Folks: the time has come. Thereâs been discussion of these on the podcast, and on the Discord, and in the martial arts pit Seanbaby lords over on weekends and alternate Fridays. Itâs time for an article-shaped look at a real garment called⌠Kicking Jeans.
Behold that description. And behold this hyperlink! You can visit that web store right now! You can purchase your own pair*, and experience them firsthand**, and toss this blog in a friggin trash can***!
*As of this writing, Kicking Jeans are only available in adult menâs sizes.
**As of this writing, Kicking Jeans are unavailable in every waist size above 29. I wanted to buy a pair and test them in real life and write about that. But I am too big.
***Your computer or phone is dirty now! Ha ha ha. Ha ha!
âKicking Jeansâ are jeans designed for doing regular stuff and doing martial arts. Which martial arts, you ask? âMultipleâ, they reply, because they havenât finished googling âmartial arts style namesâ and need to stall for time.
Kicking Jeans are the Model T of pants. Theyâre from decades ago (the 1970s), theyâre proudly sold in one color (blue), and they make a statement (such as âhi-yaaaâ). But maybe itâs more accurate to call Kicking Jeans the impractical, over-optimistic convertible of pants. From their debut in August 1977, âKickinâ Jeansâ sold themselves as more than clothing. They sold themselves as the gateway to a dream lifestyle.
Special thanks to Shawn Robare and the now-defunct website Branded In The ’80s for preserving screencaps of these vintage ads.
âFinally, blue jeans you can kick in.â Finally. Finally! Finally thereâs a product that lets you toggle between walking (boo) and kicking (FINALLY). Do you own a bright red sports car? If you did, you could toggle between obligatory errands and a breezy babe-magnetizing joyride. Kickinâ Jeans make that same promise, in a legs sense. Theyâre not a unique sales pitch. They are a unique modeling task, challenging clotheshorses to achieve âdisco casualâ and âIâm dressed optimally for this pummelingâ within the same magazine spread.
Hey computer: enhance! Because that advertisement features the most squicky word Iâve learned in a long time.
Thatâs right: âgusset.â The word âgussetâ is the central pillar of Kicking Jeans descriptions. Various ads trumpet a âslim gussetâ, âexclusive gussetâ, âhidden gussetâ, and other flashy synonyms for âwe let the crotch out by adding a humongous fabric quadrilateral.â
Iâve read the word âgussetâ a dozen times now. Iâve learned itâs a pants thing. I still feel like it means âturkey genitalia.â
Also, âgussetâ might be the only consistent word in these ads. Even the jeansâ name went through a few rebrands. As you saw above, they changed names when Literally Chuck Norris became their spokesman. Norris repped âAction Jeansâ, and also repped the same product as âKarate Jeansâ. In those ads, Chuck demonstrates the pantsâ ability to encompass the entire adult male yin and yang of âKarate Masterâ and âA Second Guy Incapable Of Relaxing.â
The company also turned to an array of spokeskickers beyond Norris. They hired not one but two Ernie Reyeses.
I know that ad feels dated now. Back in the day, America didnât have Big Government telling Job Creators they couldnât sell Violence Pants to School Children.
Kicking Jeans also hired somebody called âBill âSuperfootâ Wallaceâ to spokesleg.
I wish Iâd learned about this person sooner. He combines DB Cooper’s face with Braveheart‘s main character’s name. For all I know he is immortal and is all three men. Please: let me have that headcanon. I like it. Itâs fun to imagine him kicking open the door of a hijacked plane, shouting a Scottish âhi-yaa.â Also, I need any distraction I can get right now. Whenever my brain idles, it goes full Amadeus on new alt meanings for âgusset.â
Today, Kicking Jeans apparently lack the juice to keep the Celeb Train rolling. But I want to celebrate their modern models (âmod-delsâ?). The new no-names are no less striking. Such as this guy, whoâs trying to strike you with his fists even though heâs already kicking you.
If an action photo of âMr. Clean Trying To Aneurysmâ didnât sell you on these pants, nothing will. This blog is over. And if youâll excuse me, Iâve got a date in Seanbabyâs martial arts pit. I sure hope they start offering Kicking Jeans in my size before the big fight!
