Punching Day: Fight Zone 🌭

Imagine a sport with the lethal strikes of martial arts but the pageantry of pro wrestling and the choreography of a grade school ninja play. Imagine two biker babes in leather underpants. Imagine seven more nude biker babes. Maybe imagine three more. You fool, your insane and horny imagination has trapped you in…

The Fight Zone.

In 1995, Sugar Ray Leonard and the guy who would go on to produce the Purge movies got together with a bunch of stuntmen, martial artists, and the most affordable bikini model agency he could find to create Fight Zone. It was a series of pay-per-views that felt like a yellow belt’s insecure reaction to the Ultimate Fighting Championship. All that hugging and tackling wasn’t real fighting. Real fighting has no rules! It has nine variations of butterfly kicks! And costumed characters based around their nationality! It has fake blood and delicate choreography! It has announcers who are as confused as anyone about what this is supposed to be! Let’s meet them!

The lead commentator is Danny Martinez, who introduces his “sidekick, no martial arts pun intended,” Cameron Flener. Danny is Newscaster (Uncredited) in any ’70s TV movie and Cameron Flener is a Pauly Shore without the personality. This broadcast team doesn’t seem to know much about combat sports, sports, or broadcasting, but Danny lists their one qualification:

It’s not a lot of expertise, but as you’ll discover in the Fight Zone, competence only gets you dead. By this point, most of the audience will have clocked this as a second-rate and fake version of something, but it’s not clear what. This is a much worse version of pro wrestling and a much, much, much worse version of UFC, and the announcers seem to know it. They sense every viewer’s question will be “fucking why? Why do this!?” Well, Danny tries to answer that by listing possible motivations for Fight Zone warriors.

Most competitions don’t start with the announcer asking, “What’s the point?” The point of victory!? What kind of coward or Communist would even bring it up? Well, this may be another thing Fight Zone is insecure about because the same way it’s not really fighting, it’s not really a tournament. As Danny and Cameron badly explain, viewers can call in to vote for the champion, even if they lose or die. So this sport’s champion is decided not like a normal death match, but how 2007 American Idol viewers made fun of Sanjaya. And it takes Danny and Cameron so many tries to explain this very simple idea that I’m surprised “The Concept of Voting By Phone” didn’t win the belt. Let’s move on to the first fight.

The producers thought it would look cool if they replaced the ring announcer’s tuxedo jacket with a bulletproof vest. Like every decision every person made about Fight Zone, they were wrong. This guy looks less like a thunderdome emcee and more like a little boy got cold at a wedding reception and borrowed grandma’s fleece. He looks like a war reporter at a chess tournament brawl. He looks like a miracle that crawled from the laundry after semen soaked into a very special pair of cargo shorts.

The producers were trying for a Bloodsport thing, so the Finnish guy’s personality, backstory, and name is Viking. Viking scolds us, saying that since Vikings were the first Europeans to discover America, he has land rights to our country. I don’t need to tell you this is not how any single idea has ever worked in the history of land ownership or man, so I’m not sure what he means or what he could expect. It’d be like someone from New Orleans going into a Pizza Hut and declaring, “By rights of Louisiana Purchase, I am here to battle for my personal pan pizza.”

As Viking mocked our puny Christopher Columbus, our nation’s greatest pride, the cameraman created a sense of menace by slowly zooming in. Unfortunately, Viking’s speech went on longer than anyone anticipated and no one involved in this show had any sense of restraint. So people who bought this pay-per-view, disappointed taekwondo instructors in the single digits, got to see nothing but Viking’s nose for a full minute. He is facing off against The Irish Assassin.

The Irish Assassin’s thing is that he was trained in lethal street warfare by the Irish Republican Army, which is a great backstory. But instead of focusing on that, he attacks Viking for his weight problem.

