Mithun Chakraborty is considered one of the dancing legends of Hindi cinema. He made his entry with performance oriented roles in serious cinema, but soon became a commercial film superstar, thanks to his unique dialogue delivery and fantastic style of dancing. Mithun ruled Bollywood dancing in the ’80s, until Govinda came along.
He brought in the disco style of dancing, something John Travolta was doing in Hollywood in the ’70s. Mithun’s dance steps were never about perfect technique and sharp form. He danced from his heart, it was all about the feeling and making the audience want to dance with him. He enjoyed his moves, and the audience felt it too.
And so, recreating a Mithun song requires a recreation of that feeling, that easy, cool vibe that he brought to the dance floor. Something that’s terribly missing from the muscle-flexing moves of Tiger Shroff in the 2.0 version of Mithun’s iconic song I Am A Disco Dancer.
Tiger puts his heart and soul into his steps in I Am A Disco Dancer 2.0, choreographed by Bosco Martis. In getting the steps right and the technique perfect, the feel and vibe, which made Mithun’s moves magical on screen, have gone missing.
There’s a part in the song where Tiger copies a move made famous by Hrithik Roshan in Koi Mil Gaya. You realise that he is better off aping Hrithik than Mithun, since the latter’s dancing style was completely different.
Tiger is a terrific dancer, no doubt, but even the most terrific ones sometimes fail to be a delight to watch if they focus too much on performance rather than the feeling of the song. Disco Dancer was also about the struggle of a man from the streets trying to make his mark as a dancer. The glittering sets of the new song completely ignores that sentiment. It has become just another dance number out of Bollywood.
The other thing missing from the new song is the legendary Bappi Lahiri. Salim Sulaiman’s music is very different from the original. Watch the video here, it will definitely make you want to revisit the original song.