ABC News 20/20 Freeing Keiko

It was one of those magical movie moments, a homeless boy bonds with a 5-ton orca in the film "Free Willy" and helps the killer whale escape from unscrupulous keepers and return to the wild. But that ending was Hollywood fiction. When audiences, including millions of children, learned that the animal that played Willy was an orca named Keiko who was confined to a shallow pool in Mexico, they started a campaign to free him. And that, say some experts, was taking Hollywood too far. As the public began to campaign for Keiko's release, the movie studio hired Dave Phillips, a marine mammal activist, to monitor Keiko's rehabilitation and spearhead the effort to return the whale to the wild. No one had ever undertaken such a project, but Phillips said he knew he had to give it a shot. When Phillips saw Keiko in his pool in Mexico, the orca was underweight and suffering from papilloma virus. Keiko was moved to a specially built tank in Oregon where he swam in sea water for the first time since infancy. Within a year and a half, he'd gained 2,000 pounds and his skin virus had disappeared. Phillips and his colleagues knew how unprepared Keiko was for life in the wild. He didn't even know how to catch a live fish. Still, the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation carried on and hired an Air Force cargo plane to take the whale to yet another custom-made location in Iceland. It cost some $200,000 a month to maintain Keiko in his million-dollar pen and to reintroduce him to the waters where he was born. Keiko was outfitted with transmitters to track his movements, and then lured into the open ocean. Phillips and his team hoped Keiko would reconnect with his own species. He did, but after each encounter Keiko returned to the safety of his pen until July 2002. That's when Keiko swam away with a wild pod, leading Phillips to believe the project had finally succeeded.