Daniel Alarcón
Appearances
Serial
The Good Whale - Ep. 1
All told, it's estimated that some 3 million individual whales were killed by humans in the 20th century. By the early 1970s, scientists understood that whales were far more scarce than we'd all previously thought, and began warning that the steep declines they were seeing in wild populations might be irreversible.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
In response, the Save the Whales movement was born, with the goal of ending commercial whaling worldwide, a bold, quixotic idea to convince the countries that still practiced whaling to simply stop. I'm telling you all this because in a way, everything that happens to Keiko a couple of decades later is a result of it, of this idea that these creatures were worth protecting.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
And it's also when this next significant person in Keiko's life enters the story, a guy by the name of Dave Phillips. I was pretty young then.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
It was the late 70s. The Save the Whales campaign was just starting to pick up steam, and Dave wanted in. So he packed up his life, drove his turquoise Volkswagen Rabbit out to California, and soon joined the movement to do his part.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
So yeah, he was kind of a hippie, but he was a hippie with a degree in biology who found he was too impatient to spend his adult life in a lab studying the minutia of wildlife without doing anything to save it. Given the scale of the environmental crisis he saw, science moved too slowly for him. The central message for the Save the Whales campaign was simple. Whales are not commodities.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
They're living beings. This message was everywhere. There were bumper stickers and t-shirts emblazoned with the words Save the Whales. The slogan itself becoming so ubiquitous it was almost cliche, played as a punchline. There were Save the Whales marches and rallies across the world, and Dave was there for all of it.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Most importantly, he was there in 1982, a pivotal moment in his career, when the International Whaling Commission caved to the pressure and voted to impose a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling. They'd done it. They'd saved the whales from what many felt was their almost certain extinction. So Dave learned two things. One, to succeed, your message had to be everywhere.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
If your slogan becomes a joke, so be it. At least people are hearing the message. And two, whales are magic. It's that simple. They're just one of those species that people fall in love with. A decade later, in the 90s, Dave's still in the environmental movement, still advocating for wild whales and attending meetings. And it's at one of these meetings in Glasgow when he gets a call.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
He's out to dinner with a few colleagues when somebody comes up to the table and says, Is Mr. Phillips here?
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
I haven't introduced you to Dick Donner yet, but I did mention his wife, Lauren Schuller Donner. Together, they were a legit Hollywood power couple, producing or directing blockbusters like The Goonies and Superman. Dick has since passed away, but Lauren told me that they both were self-proclaimed animal lunatics. David actually worked with the couple before.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
They asked him to consult on a few lines of pro-dolphin dialogue in the buddy cop movie Lethal Weapon 2.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
But what I can say is that the people who work there, they truly, sincerely love Keiko. They are, for all intents and purposes, his pod.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
It was small, barely a scene, but Dick felt good about it. And now he had something bigger in mind. Free Willy, a movie he and Lauren were putting together. And Dick wanted Dave's help.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
The whaling ban Dave had fought for all those years ago protected whales from commercial slaughter. But some species were still captured or killed on a smaller scale. The way Dave saw it, Dick and Lauren were offering him an opportunity to finish the job he'd started all those years ago. A chance to save the rest of the whales.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Dave and the producers started with something simple, an 800 number that would pop up on the screen at the end of the movie credits. The idea was that people would call, leave their address, and Dave's organization, Earth Island Institute, would send them a packet of information about the plight of whales across the world, how they could help.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Nothing too elaborate. You called the number, you got a kit. But fast forward a year and once the movie was released and word got out that the star of Free Willy was sick and still living in a tiny pool in Mexico, well, calling an 800 number and getting a kit just didn't feel like enough. Dave remembers Dick phoning him up again and saying, We're being crucified down here. You've got to help us.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Now Dick was proposing something far more ambitious, something that honestly sounded a little nuts. He said, you've got to get involved in saving Keiko. Rescuing Keiko from his life in captivity and releasing him back into the ocean, like in the movie. Did you immediately say, like, this is something I can do? Or were you like, this man is crazy?