This is a crazy line of attack because Viking was Tony Halme, who wrestled in the WWE under the name Ludvig Borga, and was very, very not fat. He looked like someone camouflaged a tank with a thin layer of bologna. And Irish Assassin calls this cartoonishly muscled hulk monster fat so many different ways the cameraman has long since zoomed past a reasonable closeup and up his nose. And he doesn’t know he’s being filmed like that, so his relatively sane finishing line also ends up sounding crazy:

We’re too close to see what Irish Assassin holds up when he says “THESE.” You’d assume hands, but he just called a man with 2% body fat obese for five minutes, so there’s an equal chance he pulled out his nuts or a handful of jelly beans or two bashful puppets. More importantly, shouldn’t one of these fighters be a good guy? We have a cocky foreign invader threatening to steal our land and a cocky foreign murderer who’s just a stupid dick. Fight Zone thought they had a genius idea to add storytelling to the UFC and accidentally recorded a half hour of grouchy nostrils calling each other names.

And with that, we cut back to our announcers and Cameron tries every catchphrase at once to create word soup.

I think they pre-recorded several generic versions of this to edit into the rest of the show, and Cameron misunderstood it to mean “several versions of this in the same take.” Whatever caused it, it’s a harbinger of nervous energy, like he knows this night will only get more awkward. Speaking of, hit the gong, white guy!

Now, lead the fighters to the ring, way, way too many biker babes!

I never thought I’d say this, but this might be too many lasers and ’90s thongs.

Each martial artist gets his own swarm of naughty Easy Rider babes. Against the backdrop of all the taiko drums and yin yangs, it feels like they glitched in from the wrong video game…

… and they don’t stop coming. However many biker babes you’re picturing, triple it. By weight and volume, 11% of this arena is leather panties. Sorry, I’m getting distracted. Let’s talk about the fight.

It fucking sucks. It’s a combination of bad pro wrestling and confusion. They fight like two 9-year-olds after their sensei told them to have fun but be careful. And the announcers don’t know what to say or what anything is called. During this exchange, Cameron says “The kind of pain I get to see here, Lord have mercy. Whoa, th– oh my goodness, that hurts.”

And to his credit, this move isn’t an anything. A generous viewer could call it an armbar, but it’s mostly two awkward guys disagreeing on how stupid stage combat should look. Cameron adds the childlike commentary, “I’m telling ya, the Viking, the Viking, and just… people say he doesn’t lose. He he he can’t lose. He’s a invincible fighter.” All at once the viewer is challenged to decide who this is for. If it’s for kids, why the tits? If it’s for UFC fans, why is it so fake? If it’s for karate nerds, why are they pro wrestling? If it’s for pro wrestling fans, why get announcers who see a textbook vertical suplex and say this?

Again, all the word bubbles are verbatim. Cameron followed up that body slam comment by screaming, “BACK ACHE 1-800-BACK-PAIN!” What a precious and wonderful disaster. And Viking follows up the suplex with a Jake “The Snake” Roberts DDT to which Danny declares, “Oh. Another. Oh, I am telling you. Those are… those are vicious body slams. I mean that hurts.” And maybe he’s right, because Irish Assassin stops moving. It seems to be over after two body slams, neither of which were body slams, making this “bare-fisted combat you crave” identical but outrageously worse than any ordinary pro wrestling match.

Cameron seizes on this lull in the action to do some color commentary. He says, “This is kind of interesting. We’ve got an Irishman and a Finland. … Finlander here.” If he was going anywhere with that thought, we’ll never know because a ref emerges from the mist to declare Viking the winner. There was no count or pinfall or anything. It’s a big ask for our suspension of disbelief, but I guess everyone in the Fight Zone just kind of understands when a fight is over. Danny gives his analysis on the match containing one suplex, one DDT, and nothing else:

They cut to a replay of the suplex, but instead of them commenting over it, they simply replay the clip in its entirety, with the original audio. So you get to hear his voice from one minute ago saying, “one hellacious body slam, oh. Oh, I mean. Bring out the d-domed pills, I’m uh, you know. I’ve got back pain,” like you’ve lost your goddamn mind. This show is broken in ways that seem impossible. It’s like someone tried to invent sports broadcasting and woke up in jail with their asshole stuck in a vacuum cleaner.

And it gets weirder. They cut to a ringside post fight analysis with Michael Jai White. You probably know him as a famous movie star and martial arts great. In 1995, he was already a veteran performer and a man with the confidence that comes from being a handsome, muscular fight master. And yet when they put a microphone in front of his mouth and ask him to describe Fight Zone, he turns into a nervous fucking wreck. Here is his analysis, word-for-word, in its entirety:

The next set of fighters, Manu and El Peligro, aren’t quite as menacing.

