In this October 1997 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Ricky Martin performs “Maria” in the Toronto studio. He is 25 years old, and this is the song that did the work — his first international hit, and the record that carried him out of Latin America and across Europe while English-speaking North America was still learning the name.
The performance sits about a year and a half out from the Grammy stage that would change the scale of everything. At this point “Maria” is not a nostalgia number or a set-closer people wait for; it is the current single, being sold to a daytime audience that in most cases is hearing it for the first time.
Its staying power is the reason this tape is worth having. When MTV handed Martin the first-ever Latin Icon Award in 2025, “Maria” was still in the medley — nearly three decades after this performance, still doing the same job. What the footage preserves is the version of it from before it had become a career landmark: a 25-year-old selling a song, in a television studio, on the strength of the song. He performs it in a room where most of the audience has no reference point for him at all, which is not the position he would be in again after 1999.
Unseen since its original 1997 broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show, safeguarding an early televised performance of the song that opened the door.
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