There are reasons giant robots show up again and again in our fables and legends. One, theyâre big enough that they donât have to listen to what their mom tells them to do. Two, they let someone engage in physical combat even if that someone has incredibly soft hands and is sitting in a comfortable chair. End of list. Thatâs all they need, and donât let anyone ever try to justify these things more to you – they make no sense physically, mechanically, or tactically. They are completely and solely a power fantasy treasured by children and underdeveloped men, and I love them so much.
Which is why I was shocked and angered that Robot Jox hadn’t been discussed on this site yet. “I’ll get to fixing that,” I said from my comfortable chair.
Robot Jox is a very late ’80s movie about robot combat that was made by a film studio with nowhere near enough money or robots to actually do such a thing. You can be forgiven for having never heard of it, because the studio actually went bankrupt while making it, leaving no money for the part of the process of âtelling peopleâ theyâd made a movie about giant robots. It was in and out of theatres so fast it was effectively a straight to video release, but again, they forgot to tell people they made the videos too, so itâs really just turtles all the way down here.
The other reason you can forgive yourself – honestly stop beating yourself up, this isnât worth it – for having never heard of Robot Jox is because itâs not actually that good. And itâs not even that bad. It has none of the defining qualities of a cult classic, and is instead just a cruddy movie that has been made with a shocking degree of professionalism. I mean that! Using modeling clay, a mostly empty room, and the best actors within arms reach, these people actually managed to tell a story about giant robots. Well done them, and itâs a shame you will forget the movie as you are watching it. So take my soft hand and join me as we celebrate its feats.
Robot Jox takes place in the future, as you’d expect, in a period just after a nuclear war. War is now outlawed – which is so smart, we should do that – and now all disputes between the two superpowers are settled in one-on-one fights between building-sized robots. The robot fights, which are kind of the whole point of this movie, are all done in stop motion, which is crude but surprisingly effective. Despite everything, the big cool fighting robots look like big cool fighting robots, in a way that modern Transformers movies can’t pull off, so much so that it seems almost churlish to point out the number of wires visible in the scenes.
Our hero is named Achilles, and if you were thinking this is the movie setting him up as someone with a fatal flaw that will be exposed at a critical juncture, stop. Just stop. This movie isn’t that clever. You’re only hurting yourself. Achilles is nothing more or less than the best pilot the Americans have, thanks to⌠some personal qualities he must have, theyâre not really mentioned. There’s a lot of martial arts training, that’s for sure.
A word about the actors: They’re all doing their jobs. They are actors, and they are acting, and I want to be clear that this movie is not bad because of them. They are probably doing more with the material than the material has done for them, and for that we should all be grateful. That said, it is impossible not to notice how they all look like store brand versions of other actors. The hero is clearly a cheaper Jean-Claude Van Damme, his buddy is 90% of John Goodman, etc.
Plot wise, there is no plot. Achilles, and his Russian foe, Alexander, are nominally fighting over the rights to Alaska, but this so beside the point that it’s almost insulting to mention, I’m sorry I did that to you. No, if this movie is about anything, itâs a character study of Achilles, the man with few if any identifying qualities. Let’s break it down, regardless: Achilles initially wants to fight Alexander because Alexander stepped on his friend. (In the lingo of the movie, this is not known as “Joxing Off,” which is a large missed opportunity.) Anyways, THAT’S A GOOD REASON. Achilles is going to fuck Alexander up, he is pumped up, and so are his friends.
And then they fight in⌠well they fight in a small studio where men carefully pose robots like dolls. But the small studio is made up to look like a desert. Which makes sense, you’d want to keep the building sized murderbots away from people, except there are actually people there.
But there is safety glass, and boy youâd hate to guess what might happen if that glass wasnât there when a 200 ton robot sits down on it.
That’s right, in the very first full fight we see, a building sized robot smashes into hundreds of people, killing them.
Anyways, now Achilles is sad, and he doesn’t want to fight, and we get to the “middle” of the movie where there is no fighting. Thereâs just nothing but dialog and character building and other things which lean on the strengths of the script, which, again, aren’t there. Here, look at this bullshit.
