10 Things You Didn’t Know About Missing in Action

Kino Lorber recently released the Missing in Action Trilogy on Blu-ray and in typical Kino Lorber fashion, they knocked it out of the park with beautiful 4K scans of the original 35mm negatives and a mix of new and archival special features.

There is so much Cannon goodness in this trilogy, I almost didn’t know what I wanted to tackle first, but I did the logical thing and started at the beginning with 1984’s Missing in Action. The Missing in Action disc includes a commentary track with Director Joe Zito and it was that commentary track that served as the source material for these 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Missing in Action…

1. Joe Zito addressed the most famous Missing in Action tale of them all at the start of the commentary track. Zito’s Missing in Action film (which was originally intended to be the second film in the series) and Lance Hool’s Missing in Action film (which was originally intended to be the first film in the series) were both being edited at the same time and that is when Lance pitched releasing his movie first to the Cannon executives if they liked his film better. And that’s exactly what happened, Zito’s film was released first and Hool’s was released second (as a prequel) EXCEPT in Italy! Zito was in Rome following and discovered that the memo must not have reached the Italian market and in fact his movie was released as Missing in Action 2 in Italy.

2. For the Braddock (Chuck Norris) dream sequence that kicks off the film, Zito had the badass idea that one of the helicopters should have skulls on the ends of its skids. To their credit, the mostly Filipino crew (many who years earlier worked with Francis Cord Coppola on Apocalypse Now) managed to get Zito the skulls he wanted, although Zito admitted he did not want to know how they did it, since it is not like there were any Spirit of Halloween stores they could have gone to for the last minute prop idea.

3. Cannon originally wanted Missing in Action to be filmed in the Miami area, but Zito pushed for the film to be made in Asia since that is the part of the world that the story was taking place. Zito was then given a $25,000 location scouting budget and headed to the Philippines where the film would end up being shot.

4. Two of the notable extras used in the film were Chuck Norris’ brother Aaron Norris (who was one of the stunt coordinators on the movie) and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Van Damme’s primary responsibility on the movie was as one of the drivers on the crew. JCVD did get a stunt credit as J. Claude van Damme.

5. The scene where Braddock has to return to the hotel after he sneaks out to confront General Tran (James Hong) and find out the location of the P.O.W. camp had two notable tales attached to it. First, the street that the hotel was located on needed to be shut down for the production, that meant any cars parked on the street needed to move. Zito turned to his Assistant Director to handle this and he did in an unorthodox way. Instead of finding out who owned the cars and ask them to move them, he had a bunch of crew members physically pick up the cars (noting that these were smaller sized vehicles) and move them to the next street over!

6. This was also the scene where Braddock had to shimmy across a wire high above the street from one building to another… Chuck Norris ended up going into business for himself when he went further out on the wire than was required wanting Zito to get the best shot possible. So there was Chuck Norris high above the street and literally working without a safety net.

7. Chuck managed to do the wire scene unscathed, but a simple workout accident late in the production ended up busting open Chuck’s lip. The scab on his lip was visible in the opening minutes of the film where Chuck is day drinking and flipping back and forth from the news and a Spider-Man cartoon on TV. Zito had to shoot Chuck from the side to hide the scab on Braddock’s lip during the scene where Braddock’s pseudo love interest, Ann Fitzgerald (Lenore Kasdorf), sees him off at the airport.

8. After the production wrapped, Joe Zito took the Hawaiian shirts that M. Emmet Walsh’s character Jack Tucker wore from the wardrobe department and would end up wearing them until they fell apart.

9. The P.O.W. camp that was built in the jungle ended up getting some squatters in it. Apparently the movie quality huts were better than the conditions some of the natives were living in at the time. When the camp was needed for production the squatters had to be evicted… which was good thing for them, since Braddock ends up blowing up the camp!

10. A private security army had to be hired to protect the crew while they were filming in the jungle and to ensure none of the weapons that were used in the movie (which were borrowed from the Philippine Army) got into the hands of the rebels.