I Wonder What Happened to Skypanther

My father told me stories about a racehorse called Skypanther, in Mexico City, around 1950. We were never sure he was real. This is the story as he told it, and the ending I'd like to give him.

The story

The stories were real

Told in my own voice, the way my father used to tell it: a little different every time.

My father had a way of starting stories without warning. We'd be sitting together, talking about life, and he'd look off somewhere and say, “I wonder what happened to Skypanther?”

Mexico City. He was maybe twenty-three, twenty-four years old, and he and his buddies had a racehorse. Not owned, exactly. Looked after. They fed him. They washed him. They walked him cool after a run.

Skypanther was grey. Or maybe he was black. It depended on the story that day.

He was never famous. He never made the papers. But on race days, a handful of young men stood in the stands and shouted his name like he was the only horse in the world.

Then there was a little matter of a bet. The details seemed to change every time the story was told, but the ending never did. They had to leave Mexico City in a hurry, but Skypanther stayed behind.

My father passed a few years ago, and the story stopped. So now I'm the only one who wonders.

And I like to think I know. An old horse in a green field outside the city. Children at the fence with apples. And every now and then, for no reason at all, Skypanther goes for a run.

Erik

Plates

Six images from the telling

Three young men in shirtsleeves laugh around a dark racehorse at a whitewashed stable door in 1940s Mexico City

The buddies

“Not owned, exactly. Looked after.”

A young man sponges down a pale grey racehorse in a sunny stable yard

Grey, that day

A dark racehorse with a white star leads the field down the home straight of a dirt track

III

Race day

At night, the racehorse looks out over his stall door into an empty stable yard

Stayed behind

In warm colour, an old dapple grey horse at a fence takes red apples from three small children, a volcano on the horizon

Apples at the fence

At sunset an old horse gallops freely across a green pasture, a snow-capped volcano beyond

For no reason at all

“Skypanther goes for a run.”

How it was made

A true story, imagined

The stories are my father's. The pictures are not photographs. Nobody photographed Skypanther, so Mexico City around 1950, the stables, the race and the field were made with generative image and video tools, then chosen and edited by hand. None of the people shown are real.

The horse changes colour from shot to shot, because in the telling he did. The film stays in black and white until the last scene, the only part in colour: the part I've imagined for him. The narration is my own voice; the guitar score was made with AI.

Story — my father, as he told it

Narration & direction — Erik, Skypanther Studios

Images — GPT Image 2.5 via Higgsfield

Motion — Kling 3.0 via Higgsfield

Score — ElevenLabs

Edit — assembled by hand

A true story, retold · images and score created with AI

skypantherstudios.com