This isnât just a screenshot. The director very carefully framed this shot for several seconds. Why did he laboriously set up this image of someone making the world’s most famously easy origami model? Has the director done this because an origami motif is about to unfold here, just like I did within this very sentence?
Iâm not even sure if thatâs racist or just lazy! There’s more. The guy named Tex wears a cowboy hat.
Also, for some reason all the Robot Jox – American and Russian – all hang out together in this one bar.
Does this make any sense? No. But they needed a fucking place to do some dialog and no robot fights, and this room was available, so here we go. Put on your jumpsuits, everyone.
The whole middle of the movie is like this. Sure thereâs a love interest, and clones, and betrayal, and none of it fucking matters, because thereâs no robots. I want to be clear this isnât just me and my soft hands angry about the lack of toys, you can feel the movie itself contemptuously plodding through all this, angry that it couldnât just sell 43 seconds of stop motion robot fighting as a full movie, but not wanting to put in the hard yards to make the rest of the film.
The robot fights resume eventually, thank fuck, and there’s explosions and robots joxxing all over each other. But by this point you can sense theyâd gone so long with no robots that they had to cram all their robot ideas into what remained if the movie’s – hang on I’m going to look up the actual number to get this right – hahahhahhahahahhahhahahhhahhhhhahhhhhha 85 minute running time.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. So Alexander has robot joxxed into an advantageous position, and in his massive, arachnid-like robot, now looms over Achilles.
It’s a pretty serious situation, but however you think Achilles is going to respond to this, you’re wrong.
Because Achilles responds by leaping into space.
Physics talk. Going to space is super hard and requires all sorts of rockets and fuel tanks and math, none of which are present on these robots at all. At no point has anyone mentioned off-hand, “oh yeah, these things can go to space, it’s a thing that happens sometimes.” Never happens. But here he just fucken up and goes to space, I’m guessing solely because someone thought it looked cool. It’s incredibly insulting if you know anything about space at all, and that actually gives a big hint about who this movie is for, mainly 5 year old children. Because six year olds will know enough about space travel to know this can’t happen.
Anyways, it seems Alexander can also go into space, so he does, and while there shoots Achilles in the foot. Then they return to Earth. Like exactly where they started from. The whole thing was somehow more pointless than the 60 minutes in the movie that weren’t robots fighting.
The robot fight, which now seems almost absurd to still be continuing, continues. Achilles, now in a robot less a foot, transforms into a kind of tank thing, which one, ok, and two, means this whole time he had been piloting both a robot and a rocket, and both a robot and a tank. Which seems like a lot. It also means he now has to scoot along the battlefield like a dog with anal gland problems.
He scoots underneath the crotch of Alexander. Alexander’s crotch unfolds a chainsaw.
What happens next isn’t as sexual as it could have been, which is just tremendous news all around. I don’t think I could have written this article if it had. Eventually both robots get destroyed, and Achilles and Alexander fight with sticks for a bit, and then they very rapidly decide to stop and be friends instead. Then they do this.
Credits roll, movie over, quest complete. This movie is fucking done with itself.
In short, you have never seen anything like Robot Jox, because movies are normally made by people who know how to make movies. So what happened here? Like who the fuck wrote this thing?
Wait. What? Joe Haldeman is a Hugo and Nebula award winning author. His whole thing is writing incredible stories, usually grounded and sober ones that illustrate the costs of warfare and the toll it takes on the people who fight in them, themes not so much absent from Robot Jox as much as they are actively refuted. War, violence, and Robot Joxing, in the movieâs mind, is awesome, and has few downsides.
It seems that while Haldeman tried to write something sane and grounded, as he does, the people paying for the claymation crossed all that shit out. Every day, this whole movie must have been one long, exhausting argument between grounded realism and producers shouting LOL, ADD MORE JOX TO THE ROBOTS, JOE. PUT A CHAINSAW WHERE ONE’S DICK WOULD BE.