Manu is a gentle, tiny nerd whose pro wrestling character is a gentle, tiny nerd with father issues. He explains he’s good at fighting because his dad wouldn’t let him leave for school until 10 minutes before the starting bell. He seems to suddenly realize this isn’t much of a story, so he clarifies it was a mile away. He seems to suddenly realize this still isn’t much of a story, so he makes it a mile and a half, then two miles. All in the same sentence. So in his words, he is a master of karate because it was “a mile, mile and a half, to two miles to school.” My thirty eleven inch penis and I aren’t measurement experts, but the margin of error on a one mile distance should not be plus-or-minus one mile. And it gets worse. Young Manu had to do the same thing on the way back from school! His father was there at home, timing him!

So that’s why he’s the best. And it takes Manu seven full hours to finish making up this story. Which, by the way, he’s not even trying to sell. He’s talking to us like we’re his therapist, or a bad date he met on DumbfucksOnly. It’s hard to conceive of a less threatening origin than “my friends know me as a bit of a shark guy” followed by a long-walk-to-school story getting embellished as it’s being told. Manu, you’re competing in a laser arena filled with biker sluts where there are no rules. You can say you got to school every morning after your father opened up one of your arteries and threw you in the ocean. This is not a time for cute fibs.

At long last, after another month of describing his elementary school jogs, Manu remembers he’s on TV. He says “I know El Peligro is a dangerous street fighter, but I’m going to give him a taste of Hawaiian martial arts.” Great! A strong, punchy ending! Except it’s not. Manu goes on to list, in excruciating detail, all the dumb little karates he does that make up the portmanteau of his dojo’s style. It’s unreal. Manu has the thoughts of a pet psychic watching a cat overdose on painkillers.

El Peligro’s fighting style is quicker to explain: STREET. He’s got the costume and personality of what most viewers would call South Central Urkel. He, you know, mumbles something about gangs and homies. He probably could have rehearsed more, but it’s not like effort was going to save a concept this basic. El Peligro is a yada yada character and he knows it, so he wraps things up with a message to Manu in his signature low effort style:

Their fight is an adult blue belt demonstration. Taking turns standing deliberately still, the two men unload with spinning air swats and brutal nothing strikes. There’s no storytelling or impact, and it’s fake past the threshold of pointless. It looks like a lighting rehearsal for a play called Dojo Pussies. Sorry, that’s not really a joke. I think I’m still cranky from Manu’s origin story.

Danny, who has called every move so far a “body slam,” suddenly comes to life after Manu waves at El Peligro with his foot for the 17th time. He shouts “a round kick to the face and then a hooking needle kick!” So I guess we’ve finally found your area of expertise, dork. Jesus, I really am cranky from that Manu promo.

El Peligro is no match for the swift, misplaced feet of Manu and the underprivileged youth is kicked to death. At least in the fiction of this nonsense. In reality, the biker girls definitely took more damage from standing in front of the smoke machines than El Peligro took from standing in front of Manu’s kicks.

After his fake fight against a fake gangster, Manu smears some fake blood across his face and tells Michael Jai White how real everything was. World famous movie star, Michael Jai White, only has this to say:

Fight Zone is such a sloppy mess it has Michael Jai White stuttering like his wife caught him with his dick in it. Back to you, Danny and Cameron!

This was a bad time for Cameron to forget how to talk because the upcoming match is not an ordinary “dibla ah a another match l- tt.” It’s time for the BADD KARMA CHALLENGE!

Badd Karma is the main character of Fight Zone, and he was a bad choice. He has the voice, face, and attitude of a Theta Chi who thinks these sexual battery charges are bullshit, but he studies full wizard karate. He is undefeated in the Fight Zone, and says his energy-based style means any opponent who dares strike him opens themself up to… you know, I’d better have him explain it. This is what happens when he gets attacked:

He’s not done.

It’s fucking nu–

It’s fucking nuts. And it’s, in his exact words, what happens when you punch or kick him. In conclusion, no one can beat him because he doesn’t get emotionally involved in fights. Then he says several catty, unintelligible things about his opponent, Dreblo. But he is a fool. Our precious Dreblo is perfect.

