Michael Jackson was just three years old when the movie that he most directly tried to channel in his video – West Side Story – opened. The looks of his too-cool street gang were updated for the current decade, but particularly the sequence of Jackson and his crew dancing in the subway tunnel was heavily inspired by West Side Story. And Jackson did not wish to do a standard 3-4 minute work: a retelling of an epic film called for an epic music video.

On this day, August 31, in 1987, Michael Jackson’s 18-minute-long “Bad” music video, directed by the acclaimed filmmaker Martin Scorsese, premiered on CBS.

Jackson played Daryl in the video, a former street tough who was coming back from a semester at an expensive boarding school and trying to reunite with his former gangmates (one of them played by an up-and-coming Wesley Snipes.) After the subway sequence, Daryl and group of punks launch into his song, and then Daryl parts ways with his former company.