Recast in that light, you can kind of see Haldeman’s influence here. There’s a bit about Achilles having a contract that some jerk in a suit tries to screw him on terms, which is a very Haldeman kinda plot point, which lasts entire seconds before the movie gives up on it. And the villain, Alexander, is mostly evil, like 90 or 95% evil as these things are measured, but beneath the scenes and the dialog and the robots abruptly going to space, you can kind of sense he’s trapped in the same kind of situation as Achilles. To be clear, drawing parallels between the protagonist and villain isn’t precisely advanced screenwriting, I think a lot of Mad Libs actually set this up for you, but it’s something.
And that spectacularly inappropriate ass pat? I forgot! I TOTALLY FORGOT. That’s a fucking plot point. My same ass-grabbing guy at one point uncovers an imposter by patting them on their ass. He detected the ass was different! They set that up so well!
Yeah, yeah, you can kind of sketch out a better story with the pieces here. A trophy fighter with no choice to fight, risking his life so that no-one else has to risk anything, standing across the battlefield from someone in the same situation. Does he escape, or allow himself to be replaced with one of the test tube people, bred to never even be able to understand the hell of their existence? (I skipped past this; it seems important now.)
But in my heart of hearts, I don’t think that movie ever existed. We can’t retcon Robot Jox into a hidden gem; this movie is literally one person smashing action figures together and another person trying to give those action figures lines grounded in a place deeper than ‘JOX FOR ROBOTS.’
Iâm going to be honest with you – gestures for you to come closer to my comfortable chair – when I first remembered Robot Jox, I was like âOh great, Iâll be able to talk about how awesome this movie is, or failing that, how awful it is. I canât possibly lose!â And then I watched it, and reader, I lost. Robot Jox isnât amazing or terrible, it is the most profoundly C- movie that has ever existed.
Which made me realize every movie must have gone through something like this, a thousand arguments and compromises made between people who hate each other. It’s a miracle we ever get anything as artistically cohesive as Citizen Kane or Caged Heat. In fact, nearly everything must have gone through something like this. How many fistfights erupted about the kerning on the font on your bag of Doritos? We are surrounded by the work of people, some of them talented – but far more who arenât – some of whom cared – but far more who spent their days staring at the ceiling, silently mouthing âFuuuuuuuuuuck, letâs just finish this.â
What Iâm saying is the whole world is filled with people making Robot Jox.
So letâs try to all acknowledge how basically adequate that is.
If you took a sentient bag of mescaline to Cirque Du Soleil, its Yelp review would be the Robocop screenplay. A film willed into existence by Paul Verhoeven, a gasoline-blooded sex wizard masquerading as a movie director, Robocop grabbed Reagan-era policies by the throat and chokeslammed it into nitrous dust. It then spat that dust into our eyes like Rick Flair with a handful of cheat powder, and the result blinded us with such radical bodacity that 30 years later an alarming number of people still take the movie at face value.
Donât get me wrong â Robocop is objectively awesome. I endorse all movies that combine disparate nouns with the word âcop,â be it your Kindergarten Cops or your Wolfcops or your Beverly Hills Cops, or even your One Good Cops. And of all those films, Robocop is the Robocop-est. But Robocop is, very pointedly, a dystopian nightmare satirizing the privatization of social services, taking the recklessly excessive policies of Reaganâs 80s to their most extreme conclusions. Remember when they remade Robocop in the early 2010s as a glossily chaste action figure commercial with some light commentary about the pitfalls of drone warfare? If theyâd just waited a few more years until 2021, when America has reached the point where the media is unironically suggesting thatAmazon and Facebook should be allowed to join the United Nations, a reboot wouldâve practically written itself. That sentence I just typed is indistinguishable from any of Robocopâs goofily dystopic in-universe commercials trying to sell us performance health care on a pre-approved line of credit. The fact that it was dressed up as a story about a metal man dispensing âjusticeâ the only way he knows how â with psychotic violence â was the spoonful of sugar to help us choke that medicine down.
Anyway, I bring all of that up because today I want to talk about Robocop. I always want to talk about Robocop. I cry out his name in my sleep, so insatiable is my need to keep his mechanical spirit alive in the hearts and minds of all Robogodâs children. But today, on this blessed Punching Day, I specifically want to talk about Dick Jones, the testicle-crushing president of Omni Consumer Products.