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
What fans of the movie wanted was to see their favorite celebrity orca back in the ocean. But that wasn't so simple. First off, nothing quite this ambitious had ever been attempted. True, other captive marine mammals had been released to the wild, but they hadn't been in captivity nearly as long as Keiko. So saving Keiko would require an extraordinary effort.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Dick Donner wanted Dave to do it, but this wasn't exactly Dave's specialty. His whole career had been focused on big, huge problems, protecting the ocean and saving wild whales, plural. What Dick was proposing in response to the public outcry around the movie was much narrower in scope, saving the whale, singular.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Dave remembers telling Dick Donner essentially, thanks, but I'm not the right guy for this job. But it seems Dick wouldn't take no for an answer.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
And, you know, there was something about this that resonated. Think of it this way. If you're Dave, or an environmentalist of his generation, crazy doesn't necessarily mean impossible. Just a few years before, in 1990, an estimated 200 million people took part in Earth Day celebrations. The most ever, by far. This is the decade of the Earth Summit in Rio, the Kyoto Protocol.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Big, coordinated global actions to combat climate change and environmental damage. In 1985, scientists announced that they discovered a hole in the ozone layer. And by the 90s, an international treaty was in place to ban some of the chemicals thought to have created it. And it seemed to work. The ozone layer began to heal itself.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Even I remember, and I was just a kid, those years were my childhood, a time I remember as fundamentally optimistic. We learned about separating our trash in school, reduce, reuse, recycle, imprinted on the brain. We learned about the Amazon and the dangers of climate change, which still felt so far away. We didn't despair because we thought we could still work together to save the planet.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
That if people just knew what was happening, we'd do the right thing. And that the right thing would be clear to all of us. That's the moment we're in. The moment Dave's in. And so, sure, saving Keiko sounds a bit nutty. But maybe if you've seen what he's seen, that sort of thing doesn't scare you. So Dave said, OK, I'll check it out. I'll fly down to Mexico City and meet Keiko.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
He was, if not hopeful, intrigued until he got there and realized this is a terrible idea. By the time Dave visited, Keiko was a teenager and had been living in Mexico City for about eight and a half years. Dave could see right away. This captive whale was nowhere near ready to live in the ocean. A wild orca can swim over 100 miles a day.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
I asked Dave to tick through the reasons Keiko was not an ideal candidate to rewild. And there were many. Before they could even think of releasing him back into the ocean, Keiko needed to get rid of his papillomavirus. but also get stronger, healthier, put on weight. And there was no way he could do that in his current tank at Reino Aventura.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
The bill for that alone would probably be millions of dollars. And then they'd have to spend years and millions more teaching him the most basic ocean survival skills and pray that some of those lessons took.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Keiko had lived in the care of humans and without his family since he was around two, missing out on years of life in a pod, years of company and hunting and language and what I can only think of as camaraderie, the kind of social environment that makes a killer whale a killer whale. He had millions of human fans, but not a single orca friend. There were so many things he'd never learned.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Renata started at Reino Aventura when she was 20 years old. She chopped frozen fish, mopped the pool deck, and eventually worked her way up to be one of Keiko's trainers. Working with a killer whale had long been a dream of hers. And even now, when she talks about Keiko, she sounds the way a mother might when reminiscing about her kid's childhood.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Not only did Keiko not know how to hunt for food, he didn't know how to eat live fish. Think about that. If you put a live fish in his mouth, this killer whale wouldn't eat it. And language. Keiko had stopped making most of the sounds in a wild whale's repertoire years before. Pods have different dialects, and it was unlikely Keiko even remembered the dialect he spoke before his capture.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
This was crucially important to his survival. Orcas very rarely live alone in the open ocean, so if he was to make it out there, Dave knew Keiko would have to be integrated into a pod. his original pod, preferably. But if you didn't speak their language, that was going to be difficult. And then there was a small detail that no one knew for certain which pod that might be or where to find them.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Did you do like a back of the envelope sort of like what's this going to cost thing like on the plane back?
