Elizabeth MerrillFeb 1, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseElizabeth Merrill is a senior writer for ESPN. She previously wrote for The Kansas City Star and The Omaha World-Herald.Follow on XMultiple Authors
THE LAST SUPER BOWL halftime show for Up with People featured a dizzying array of pastel clothes, tinsel tambourines and perpetual smiles. The group cut loose with a daring Bruce Springsteen/Huey Lewis/Stevie Wonder/Kenny Loggins cover medley.
Collar stretched high and blazer sleeves rolled up, Johnson tickled the synthesizer keys with one hand and danced to the high-octane techno song “Talkin’ With My Feet.” Her impossibly large (and potentially hazardous) earrings bounced along to the beat.
The NFL spent $1 million for the first time on the 1986 show, called “Beat of the Future,” which included a futuristic floating city and planets hovering overhead. A planet caught fire the night before and the city never really materialized because of technical difficulties. Still, the group managed an enthusiastic 12-minute pitch for love, acceptance and worldwide harmony.
Jim Steeg, a longtime NFL exec who was in charge of halftime entertainment from 1979 to 2005, remembers making his way up to commissioner Pete Rozelle’s box after the performance.
NEXT SUNDAY, 40 halftimes after Up with People’s last stand, Puerto Rican superstar rapper-singer Bad Bunny will perform at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, at Super Bowl LX between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots.
Turning Point USA, a conservative group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, promises a counterprogramming option called “The All-American Halftime Show.”
The tense backdrop is a stark contrast to the 1986 Super Bowl, which showcased the lovable Bears, fresh off their hit rap “Super Bowl Shuffle.” “We’re not here to start no trouble,” the chorus thumped. “We’re just here to do the Super Bowl Shuffle.” Arguably the biggest controversy heading into the game centered on quarterback Jim McMahon’s rebellious headbands.
The ensemble act headlined four Super Bowl halftime shows in the 1970s and ’80s and was the supporting act to the Southeast Missouri State Marching Band in another.
Jumbotrons in the 1980s allowed the league to consider shrunken-down acts. A 1988 show featured 88 grand pianos and Chubby Checker. The next year, millions of viewers donned 3D glasses for the show, which featured the “World’s Largest Card Trick” performed by Elvis Presto.
Nobody thought to reach for the Rolling Stones. Most big-time entertainers couldn’t see themselves performing in the middle of a football field, Steeg says.
Fox aired counterprogramming during the CBS broadcast of Super Bowl XXVI in Minneapolis with a mostly live episode of the popular comedy “In Living Color.” While Jim Carrey exploded in his “Fire Marshal Bill” skit, back in Minneapolis, Olympians skated on plastic ice and Gloria Estefan and the University of Minnesota’s marching band performed in a show called “Winter Magic.”
Fox took away a chunk of the NFL’s viewership, prompting seismic changes the following year. The NFL responded with a halftime dubbed “An Unprecedented Super Bowl Spectacular Starring Michael Jackson.”
Jackson’s people, who were not particularly versed in football or the Super Bowl, asked if they could move the game three hours back so he could perform in the dark. That obviously did not happen.
The halftime ratings wound up being higher than the actual game’s, Steeg says, and it changed the magnitude of the show and its participants. But it didn’t stop the critiques.
The bigger the acts, the more controversy. There was the Justin Timberlake-Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004 and the M.I.A. middle finger in 2012. Last year, complaints focused on a backup dancer who displayed a Palestinian/Sudanese flag, and claims that Kendrick Lamar projected anti-Americanism. Still, his performance garnered higher ratings than the actual game. Ten of the past 15 Super Bowl halftime shows have drawn at least 110 million viewers.
CHRIS CONNELLY REMEMBERS watching an hourlong Up with People special on TV when he was a grade schooler in the mid-1960s.
All these years later, the former MTV reporter who currently works as a journalist for ABC and ESPN can still recite the lyrics that served as a sort of moral compass for young America.
“And that tells you what Up with People was at that juncture,” Connelly says. “They were this heavily corporate-backed singing group that was terrified of rock and roll, that was terrified of the counterculture, the burgeoning counterculture of the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
“So they tried to use what looked like folk music in the manner of the Kingston Trio or something like that to send very different messages into popular culture.”
Up with People was an offshoot of Moral Re-Armament, an international ideology focused on the tenets of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. In the 1940s, MRA and its followers were believed to be effective in fighting off communism, and later were considered a counter to the hippies, offering a squeaky-clean, Christian conservative view that was perceived by some as fascism.
