No Surrender Cinema: Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos
Man, I miss the 80’s. Truth be told, I miss most years where the world wasn’t such a hypersensitive place, but those first ten years of my life (1980 to 1990) were truly something else. It was an era chock full of things that quite simply just wouldn’t fly today, like a man best known for kicking ass in R-rated action films deciding he was fit to transform into an cartoon hero for the children of the world. Two decades before the internet was overflowing with his facts, Chuck Norris decided that he could do animated action just as well as the Masters of the Universe and GI Joe could, and that’s why we have been blessed with some offbeat subject matter for this edition of No Surrender Cinema. Prepare yourselves as we journey back to the days where the world was kept safe by the Karate Kommandos!
Airing in syndication in 1986 (the same year he starred in The Delta Force, and a mere year after he blew Richard Lynch to bits in Invasion USA), Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos featured Chuck as a sort of hybrid GI Joe/James Bond government operative, backed up by a team of skilled fighters and young proteges. Much like its animated peers, each character had a defining look and/or trait. Let’s take a look at the Karate Kommandos roster:
- Kimo: a Samurai warrior who was often spotted slicing his enemies weapons in half, then sprinting away gleefully.
- Tabe: a Sumo wrestler who stayed in fighting shape by devouring any food in sight.
- Reed: Chuck’s teenage protege who was quick to join in on the action.
- Pepper: Reed’s sister and the apparent “brains” of the team.
- Too Much: the knockiest of knock-offs. There’s really no disguising the fact that Too Much is the Karate Kommandos copycat (uh, equivalent) of Indiana Jones’ little buddy Short Round.
That’s right folks, this is the team that the United States Government has deemed worthy of being our protectors. A martial arts movie star, two fighters defined more by stereotypes than by skill, and a couple of kids. Actually, come to think of it, Chuck isn’t even presented as an action star in the cartoon. Yes, he’s still Chuck Norris, but he’s not world famous Chuck Norris. In fact, Chuck is so unknown to the masses in this animated world that he has to identify himself to several fishermen at one point, and tells them that if they need to reach him, he can be contacted through the US Embassy. The best part about this whole deal is that each episode is bookended by live action sequences of the real Chuck Norris training and talking to the audience at home. Trust me, you haven’t lived until you hear Chuck Norris, with his dry as the desert sand delivery, telling us about the time the team “finally got the robot to his destination”. Then, just like any 80’s cartoon worth its salt would do, Real Life Chuck would come back at the end of the show to reflect on the happenings of the episode and give us the moral of the story before the credits roll.
Unfortunately for Cartoon Chuck and his crew, he’s very familiar to a certain group of people, that being the terrorist organization known as VULTURE. VULTURE’s leader is The Claw, who of course has a mechanical claw for an arm and looks to be the result of putting GI Joe’s Destro and Inspector Gadget’s Dr. Claw in a blender. His nefarious band of baddies consists of Super Ninja (who sounds less sinister and more like an irate Krusty The Clown when endlessly cursing Norris’ name), a gaggle of ninjas that act as frequent punching bags for the good guys, and guest villains like Angelfish and The Imposter. Every episode follows the same, standard formula; VULTURE is in search of a McGuffin that will help them accomplish their goal of world domination, and the Karate Kommandos spoil their plan and save the day. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Sadly, repeat is exactly what fans of Karate Kommandos had to do if they needed their fix , because a mere five episodes were all that was produced for television. I was one of those fans, and if the absurdity that you’ve read about in this article thus far makes you wonder why, then let me clear things up for you. First of all, I was 6 and anything involving the martial arts was awesome to me. Second of all, as a grown man who loves absurdity in entertainment (remember, I’m the guy who presented the bar fight from The Garbage Pail Kids Movie as a Scene of the Week here at BPA), the situations that the Kommandos found themselves in were fantastically wild. In the very first episode (“Deadly Dolphin”) we get ninjas in scuba gear shooting lasers at our heroes. Later, in Episode 4 (“Menace From Space”) we’re blessed with the once in a lifetime opportunity to watch Chuck Norris fighting ninjas in space.
Read that back. Now read it out loud. CHUCK NORRIS FIGHTING NINJAS IN SPACE. And just when you think that’s where Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos reached its peak, the following (final) episode sees the team stranded on an island filled with zombies. So we get Chuck and company kicking zombie and ninja ass at the same time! Cannon Films made some crazy stuff, but even they didn’t take things that far, and we were still a few years away from the truly eccentric offerings of the video store era. A cartoon was the perfect medium to deliver the type of adventures that kids like me were having with our toys, and if that’s what it took to see Chuck Norris hitting jump kicks on an enemy inside of a space shuttle, then so be it.
Speaking of toys, there’s no way I can talk about Karate Kommandos without mentioning the toy line that it supported. Christmas 1986 was a great time for yours truly, because I was gifted the majority of the series from my older cousin. There was Chuck, and Super Ninja, and another Chuck, and Kimo, and another Chuck, and no I’m not being funny. In a series of toys that consisted of 10 action figures and one vehicle, Chuck Norris took up a third of the lineup. I can forgive Chuck for not making room for other figures (the man got 3 figures in one series while the show’s main villain didn’t even get the toy treatment!) because Kenner did make the Karate Corvette, and it was AWESOME. It shot out shuriken discs! Swords popped out from the sides and the trunk! My Karate Kommados put a lot of miles on that car. They even took it all the way to Eternia a few times for a little martial arts/MOTU crossover action.
Will Karate Kommandos go down in history as a groundbreaking cartoon? No, because it was derivative of 100 other shows at the time. Will it go down as one of Chuck Norris’ most memorable efforts? Even Chuck himself probably wishes he could forget about it sometimes. Even though it was short-lived and the toys are more memorable to 80’s kids than the show itself, there is something charming mixed in with the craziness. Slapping Chuck’s name on it for credibility and then crafting the craziest scenarios imaginable just made it even more appealing for the young kids who felt cool enough to know who Chuck Norris was at that point. None of my friends had been able to sit and watch The Octagon or Missing in Action like I had, but we could sit back and chit chat about how cool we thought the cartoon was and plan out what villainous toys our Karate Kommandos figures were going to take down next.
Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos is available to view for free right now on the Tubi app, and a MOD DVD from the Warner Archive is available for $9.99 on Amazon as of this writing. Some of you might have to be in the right (nostalgic) state of mind to dive into this one, but if you’re in the mood to keep your entertainment light and still want to fill your action quota, you can’t go wrong with a couple of episodes of Karate Kommandos.
Plus, everyone should see Chuck Norris fighting ninjas in space at least once in their life.