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
So 10 impossible steps, at least. But let's be real. For Dave, it was also one giant opportunity. Up until this point, Dave had been thinking about Keiko the way everyone in the world was thinking about Keiko, as one individual killer whale in need of saving. But what if he allowed himself to see it differently?
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
He'd experienced firsthand the hold that whales had over people at anti-whaling marches across the world. He'd seen the power that media campaigns could wield with the Save the Whales movement. This could be something much bigger. What if Keiko, the individual, could become Keiko, the symbol? What if you could use Keiko to tell a story about the ocean itself?
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
She remembers all of Keiko's favorite games, his favorite toys, his favorite playmate.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
And Dave knew you could do a lot with that kind of star power, with that kind of attention. So he set aside his doubts and decided that, yes, as absurd as it sounded, he was all in. Once Dave committed to getting Keiko out of Mexico, the next step was logistics. And what I'm about to say is pretty obvious, but it's worth saying anyway. Moving an orca is not easy.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
One of the first things Dave did was create a whole new organization, the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. The U.S. Humane Society chipped in a million dollars. Dave secured a couple million more from a billionaire cell phone magnet. Warner Brothers also agreed to put in $2 million, which sounds like a lot until you consider they made $150 million on Free Willy.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
And by this point, the sequel, Free Willy 2, was already in production. Still, with that money, Dave was able to convince a small marine park in Oregon to let the foundation build them a new, much bigger pool just for Keiko. And so now, all Dave needed was the whale. which you might assume would be the hard part, given that Keiko was the main attraction at Reino Aventura.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
But it turned out that Oscar Porter, the director of Reino Aventura, wasn't opposed to the idea of giving him up. He had a whole park to run, and managing his most famous attraction had become an all-consuming headache. There were journalists and activists to deal with, Mexican television stars and singers calling to arrange private swims with Keiko...
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Porter told me he was spending three hours a day dealing with Keiko-related nonsense. Which is a lot, sure, but most worrying of all was what some of the outside veterinarians were saying. That Keiko might die soon. Porter really didn't want that to happen at Reno Aventura. So over the course of several months, Dave and Oscar Porter made a deal.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
In February 1995, it was announced to the world that Keiko would be leaving Reino Aventura for his new temporary home at an aquarium on the Oregon coast in an enormous new tank with cold seawater. Dave laid out a vision for Keiko's future, invoking the plot to Free Willy 2, which would hit theaters a few months later.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
If Keiko had his moods or played favorites, well, Renata says that was just part of who he was.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
That was Dave's ultimate plan, even if the last part seemed improbable at best. For Keiko's trainer, Renata, and many of the staff that worked closely with Keiko, the decision to let him leave was heartbreaking, even if they knew it was the right one. Giving him up was a kind of noble, even maternal sacrifice. That's how Renata saw it, which of course didn't make it hurt any less.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Goodbyes are like that, especially when you can't explain what the future holds. You feel guilty, like you're betraying a friend. And across Mexico, a lot of people were feeling this way. They wanted him to stay. They wished he could stay. But letting him go was a sacrifice they were willing to make because they loved him and they wanted what was best for him.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Which is why it was so offensive to Renata and many others I talked to to hear how the story was being told in the U.S. that Keiko was being saved from a terrible life in Mexico. Do you feel like there was an element of like, ah, Mexico, you know how things are down there?
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
A few days before Keiko was scheduled to leave Mexico, the Reino Aventura staff threw him one last party, a kind of final spring break bash. Everyone was invited, current trainers, former staff, all of Keiko's friends, his extended human pod.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Wait a second. So you're telling me, Renata, that like 30 people got in the pool with Keiko at the same time to play?