J. Blanton Belk founded Up with People in 1965. His daughter, Jenny Belk, was part of the 1986 halftime show. She acknowledges that the earlier iteration carried a cultlike stigma. But she says Up with People actually was formed by something very Dylanesque: a hootenanny.
“So they had a conference in Michigan and they said, ‘Come with your ideas. What do you want to say?'” Belk says. “You know, non-violence is the best way to protest.
Belk says her father, who turns 101 this month, felt as if Moral Re-Armament had become stuck in its ways, and was judgmental and “stuffy.” J. Blanton Belk wanted a younger and more positive view of the world. In 1968, Up with People became a 501(c) nonprofit organization.
Large groups of young people between age 18 and 25 traveled the world performing musical shows and doing community service. Up with People members met with world leaders and popes and traveled to China and Berlin. They paid tuition for the yearlong experience and stayed with host families.
PAT MURPHY STOOD in front of the bathroom mirror the night before Super Bowl XX and questioned his life choices.
He was set to perform a song called “Jammin’,” his face flashing on and off the screen for 2 minutes and 10 seconds.
In the months leading up to the game, four casts located in different parts of the world — some as far away as China — rehearsed in groups. There was no FaceTime to bring them together during their practices.
On Jan. 2, three weeks before the game, they gathered in New Orleans for final preparations. Jenny Belk was part of the show. Her lineage did not, however, earn her a spot on the stage with the singers and dancers.
“My sister and I both were not talented in the performing arts,” she says. “I have rhythm. I can follow the steps, and I can sing like someone who sings in the shower, but no … So I was very much in the back, and I loved that.”
To this day, Belk has a hard time looking at red beans and rice — or Pizza Hut — since it’s pretty much what they subsisted on. They rehearsed in a warehouse from 9 to 5. Reebok gave each of the roughly 600 cast members a little swag for their efforts — one pair of white sneakers — that they wore at the halftime show, which was a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.
During the first half of the game, Up with People waited on folding chairs, stunningly close to the field.
The clock ran down, the Bears went into the locker room up 23-3 — not exactly the best scenario for halftime-show watchers. But Up with People was undeterred.
“Hey, somebody turn it up,” a young man in a multicolored fluorescent sweater sang at the highest tier of the stage. “Yeah, something in the sound is changin’.”
What followed was an explosion of thin ties, feathered hair, and youthful energy set to lip synch — all with perpetual smiles. Saxophones swayed, electric guitars jammed, and backup singers spun in circles. A guy with a tambourine was so amped he jumped up and down.
The beat of the future is all around us. It’s the players on the field, the kid in the stands dreaming of being out there himself someday. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe, and when you can’t say it with words you can always say it with your feet.
“Talkin’ With My Feet” was considered a filler song, one you get through to move on to more meaningful songs. Years later, descriptions of the song from various cast members range from “silly” to “it sucked.” But the crowd apparently found it catchy.
It was a tension point for Jenny Belk, one of the people on the field tasked with marching in formation to make four giant feet. Months were spent working on this formation, but then the foot came in tight, nearly crashing into a camera man, and Belk’s foot looked like a popsicle.
The show went on. Dressed in a yellow shirt, and flanked by two “backup singers,” Murphy strutted, sidestepped and sang with confidence. He held his arm in the air as he mouthed the last Jammin’, remembering one of the tricks of their training.
“If you’re on a close-up,” he says, “just hold the mic over your lips so that nobody can really see.
“As our small planet travels through the universe and those of us who live here try to imagine the future, we share Dr. King’s dream that we’ll be there someday in a world where there’s room for every nation, every race, every creed.”
Then cast members walked across the stage waving flags from different countries for the song “Room for Everyone.” Jenny Belk says it gave her chills.
“At that moment, I didn’t feel like 10 million eyes were on us,” she says. “I just was kind of caught up in the excitement of it.”
THEY DID NOT stop at Sardi’s for the rave reviews. Outside of the loving opinions from family and friends, there weren’t many of them.
Super Bowl XX was anticlimactic, as the Chicago Bears pummeled the New England Patriots 46-10. Reviews of the halftime show landed with a similar thud.
For years, various outlets have reported that Rozelle held an emergency meeting the next day and told everyone there were three words he never wanted to hear again: “Up with People.”