Moonwalker filming locations: Smooth Criminal's street is on the Universal tour — it's burned twice since Michael Jackson filmed there

Moonwalker, Michael Jackson's gloriously unhinged 1988 anthology film, has one sequence everyone remembers: Smooth Criminal, the Club 30s number with the white suit, the fedora, and the physics-insulting 45-degree lean. The dance floor was a purpose-built set — but the moody 1930s streets Jackson prowls on his way there were standing backlot sets at Universal Studios Hollywood, and per the Studio Tour's own archive, the sequence used three of them: Brownstone Street, Little Europe, and the New York Street area.

Which means the Smooth Criminal streets sit on the same patch of Los Angeles the Studio Tour trams have trundled past for decades. With one enormous caveat: what you're seeing is not what Jackson filmed. Because that corner of the backlot has the survival instincts of a paper lantern.

Fire the first: 1990

On 6 November 1990, barely two years after Moonwalker came out, a security guard deliberately started a fire in a Brownstone Street alley with a cigarette lighter. The result:

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• New York Street: completely destroyed, fresh off its Dick Tracy makeover.
• Courthouse Square gutted and the Ben-Hur set gone — roughly a fifth of the standing backlot consumed.
• $50 million in damage, 400 firefighters, 86 companies, six helicopters: one of the largest fires in LA to that point.
• The arsonist got four years; Steven Spielberg, rather sweetly, helped oversee the redesign, and Newsies christened the rebuilt streets.

Fire the second: 2008

Then it happened again. A three-alarm blaze on 1 June 2008 destroyed New York Street once more, along with the King Kong attraction, while the courthouse facade stood there surviving its second inferno like the world's luckiest piece of plywood. The current version opened in December 2009 — nine shooting locations and, in a development that feels overdue, actual sprinklers, built to a new fire code written specifically for backlot structures.

So today's tram riders pass a Brownstone Street and New York Street that are spiritual grandchildren of Jackson's locations: same footprint, same bones, twice-rebuilt skin.

One footnote for the pedants, offered with affection because we are the pedants: Moonwalker's opening Speed Demon chase tears through "a fictional movie studio" and cheekily features a Universal Studios tram — yet that sequence is believed to have been shot over at Culver Studios. Jackson borrowed the tram; the tram now returns the favour daily.

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