Daniel Alarcón
speaker
2,010 appearances
36 recordings
11 series
first heard Feb 2022
last heard 10 Jul
Daniel Alarcón’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 33 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 25.
Appearances
And as far as anyone could tell, Keiko genuinely seemed to like it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He was in Reino Aventura commercials, of course. There were pop songs dedicated to him.
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.
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.
First, it was the sea lions, then the dolphins, including Richie, and then... We would open the pen and Keiko would come out jumping.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing 1901–1920 of 2,010 · page 96 of 101
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