Shield Supremacy

The Michael Jackson movie made $1 billion, and there's one part of his life it legally isn't allowed to mention. They spent $15 million reshooting the ending to cut it out. John Mulaney just brought it up on Conan's podcast, and the whole table lost it. Michael always explained Neverland the same way. He never got a childhood, so he built one: 2,700 acres, a Ferris wheel, a zoo, kids around all the time. Fans have been repeating that for 30 years. Mulaney's first line goes after the sympathy. Nobody born before 1910 had a childhood either, he says, and he's basically right. The 1900 census found 1.75 million American kids between 10 and 15 working jobs, almost one in five, and that's not counting the younger ones in the mills or selling newspapers on the street. The US didn't really ban child labor until 1938. Then he adds that those people didn't marry children with a giraffe as a witness. That's two real things smashed together. Neverland's zoo had four giraffes. And in Leaving Neverland, James Safechuck said Michael held a mock wedding with him in his bedroom when he was 10, and he still has the diamond ring. The movie couldn't touch any of this for a legal reason. A 1994 settlement with an earlier accuser, Jordan Chandler, says he can never be shown or even mentioned in a film, and once the estate's lawyers caught that, the whole third act had to go. None of it's settled, by the way. Michael was found not guilty on all 14 counts in 2005, his estate denies everything, and the Safechuck and Robson lawsuit doesn't go to trial until February 2028. Somebody spent $15 million keeping a billion-dollar movie away from this subject, and Mulaney got there in one sentence while Conan was still laughing.