Dreblo doesn’t seem to know everyone was doing characters. He talks like he’s at a job interview, reciting his record of three and a half years of Hapkido like it isn’t a punchline in this context. In combat sports terms, saying you have 3 and a half years of Hapkido is like a mathematician saying “I have 3 and a half years, or ‘pi’ years of fourth grade.” And it is only downhill from there. God bless our precious, precious Dreblo.

Dreblo gives this powerful testimony for incel-powered karate, then flubs at the camera, “You cank back out now, Badd Karma. Your ass is mine.” It’s adorable. And when the fight starts, he’s as fucked as you thought he’d be. Badd Karma is Fight Zone’s version of Steven Seagal, an untouchable wrist lock sorcerer, but he ends every throw with the theatrics of a boat show model. He’s like a figure skating routine based on Under Siege 2. And that would be the full description of the fight if he hadn’t gone way too far with his third flamboyant wrist lock:

He plants our poor lonely Dreblo on the back of his neck with all the care of a man who found a spider in his sex doll. He eats shit. They took his shattered spine and full balls to the hospital in a pillow case. And like they eventually do every time, these untrained nerds have demonstrated why it’s a bad idea to get together and play UFC.

Cameron forgets he’s supposed to be the pain-loving color commentator and reacts honestly: “Oh, that’s BAD.” Danny agrees, telling his broadcast partner, “That really hurts when that happens.” Yeah, Danny, snapping your spine into eight parts after 3 and a half years of hapkido instead of sex sucks, man. Great insight. Anyway, Dreblo responds by not moving, which is the losing condition of Fight Zone (sometimes).

Next up is Piranha vs. Scorpion almost as if to remind Dreblo’s pathetic remains they were allowed to come up with cool names.

Piranha’s promo is rough. His style is “OKINAWA” and he’s a weeb who didn’t know wardrobe was going to make him a biker. He was not ready for any of this. He rambles about the sensuality of flesh-eating fish, his travels through the Orient, and concludes by telling us the Japanese have a saying: “hajimemashite and sayonara.” And then he translates: “Nice to meet you, and goodbye.” It’s incredible. I will treasure it forever. Piranha could said anything here, memorized any line from any samurai movie, and he instead summed up his lifetime of Oriental adventures with the first two phrases in his Japanese For Tourists guidebook. It’s like bragging, “We have a saying in Texas, which locals know is commonly spelled with an x.”

His opponent, Scorpion, has been trying to get in a fight for seven years, but no one will meet his challenge. I know this because Cameron throws to his package by saying:

What does that mean? Scorpion helps make it more clear:

He’s a mystery. We only know three things about him, and all of them are those seven years without a challenge. He says “Americans are wimps” and “my style of karate is American Kenpo Karate.” Unlike the rest of the Fight Zone competitors, Scorpion can hear himself, so he clarifies “American Kenpo… but it’s a pity you guys didn’t learn it right.” It’s a beautiful save. But like Viking, his character is a confused colonial, so he ends his promo by threatening the viewer’s entire nation. “WE DIDN’T DISCOVER THIS COUNTRY! WE CONQUERED THIS COUNTRY! AND I’M GONNA CONQUER YOU!” It’s stupid, but fun stupid. And check this sweet shit:

That rules. That’s how you kenpo kick Shaquille O’Neil’s face, dick, and booking agent in one smooth combo. By this point, you already know what their fight looks like. They miss with dainty kicks while the announcers mutter “that hurts” or “that’s some pain.”

Scorpion eventually chokes Piranha out, a move the Japanese call “arigato,” but there aren’t any taps or referee stoppages in the Fight Zone. It’s up to each maniac’s discretion how long he strangles his unconscious opponent. Piranha is left in a heap, and I guess in this fiction, he’s dead? Maybe Michael Jai White can clear things up.

Not really.

Next up is the final match! It features Bruce Burly, representing the style of Australian ju-jitsu, which is “a form of, like, Australian ju jitsu.” He’s the best. He is a professional great white rescue hunter and he brought shark teeth like he’s our biology class guest speaker.

