, but having explored once how non-speakers of Esperanto make use of the language (for artistic reasons etc.), I can only think of a real Esperanto speaker as the source of the translation. Otherwise there would be the problems with spelling, grammar, or mistranslations as I encountered in many such cases.
    – Cyril Robert Brosch
    May 10, 2017 at 7:26
  • @CyrilBrosch – That is really interesting. Is your exploration available in written form somewhere? :-)
    – Bjørn
    May 10, 2017 at 11:21
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    Yes, but only in German: interlinguistik-gil.de/wb/media/beihefte/23/…
    – Cyril Robert Brosch
    May 10, 2017 at 18:48
  • That’s fine, a lot of people read German (myself included). Thanks for sharing!
    – Bjørn
    May 10, 2017 at 19:43

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