Copyright news18
Fans know Jumma Chumma De De as one of Amitabh Bachchan’s boldest and most-loved songs ever. But before the whistles and chartbuster craze, the team behind it feared that the iconic hook step could go horribly wrong. Choreographer Chinni Prakash has now shared how the megastar himself was unsure if the steps might look too over the top on screen. During a chat on the YouTube channel Friday Talkies, Chinni revisited how the track first landed in his hands. He said the superstar called him to his vanity van (back when only two existed in the industry) to play the song for him. “This song was played to me by Amitabh Bachchan in his vanity van. In those days, there used to be only two vanity vans — one belonged to Amitabh Bachchan and the other to Manmohan Desai. He had one disk and a speaker, and he made me hear the song. Even during those times, 1989-90, he kept high-tech speakers with him.” The choreographer opened up about the panic that followed while locking the now-famous move. Director Mukul Anand wasn’t confident about it, and even Chinni’s own assistants backed out of showing the step to the star. “I got a call from my assistant at 12 in the night… both of my assistants refused to show the hook step to Amitabh Bachchan and told me to do it. ‘We can’t show him. We are scared,’ they told me.” So Chinni himself demonstrated the entire choreography for Bachchan. The reaction surprised him. “I danced on the whole song in front of him with my dancers. Amit Ji saw me and told the director that he needs three months to rehearse and asked them to postpone the shoot,” he said. The star also expressed concern about how the step would look on his tall frame. “While doing the hook step, he told me, ‘You are a 5 feet man and it looks good on you, but I am 6 feet plus, and it won’t look good on me.’ But I begged him to do the hook step.” Later, a special screening took place with Jaya Bachchan and a young Abhishek Bachchan also present. For a full six minutes, the theatre stayed silent as the song played. Chinni remembered what happened as soon as the music ended — an explosive cheer. “Everyone was there, and during the six-minute song, there was pin-drop silence, but after the song got over, there was a big shout in the theatre. Never in the history of Amitabh Bachchan has there been a song shot like this. Jaya ji told me, ‘It is looking superb.’” More than three decades later, those steps are still etched in pop culture.
