Corbin Bleu still has his jump roping skills all these years later.
“Double Dutch in between shows outside of our theatre! My [Off-Broadway’s Little Shop of Horrors] family knows how to bring the community together!” Bleu, 35, captioned an Instagram video on Sunday, May 27. “Can’t believe it’s been almost 20 years since I’ve done this.”
In the clip, the star is jumping rope on a New York City street as his 2007 song “Push It to the Limit” from the Disney Channel Original Movie Jump In! plays in the background. Bleu starred alongside Keke Palmer in the DCOM, which premiered in January 2007. (Bleu is currently starring as Seymour Krelborn in an Off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors.)
The film followed the story of Izzy Daniels (Bleu) a teenage boxing prodigy who finds himself on a Double Dutch team coached by longtime friend Mary (Palmer). Throughout the movie, Izzy has to decide if he wants to be a Golden Gloves winner like his father or help his new friends win a regional Double Dutch championship.
The film’s director, Paul Hoen, told Insider in January 2022 that both Bleu and Palmer, 30, did their own stunts on the film’s set.
“What’s just so amazing with that group of actors is that they could do all of that jump roping,” Hoen recalled. “It’s amazingly hard, and all the tricks, they were completely into those and learning how to do them.”
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Palmer has also looked back at her time making the movie, revealing that she had her first kiss on camera with Bleu.
“That was my first kiss in life,” Palmer, 30, said during an interview with Cosmopolitan in July 2020. “Even though that wasn’t my real first kiss, it was my actual first kiss … I remember just feeling excited and it was cool because I had a cool person to kiss, Corbin is pretty good looking.”
Palmer admitted she was “scared” as well. “The most fun part about this movie was that I was around my peers — people my own age,” she recalled.
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Other than Bleu and Palmer, Jump In! also starred David Reivers, Shanica Knowles, Patrick Johnson Jr., Laivan Greene and Kylee Russell.
While Jump In! was a standalone DCOM, director Hoen revealed that a lot of footage was left on the cutting room floor.
“It took a long time to kind of cull it down,” he told Insider, explaining that the original 120 minutes of footage had to be cut for TV. “I don’t know that we pulled out [full] scenes, but a lot of the Double Dutch was just so thick, and it was just trying to find the rhythm of how we could cut all of it down, especially in those competitions.”
