Photograph by Paul Natkin/HBO
By
Lacey Cohen
Published 5 minutes ago
Lacey Cohen is a lifelong student, writer, editor, music fanatic, and massive advocate for the Oxford Comma. She has been playing guitar for 16 years, boasts a 13-year-old Spotify library complete with playlists for just about any mood, and is well-versed in the language of nearly every genre of music. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in English and a minor in gender and health, and she graduated from Long Island University with an MFA in creative writing and publishing with a focus in prose writing. Lacey is currently based in Brooklyn, but she is a true and proud Michigander at heart.
Sign in to your ScreenRant account Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recapOn December 3, 1985, the day after the Chicago Bears lost their first game of an otherwise perfect season, they did what no other NFL team had ever done before: Record a hit rap song, complete with an accompanying line dance and music video. Morale was understandably low on that winter's Tuesday, as hardly 12 hours earlier, the Miami Dolphins beat them 38-24 on a Monday night with every football fan in America watching, if for no other reason than it was Monday Night Football, and therefore it was the only game on TV that night.
Even with that loss in mind, music producer Dick Meyer and Bears wide receiver Willie Gault had an idea for a rap song, the success of which was predicated on the participation of this team, and the proceeds of which would go towards feeding the homeless across the city of Chicago. Thus, "The Super Bowl Shuffle," in all its polarizing prophetical glory, was a go.
The song itself, as well as the music video, was an absolute hit, rising to #41 on the Billboard Hot 100 at its peak. It went on to receive a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals the following year, and that's not even to mention the handful of imitation tracks put out by other NFL teams—none of them were nearly as successful as "The Super Bowl Shuffle."
HBO Documentary Films and NFL Film Productions came together to create The Shuffle, a short documentary film detailing the unlikely story of the '85 Chicago Bears' culture-defining rap dance craze, and the first episode in a series of mini NFL documentaries on HBO.
Jeff Cameron's The Shuffle Is A Must-Watch For Any Football, Rap, Or Film Fan
Director Jeff Cameron's insatiable hunger for a good NFL story has brought us inside pre-season training camp in Hard Knocks, up close and personal alongside some of the NFL's greatest play callers in Quarterback, and now he's taking us back to the '80s, where the Chicago Bears were dominating every single aspect of popular culture, in HBO's The Shuffle.
The NFL Films director explained, "We can always rely on football—we have football footage for every play that's ever happened. But when it comes to the genesis and creation of something like a song, so little primary artifacts still exist from the original shuffle, so coming up with ways to illustrate how they found the basis of the music or things like that were challenging, but [it was] also fun to think about different ways to show those things that we don't have footage for."
The documentary really does fire on all cylinders, featuring interviews with recording engineer Fred Breitberg, who worked on the original song, Julia Meyer, the wife of music producer Dick Meyer, and a handful of players from the '85 Bears team, including Willie Gault, Jim McMahon, Gary Fencik, and Mike Singletary. "After all these years, they've come to be proud of what that song's become and what it represents to that era and that team."
Cameron continued, "I had never interviewed Mike Singletary before, so he comes into the room, and if you've ever met him or talked to him [you know] he's very soft-spoken, but working at NFL Films, I know him from his footage where he's the most ferocious tackler of the 1980s. As we're talking, and we get to the part where, after the loss to Miami, there's some doubt and some hesitation in some of the players that no longer want to do the video because they just lost, and it's kind of on him to get them back in line. As he's retelling the story, he raises his voice and widens his eyes, and he kind of reminds me, 'Oh, right, you're Mike Singletary.'"
Cameron's direction brings his viewers right along with him, telling the story of the Chicago Bears' 1985 season through the lens of not only the football games themselves, but the bonding experience created by "The Super Bowl Shuffle," and the cultural aftermath that this song and dance had on the NFL, the music industry, and the city of Chicago.
The Shuffle premieres live on 
HBO, and will also be available to stream on 
HBO Max starting Tuesday, November 25 at 9:00pm EST.
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