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
On January 6th, 1996, it was time for Keiko to go. They decided to move him in the middle of the night for a few reasons. To avoid the heat and the traffic, but also the crowds that were sure to want to say their goodbyes. Moving any object as big as a killer whale is an engineering problem. But when that object is a living thing, there's an added complication.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Getting Keiko out of Reino Aventura and onto a plane would depend in no small measure on the cooperation of Keiko himself. And that required training. For months, they'd worked on it with him. First, he'd swim into a small, shallow pool, and then into a custom-made sling, swimming in and out of it, weeks spent just getting comfortable with his process.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
In the off-season, when there were no weekday shows at Reino Aventura, Renata and the other trainers swam and played with Keiko for hours. Most of the people who worked with Keiko were young, none older than 30, and they made Keiko the center of their lives. They fed him by hand, gave him belly rubs all the time. They even set up a special hose just for him. He loved to be sprayed.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
He had to be comfortable because once he was in that sling, he'd stay wrapped in it for at least 14 hours. The challenge would be to keep him calm. He had to trust his humans, not fight or flail. Trust. The night of the move, it's noisy and chaotic. I've seen the videos and it's just manic. It doesn't look like an aquarium or even an amusement park. It looks like a construction site.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
All this movement and whirring of motors and beeps and shouting and lights. Renata stayed close to Keiko, touching him, close to his eyes so he could see her. But when it was time for him to swim into the shallow pool where the sling awaited him, he refused and there was nothing they could do to persuade him. Finally, a dozen people in wetsuits encircled him with a net and pulled him into place.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Our story begins in the early 90s with an orca named Keiko. He's just entering his teenage years, living at an amusement park in Mexico City called Reino Aventura, or Adventure Kingdom. He's not from there, but for the last seven years, a tank in this polluted, landlocked megacity more than 7,000 feet above sea level has been his home.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
In the shallow pool, Renata and the other trainer dried him off before applying moisturizer all over his body. Actually, the same stuff you might put on a baby to protect from diaper rash.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Once Keiko was in the sling, it was attached to a crane that lifted him out of the pool and placed him in a shipping container filled with 3,000 pounds of freshwater ice. The container sat on the back of a tractor trailer, ready for the hour or so drive across the city to the airport. Once there, it would be loaded onto a giant cargo plane. David convinced UPS to deliver Keiko to Oregon for free.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
When the caravan finally left, there were crowds, more than they'd expected. Ordinary people who loved this killer whale. Whole families, children who dragged their parents out in the middle of the night to say goodbye. All gathered just outside the gates of the Reino Aventura parking lot. So many that police had to move them just so the caravan could pass.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
And they soon discovered it wasn't just at the gates that the crowds had gathered. It was everywhere. I've talked to a lot of people who were there that night, lining the streets, desperate to say their farewells. One person told me the only thing he could compare it to was the time the Pope visited Mexico City. The route to the airport was supposed to be secret, but that's not how it worked out.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Reporters kept the city abreast of the caravan's progress. There were thousands of people lining the streets. Boys in their pajamas carrying handwritten signs and girls in pigtails carrying Mexican flags. Teens shouting and calling Keiko's name. You have to wonder if the whale could hear them chanting, Que se quede, que se quede. He should stay, he should stay. He should stay, he should stay.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Then, somewhere along the slow, ponderous route to the airport, there was a mariachi band playing an old song about a loved one's goodbye, Las Golondrinas. Where can the tired swallow go, say the lyrics, tossed by the wind with nowhere to hide, remember my homeland, beloved pilgrim, and cry. Cars and mopeds follow the procession, drivers waving, honking their horns.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Honestly, it's a little bit mad, the emotion on people's faces, the palpable sense of loss. Dave says some people had to be peeled off Keiko's container as they tried to climb it. The procession just creeps along as best they can through the impossibly crowded late-night streets. A city, a country, saying goodbye to its beloved whale.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
