Me, Myself & Freddie

Media Moment: Elton John documentary
Queen Related: Freddie sightings

This documentary on Elton John, produced just after his Red Piano show in Vegas wrapped up, takes an interesting approach to chronicling his career. They take old footage and insert the “current Elton” into the frame and he actually comments on his own history and on-screen behaviours—warts and all.

Since the documentary was only 60 minutes long (at least the one they aired on MuchMusic here in Canada), I was curious to see whether Queen and/or Freddie would warrant a comment from Sir Elton as I figured his appearance at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert was close to his heart.

Nope, no mention of Freddie and the boys. He talked a lot about working with John Lennon, knowing Princess Diana, hanging with Rod Stewart, his marriage to Renate then David, The Lion King soundtrack, and—the turning point for him regarding AIDS—Ryan White. And since Ryan died in 1992, the same year as the Tribute Concert, I guessed that he didn’t have time to cover two events in the same year.

However, there are two sequences in the documentary where Elton strolls past a wall of framed pictures showing him and his celebrity friends, and there’s him and Freddie in one frame on the bottom left of the wall. Okay, I thought, that’s better than nothing.

At the end of the show, it returns to his gig in Vegas and then a “voice” welcomes some of his old friends onto the stage, and the first one to magically run out on stage is Freddie (obviously lifted from the Magic Tour footage).

I don’t know if having Freddie appear first is symbolic of something special between them, or whether the documentary’s producers just liked how the image of someone running onto a stage worked during that end segment. At this point, the Vegas audience begins a standing ovation, which coincided with Freddie’s appearance. That was a nice tie-in.

I’m just glad that Freddie made an appearance in the (abridged) version of Elton’s life and career.

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