When the movie “Free Willy” is released, word gets out that the star, a killer whale named Keiko, is sick and living in a tiny pool at a Mexican amusement park. An environmentalist sets out to give the fans what they want: their favorite celebrity orca back in the sea. Our newest podcast, “The Good Whale,” is out now. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it here: https://lnk.to/good-whaleTo get full access to this and other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [email protected]
Chapter 1: What is the story behind the orca named Keiko?
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.
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.
Chapter 2: How did Keiko's early life affect him?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, obviously, my purpose in life at that time, it was Keiko and Keiko only.
That's Renata Fernandez, who worked with Keiko at Reino Aventura.
Before having kids, he was my kid. He was my baby. He was, I mean, I had boyfriends back then, but they were not that important as Keiko. I had to break up with two boyfriends because I spent most of my time with him. I mean, it was, I worked there for seven years and it was the best seven years of my life.
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Chapter 3: What was Keiko's life like at Reino Aventura?
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.
She remembers all of Keiko's favorite games, his favorite toys, his favorite playmate.
His best friend was a dolphin named Richie, and they would just play nonstop. And between shows, he would just have Richie on top of him, just kind of like giving him a ride.
If Keiko had his moods or played favorites, well, Renata says that was just part of who he was.
Keiko would choose who to play with. I mean, we had this very young girl, she was 16 or 17, and she would come into the water and he was like a magnet for Keiko. He would love her, love to be with her. And why? Nobody knows. I mean, it's just, you know, it's like chemistry.
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.
And as far as anyone could tell, Keiko genuinely seemed to like it.
We had this little boat and there was a rope tied to the front, like a long rope. But we would put it in the water and like three girls would get, you know, hop in it and he would pull us all over the pool and then he would pull it down and just to make us fall from the boat. And that was over and over. And obviously we would laugh and then get on top of the little boat again.
He would give us a ride again. So, I mean, he would have a blast.
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Chapter 4: How did the movie 'Free Willy' change Keiko's fate?
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.
You're that graffiti kid, aren't you? I guess.
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.
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.
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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Chapter 5: What were the public's reactions to Keiko's living conditions?
They asked him to consult on a few lines of pro-dolphin dialogue in the buddy cop movie Lethal Weapon 2.
Hey, hey, what's that you're eating, Dad? All right, my tuna fish sandwich. Tuna?
Daddy, you can't eat tuna.
I can't eat what? Oh, thank you, Flipper. We're boycotting tuna, honey, because they kill the dolphins and get caught in the nets. Only albacore.
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.
And he's like, you know, this movie is going to be big. He's like, it's going to be a great movie. And I'm doing this because I want to make a difference for Wales. And I want to know, are you in?
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.
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.
The kit was like steps you can take, like go watch whales in the wild instead of going to watch them in captivity and put pressure on the International Whaling Commission to stop killing whales.
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Chapter 6: How did the Save the Whales movement influence Keiko's story?
And where are we supposed to bring him? We're not bringing him into, like, we couldn't bring him into the captive facility. I'm thinking, where are we going to go? We're not going to take him to some place where he's having to perform or be in a captive environment where they're making money off of these whales. We couldn't do that. We're going to have to build a place. And that's just a step one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Somewhere in the North Atlantic, near Iceland, presumably.
How are we going to get him back to Iceland? It's a whaling nation. Are you kidding me? What, we're going to go over to Iceland and convince them that we want to bring back this whale because the world wants to save him?
Did you do like a back of the envelope sort of like what's this going to cost thing like on the plane back?
Yeah, exactly. Before even, while I was down there and on the way back, I was like, I lined it out. I was way over $10 million. And I was like, at that point, I pretty much just stashed it back in my pack saying, I don't know about this. It's just, I don't, you know, we're not used to things with six figures behind it. I can see about like 10 impossible steps here.
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Chapter 7: What role did Hollywood play in Keiko's life?
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.
So we were like 30 people in this place and in the Delphine room, we made a big luncheon and we all got into the water together. And we all played with Keiko and there was a lot of crying and it was fun. And Keiko was so happy and he would play with all of them.
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?
Yes. Yeah. I mean, you would never get this in SeaWorld or Marineland or any other aquarium in the world. If you tell this to a veterinarian from these, you know, huge aquariums, they would tell you that, I mean, that's not a good idea because he would, I mean, the animal gets stressed. I mean, I don't know what would they say, but he was so happy. He was so happy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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