The UPS plane carrying Keiko to his new home leaves at around 5 in the morning, more than three hours behind schedule, just before a beautiful Mexican sunrise. Only Keiko's veterinarians fly with him. Renata and Dave fly alongside in another aircraft, close enough to see Keiko's plane from their window. Keiko no longer belonged to Reino Aventura, much less to Mexico.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
He belonged to the story being told about him, the uncertain, real-life sequel to the movie that had made him a star, only more far-fetched and with no happy ending assured.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
For the moment, no one knew. That's on the next episode of The Good Whale.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
New York Times all access and audio subscribers can binge all episodes of The Good Whale right now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just head to the link in our show notes and subscribe, or if you're already a subscriber to The Times, link your account. Also, sign up for our newsletter, where each week we'll be sharing photos and behind-the-scenes info on The Good Whale.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
This week, we've got photos and links to video from Keiko's life at Reino Aventura, the place he called home for more than a decade. You should definitely check it out. The link to sign up is also in our show notes or go to nytimes.com slash serial newsletter. And there's a Spanish language version of this first episode that we produced for my other podcast, Radio Ambulante.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
You can look for that at radioambulante.org. The Good Whale is written by me, Daniel Alarcón, and reported by me and Katie Mingle. The show is produced by Katie and Alyssa Shipp. Jen Guerra is our editor, additional editing from Julie Snyder and Ira Glass. Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. The original score for The Good Whale comes from La Chica and Osman.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Our theme music is by Nick Thorburn and additional music from Matt McGinley. The song Las Golondrinas in today's episode was performed by Mariachi Hidalgo, NYC. It was produced and engineered by Dan Powell, Brad Fisher, and Pat McCusker. Research and fact-checking by Jane Ackerman, with help from Ben Phelan. Tracking direction by Elna Baker. Susan Wesling is our standards editor.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Simone Prokus. Carlos Lopez Estrada is a contributing editor on the series. The supervising producer for Serial Productions is Ndeye Chubu. Mac Miller is the executive assistant for Serial. Liz Davis-Moore is the senior operations manager.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Special thanks to Lauren Schuller-Donner, Jenny Lou Tugend, Nina Litvak, Rob Friedman, Jose Solorzano, Kenneth Brower, Dalia Kozlowski, Pablo Arguelles, and Katie Fuchs. The Good Whale is from Serial Productions and the New York Times.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
There's nothing about that last sentence of Renata's that could be fact-checked. Not a word. We don't know if Keiko was having a blast. We can't know. Maybe he was dragging the trainers around because he was bored, or because he loved these friendly people who fed him every day. Maybe what his humans interpreted as Keiko having fun was really just habit, or even defeat.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Like, why not let the people ride? They seem to like it. We can't really know what animals are thinking, so we do our best with the information we have, making educated guesses about the inner lives of the creatures we love. And that's what the story is really about. An imperfect attempt to understand what might be best for an animal who can't speak for himself.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
The intention to make things right for him, to make things better. Everything I'm going to tell you in the next six episodes was set in motion by these good intentions. And by everything, I mean an unprecedented global campaign, a high profile, high stakes science experiment, and a debate about what exactly we, humans, owe the natural world.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
At the center of it all is Keiko, who would become, almost by accident, a symbol for all whales, for the health of the oceans, for the very concept of wildness, but who was also an individual orca with a name and specific history and trauma and character. A character with fears and limitations that no human could ever hope to interpret with any certainty. Not that they wouldn't try.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
In fact, lots of well-intentioned people would claim they knew exactly what was best for this whale. And they would be arguing and fighting over those interpretations for years. From Serial Productions and the New York Times, this is The Good Whale. I'm Daniel Alarcón.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
It wasn't just Renata and the other trainers who loved Keiko, or even just the people in Mexico City who went to see Keiko at Reino Aventura. It seems like pretty much every kid in Mexico knew him. He was beloved, a kind of national mascot.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