Speaking of bull whips, Bruce Burly is also a whip master!

Bruce Burly is so great. He has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing here in an all new direction. He completely forgets about the fight promo he’s doing and tells a story about the goddamn government repoing his boat. He pulls out a giant knife and complains it’s “bureaucrats like them that keeps guys like us from getting anywhere in life, right?”

And the question wasn’t rhetorical! You can hear a producer off camera respond, “y-yeah.”

It took us the entire show, but we have a good guy. And he comes with good news. He says the same “Abo elder,” Oota, had a vision of all the greatest warriors in the world coming together to battle, and if Bruce Burly went there and defeated them, he’d get his boat back from the bullshit Australian government, which would let him save the sharks! These are the stakes we were looking for! This night, in this Fight Zone, we are battling for Bruce Burly’s boat! And the sharks!

When Bruce Burly gets back to doing the fight promo, he has simply one word for his opponent, Ski:

Awesome. That’s how you make wrong numbers work, Manu. Anyway, Ski is a lanky stunt bro whose character is an adrenaline junkie. He’d be my least favorite even if he wasn’t standing in the way of Bruce Burly’s boat prophecy.

As dabs of fake blood make Ski’s face look less and less like James Franco, the broadcast team has lost all steam. Ski swings a kick near Bruce Burly and Danny says, “Oh my goodness that hurts when you get hit in the he– I hate it when that happens.”

Cameron adds, “Yeah, that’s terrible. It’s like gettin’ kicked by a mule, I guess.”

It’d be weird if Danny and Cameron were good, but it’s hard to conceive of someone being worse at describing fights than these two men. Which sucks because when the fists and feet are so far from making contact it’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be happening. Again, who is this for? What kind of person would cheer for this? I’m glad you asked, because the camera finally picks up a good shot of the crowd. Look at these people:

Even the crowd on Fight Zone is fake. They filled a room with actors dressed like background extras from Pit Fighter. This is the 1995 equivalent of Twitter bots arguing with themselves. They pretend to cheer while Bruce Burly pretends to kill Ski with a mom jeans choke.

When Bruce Burly has decided he’s won, he is declared the winner. We don’t get his thoughts on the win because Bruce Burly can’t understand Michael Jai White’s nervous muttering and leaves. In an evening of uniquely awkward moments, it is a strong contender for most awkward…

… and yet it’s barely worth mentioning compared to Danny and Cameron’s sign off.

All they had to do was thank people for watching and say goodbye, and the task destroyed them. Human Language had the most dominating victory of the night against Cameron Flener’s mouth. All that’s left to do is fill time while they wait for callers to vote for the Fight Zone champion, a useless honor for a pointless event…

… what the fuck, what’s this? We’re entering MASTER KAZJA’S DOJO!? To learn MASTER KAZJA’S FORBIDDEN FIGHTING SECRETS!? There has never been a more pleasant surprise. The guy who played Skeeter in Shootfighter: Fight to the Death is going to teach me a forbidden fighting secret!? I’m so goddamn ready.

Ha ha ha, oh no. Kazja is teaching the “secret” to adding power to your punch. It seems to be, you know, really meaning it. Like, putting your hand into someone, but more enthusiastically. I’m not being mean when I say Kazja’s “forbidden techniques” are included in the very first sentence said by anyone who has ever taught anyone how to punch. What a treasure. What a hilarious explosion at the end of this tumbling disaster of an event.

After a short, weird interview with kung fu star Cynthia Rothrock, we cut back to Danny and Cameron to announce the night’s champion. They already know the show climaxed with Master Kazja, so with no pageantry or excitement, they break the news that Badd Karma won. They don’t say what this means for Bruce Burly’s boat, and with it the fate of all the ocean’s sharks, but it can’t be good.

Badd Karma is given full karate honors: no prize money and slow motion footage of his fight from earlier. Which means we go out on two minutes of Dreblo writhing on the floor while our winner stands out of frame. Not a single moment of this insanity went the way anyone intended. I wish every sport, every thing was Fight Zone.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsors and Hot Dog Supremes: Zach and Eva, Fight Zone Tag Team Champions and winners of a Dairy Queen voucher good for 10% off any small Blizzard containing two or fewer mix-ins.