Free Willy is a classic film even today and features an orphan trying to reunite a killer whale, Willy, with its pod and save it from captivity. Well, sometimes real life follows fiction. Somehow, the true story of Free Willy is wilder and more inspirational than the movie.
After the film became a hit, fans decided to track down the real life Willy, an orca named Keiko. They found the poor killer whale in a pool at an amusement park where it appeared sick. The animal's situation caused Warner Brothers and fans to try to save the animal.
In 1996, they moved Keiko to a special tank in Oregon for rehab and recovery. Fast forward two years later, and both the U.S. and Iceland approved moving the killer whale back to Iceland. They planned to reintroduce the real-life Willy into the wild. They transported the animal using a US air force C-17 military transport jet.
'Free Willy' In Real Life
We've always known how easy it is to capture a whale," says Vinick. "What Keiko showed us is how hard it is to put one back."
Now, it's story is going to be a part of an upcoming podcast called The Good Whale.
"There is a lot of genre-bending going on in 'The Good Whale,'" Julie Snyder, the executive editor of Serial Productions, said in a statement about the upcoming podcast. "Because Daniel Alarcón is a novelist and a reporter, the podcast is a literary campfire epic, a scientific exploration, and then - in a bit of a left turn - it's got a bit of Broadway musical thrown in, too. It's one of the most inventive stories I've ever heard."