One person I spoke to compared him to a Mexican Mickey Mouse. And in fact, a lot of people assumed that Keiko was Mexican, like actually from Mexico. They never considered that he could have come from anywhere else. He was just theirs. We talked to lots of people who grew up in Mexico City in the 80s and 90s.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
And they said again and again that Keiko had an aura about him, that seeing him at Reino Aventura was like hanging out with your 7,000-pound best friend, the killer whale you told your secrets to, what was happening at school, who your crush was. It was that kind of relationship. If you watched television in Mexico in the late 80s or early 90s, chances were that sooner or later you'd see Keiko.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Before that, it was a marine park in Canada, where he was bullied by the other orcas. Before that, it was a tank in a big concrete building in Iceland, where he was kept for about three years, unable to see the sky. And even before that, it was the North Atlantic, where he was captured and separated from his mom and the rest of his whale pod, probably when he was around two.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
He was in Reino Aventura commercials, of course. There were pop songs dedicated to him.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
He even starred in a telenovela as himself. And then there were the shows, when visitors got to see their beloved pet up close. Reina Aventura doesn't exist anymore, not under that name anyway. It's since been acquired by Six Flags. But back in its heyday, in the early 90s, Keiko was the star attraction. And these shows, they were legendary.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
At the peak of his fame, there might have been 200 people lining up a couple of hours before the gates opened. A pair of clowns marched around, playing trumpets, entertaining Keiko's fans as they filed in. On weekends, there were three shows a day, more than 3,000 seats, consistently packed. I had Renata walk me through one of the routines.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
First, it was the sea lions, then the dolphins, including Richie, and then... We would open the pen and Keiko would come out jumping.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
There were so many people clamoring to see Keiko up close that his veterinarian told me they set up a kind of receiving line. He even compared the crowds to the believers who wait in line to see the Virgin of Guadalupe. That reverential, that devoted. So that's Keiko, occasional TV star, quasi-saint, telepathic confidant, and best friend to countless Mexican children. And this was his life.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Constant attention from his trainers, games with his favorite dolphin buddies, performances for thousands of adoring fans. But it was all about to change. In 1992, Radio Aventura was set to close for some much-needed renovations, which meant Keiko had some free time. Six months with no shows and no crowds.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
So when a production company proposed to film a movie with Keiko, the park's director, Oscar Porter, thought, what the hell? Why not? It wasn't much money, but it might keep Keiko entertained. Once he said yes to the movie, Porter didn't give it much more thought.
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He was busy overseeing all the details of the park's upgrades, the installation of new rides, new contracts with vendors, more than 600 employees. He told me he didn't even read the script. But that script is why we're telling this story.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
While you probably already know who Keiko is, even if it's by a different name, the studio behind this proposal was the American movie powerhouse, Warner Brothers. And Keiko was about to get the name you might know him by, Willie, Free Willie. If you're my age, mid-40s, you've probably seen the movie. But if not, or it's been a minute, here's a quick refresher.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Lauren Schuller Donner, one of the producers, told me the movie could be boiled down to this. Bad kid, bad whale. The bad kid is a moody 12-year-old named Jesse.
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I don't think I really understood how traumatic this could have been until I learned that male killer whales are essentially mama's boys. And not just when they're young, but basically their entire lives. Even as adults, they might swim by their mother's side. They depend on her. A mother orca might catch a fish, bite it in two, and give half to her son.
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The bad whale is Willie, captured and separated from his pod, stuck in a small pool in a ramshackle aquarium. The park staff find him stubborn, hard to train. He has three black spots on the underside of his jaw. His dorsal fin droops to one side, a killer whale's version of an emo haircut. Jesse decides he has to save Willie's life, get him back to the ocean, back to his family.
