{"id":2390780,"date":"2026-04-27T04:30:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T04:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2390780"},"modified":"2026-04-27T04:30:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T04:30:20","slug":"chuck-norris-played-himself-in-this-awful-karate-kid-style-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/chuck-norris-played-himself-in-this-awful-karate-kid-style-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Chuck Norris Played Himself In This Awful Karate Kid-Style Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

Chuck Norris starred in some of the most violent action movies of the 1980s<\/a>, but what he really wanted to do was entertain children. Poorly.<\/p>\n

Kids were wild about martial arts in Norris’ day, primarily because of Bruce Lee. They could throw on “Fist of Fury” and watch Lee open up a case of ice-cold whup ass on an entire dojo. Every child in the throes of bully trouble at school wanted to learn how to bring the pain the Bruce Lee way. Alas, when Lee died in 1973, martial arts cinema lost a bit of momentum in the United States. Unless you lived in a major city with a large Asian-American population, you had to settle for, basically, Norris and David Carradine.<\/p>\n

Like his 1980s action movie brethren, the now deceased Norris<\/a>\u00a0knew that when he made a film where his “Missing in Action” protagonist, Colonel Braddock, gets a burlap sack containing a starving rat thrown over his head (which he subsequently chomps in the squishiest, bloodiest manner possible), teenagers would be exchanging high-fives over the grisly sight. All sorts of nasty stuff happened in Norris’ movies, and kids loved it most of all.<\/p>\n

You know what kids didn’t<\/em> love? All five episodes of Chuck Norris’ “G.I. Joe” ripoff cartoon series “Karate Kommandos.” The show represented Norris’ first attempt to make a child-friendly piece of entertainment, and, to put it kindly, it sucked out loud. You’d think Norris would’ve gotten the hint, but when his commercial appeal went poof in the early 1990s, he decided to take another crack at that family audience. This resulted in 1992’s “Sidekicks,” an atrocious “The Karate Kid” clone in which Jonathan Brandis defeats his bullies with the help of the real Chuck Norris (minus the starving rat).<\/p>\n

Read more: 12 Plot Holes That Completely Ruined Movies<\/a><\/p>\n

Sidekicks delivers a swift kick to the cojones of film history<\/h2>\n
\n