Serial podcast team launch podcast on Keiko, Oregon’s most famous whale

Published 2:35 pm Friday, November 8, 2024

The team behind the hit podcast “Serial” is launching a new six-episode podcast about Keiko, the famous orca whale who won the hearts of millions in “Free Willy” and later became an icon of the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

“The Good Whale” is expected to launch Nov. 14. It is produced by Serial Productions and The New York Times, and hosted by reporter Daniel Alarcón.

Keiko rose to international fame in “Free Willy” — the 1993 family film about a boy who befriends an orca at an aquarium and helps release him into the wild. The movie was a phenomenon, spawning several sequels. The movie was shot, in part, in Oregon, including at Oaks Amusement Park in Portland, and in Astoria. After the film’s success, fans were outraged to learn that Keiko was living in a tiny chlorinated tank at an amusement park in Mexico. He had developed skin problems because of the water and was dangerously skinny.

A campaign from fans eventually led Keiko to be be moved to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, in Newport, in 1996. There, scientists hoped to do the impossible: Teach Keiko the skills he would need to survive on his own, and free Willy, for good.

It was a “wildly ambitious science experiment,” according to the podcast, not made any easier by the fact that Keiko was far from an ideal subject.

Keiko was only 2 years old when he was captured in the wild and brought to captivity in 1979. He spent nearly all of his life among people, and knew nothing about how whales were supposed to behave. He’d never spent time with other orcas, didn’t know how to hunt, eat live prey, or even communicate with his own kind.

The six-episode series follows Keiko on his journey from Mexico to Oregon and eventually to Norway, where he is met time and again by “well-intentioned people who believe they know what’s best for him,” the podcast writes on its website. “People who still disagree, decades later, about whether they did the right thing.”

“There is a lot of genre-bending going on in ‘The Good Whale’,” said Julie Snyder, the executive editor of Serial Productions. “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.”

The first two episodes of “The Good Whale” release Nov. 14. Episodes will release weekly.

A trailer for the series is available now on The New York Times’ website.