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And somehow, against all kinds of obstacles, he does. The movie poster is what most people remember. It's the image that was absorbed into the culture, a still from the film's climax. Willie in mid-flight against an orange sunset jumping over a breakwater. The ocean beckons. The boy stands just below Willie beneath an arc of sea spray, a triumphant arm pointing to the sky.
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The tagline reads, how far would you go for a friend? When it came to who would play Willie, it wasn't like Warner Brothers had a ton of killer whales to choose from. A producer on the film told us her team approached a few different marine parks, but people weren't excited about the message of the movie and wanted changes to the script.
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Finally, they landed on Reino Aventura, who signed off, as we mentioned, without even reading it. And Keiko, it turns out, was perfect for the part. See, for the film to work, the producers needed something very specific, a kind of sad-looking whale living in less-than-ideal conditions. They needed a whale kids would feel sorry for, a whale children would want to save.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
And the fact is, while Keiko might have been happy, he wasn't actually that healthy. He was a couple thousand pounds underweight. Not because he was underfed, but probably because the warm water affected his appetite. He had a skin rash too, something called papillomavirus, which looked bad, even though the veterinarian at Reino Aventura said it wasn't that serious.
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But most striking of all was his tank. It was small, disturbingly small. One of the film's producers joked it was smaller than some swimming pools in Beverly Hills. The water he swam in wasn't even seawater, just fresh water with salt added. Renata says they checked the salt levels frequently and they weren't under any illusions that Keiko's living conditions were ideal.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
She told me Reino Aventura looked into building a larger pool, but just couldn't make it work financially. So strip away for a moment almost everything I've told you. Forget the love and the games and the trainers and the fans and see instead what the camera sees. Keiko, a smaller than average killer whale with a droopy dorsal fin, swimming alone in a tiny, shallow pool.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
He was exactly what the movie required. Free Willy was released on July 16th, 1993, and the reviews were positive, at least until journalists started asking what was up with the star of the movie, and news reports about Keiko's subpar living conditions and health began spreading.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
This kind of closeness is documented in male orcas well into their 20s or 30s. And Keiko was deprived of the chance to have that. At age two, Keiko would probably still have been swimming in his mother's slipstream, still mastering the language of his pod. He wouldn't have yet learned how to hunt on his own.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
In Mexico, Reino Aventura and the staff were suddenly having to defend themselves in ways they hadn't before, trying to convince crusading celebrities and animal rights activists that they did indeed care about Keiko's well-being.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
When Life magazine published an article describing Keiko's tank as a cesspool, Reino Aventura's director, Oscar Porter, sent a letter claiming the magazine had gotten it all wrong, that Keiko's water was, quote, "...clean and clear." Back in Hollywood, Warner Brothers was getting hammered too. Bags and bags of mail from kids arrived at the offices, all demanding the same thing. Free Willy.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Or rather, free Keiko. And so, if the studio wanted to avoid a PR nightmare and not break the hearts of millions of children, then it was clear. Someone had to save him. In real life. That's after the break. For centuries, we humans hunted and killed whales as if their numbers were infinite. And over time, we got better and better at it.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
More efficient, more ruthless, extracting more value from each kill. We harvested their blubber, their organs, their baleen, their meat, and it was all transformed into everyday commercial products, from makeup to heating oil. More than 700,000 whales were killed in the 1960s. Whaling was a huge global industry, with profits to match.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
The killing of orcas was a little different, since they didn't have much to offer us, commercially speaking. But, humans being humans, we killed them anyway. For fear, for sport, for bloodlust. Fishermen trawling for herring or salmon saw them as competitors, so they would shoot them on sight. The U.S. Navy would use orcopods for target practice.
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The Good Whale - Ep. 1
Despite weighing more than a thousand pounds, in developmental terms, Keiko would have been just a baby, ripped from his mother, from everything he'd ever known, and from a life that may have been largely spent by her side. So of course it's hard to talk about a pool in a Mexican amusement park as a substitute for any of that.