Picture Of The Day

Does the guy in the picture above look familiar? Back in the mid-eighties some thought that someday he might:

In its August 1985 issue, Ebony magazine ran a "Portraits of the Stars" feature in which it commissioned an artist to create portraits of how various black celebrities might look in the year 2000 (a date which was then still a good fourteen years in the future). Ebony's collection of artificially aged notables included Muhammad Ali, Billy Dee Williams, Kim Fields, Jayne Kennedy, Magic Johnson, Emmanuel Lewis, Debbie Allen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and, as the lead-off to the article, Michael Jackson. Jackson, who was 27 years old at the time, was pictured (as shown above) as the artist anticipated the popular singer might look in the year 2000 (when he would have been 41 years old): "He will have aged gracefully and will have a handsome, more mature look."

Now obviously this particular prediction did not come to pass but when I saw this picture for the first time without the attached explanation the first thought going through my head (and I swear that this is the truth) was, "Damn, that guy looks like Michael Jackson and Billy Dee Williams had a kid and then dressed him in some of Don Johnson's old clothes from Miami Vice!"