Thatâs not even a completely accurate description of Dick Jones. Dick Jones doesnât crush his rivalsâ testicles so much as flatten their testicles like a prom corsage in a textbook about the advantages of beating children that he stole from a prison library and display the book in a glass casket as a warning to future disrespectful scrotums.
Dick Jones is the villain of Robocop, a perfect distillation of 1980s corporate culture right down to his smart wingtips. Heâs Marvel Comicsâ the Kingpin on a juice diet. Heâs the last boss of Final Fight sprung to glorious life. Dick Jones would drown Gordon Gekko in a bathtub. He would feed Patrick Batemanâs thumbs to an ATM machine. Dick Jones would show up three hours late to a dinner with Tony Montana and then order off-menu for the whole table, and Tony wouldnât say shit.
Perpetually sporting tailored suits and a veneered sneer, Dick Jones doesnât give one piston-legged fuck about anything but collecting all of the money in the universe. He spearheaded OCPâs acquisition of Detroitâs police force, primarily to use as a staging ground for his Tyrannosaurus mandroid ED-209. ED-209 is a tank with feet, the kind of thing a kid doodles in the back of a police car. Itâs an avatar of violent whimsy. It has the vibes of a murderer working on his standup routine. Itâs like a Teddy Ruxpin with bloodshot eyes. If Hasbro built a razor-beaked Furby that only spoke German, Dick Jones wouldâve deputized it as a school resource officer, and it would be ED-209âs partner. What Iâm getting at is that ED-209 is the absolute last thing youâd ever want to put into contact with the general public, and Dick Jones wants it to be a policeman. Itâs the public safety equivalent of giving every elementary school student a flesh-bound book and a ceremonial dagger. The population of the city is about to be dramatically reduced, and in an historic fashion.
Weâre introduced to Dick Jones when he brings ED-209 to work like a therapy dog and it kills someone in front of his boss. Just absolutely obliterates a junior executive in the middle of a quarterly strategy meeting. Slams that fucker into meat confetti with bullets the size of Pringles cans. And this is the robot Dick Jones built to ticket unruly motorists and guide children through crosswalks. Everyone in the meeting reacts as if the robot malfunctioned, but if you ask me, nothing could be further from the truth. Based on everything we come to learn about Dick Jones, that robot was functioning as designed. Dick Jones didnât accidentally build ED-209 to massacre people for littering or breaking curfew; he built that shit on purpose because thatâs what he thinks about everyone who isnât Dick Jones. Heâs every auto executive who griped about having to do a product recall simply because a few lousy jagoffs got decapitated by the automatic seatbelts.
Dick Jones is such a nail-shitting bastard that balding reptilian crime boss Clarence Boddicker screams his name into Robocopâs face to avoid getting policed to death. Clarence Boddicker, a man who graphically executes his fellow human beings like a Ghostbuster but for people, invokes the name of Dick Jones in his moment of greatest terror. Thatâs the kind of letter of recommendation I wish my guidance counselor had written for me.
But what really seals the deal for me is the scene in which Dick Jones plans a manâs murder while finishing a shit. Just muscling out the tail of a monster dooker while paging Clarence Boddicker a coworkerâs home address.
You see, after ED-209 turned an employee into bone paste during a budget meeting, OCP defunded Dick Jonesâ murder bot project and turned to Bob Morton, an up-and-coming executive with a dream of fusing mangled dead flesh with remorseless metal and circuitry to create The Future of Law Enforcementâ˘. Morton swoops in to pitch his Robocop program and becomes the new star of OCP, stealing Dick Jonesâ thunder. If anything Iâve written up to this point has been coherent, I apologize, but what shouldâve been clear is the fact that stealing Dick Jonesâ thunder is the last thing you should ever do. Thatâs like calling an Uber Pool to take you to Hell. Both the journey and the destination are an eternity of suffering.
The Robocop program is a big success, and Bob Morton becomes the talk of the town. OCP promotes him to executive vice president, which puts him in prime position to come gunning for Dick Jonesâ job, and if you arenât screaming âBob Morton, no!â at your screen by this point then I have failed at my duty of spreading the gospel of Dick Jones.
Like Icarus before him, Bob Morton flies too close to the sun, and the sun in this case is the OCP executive lounge. Dick Jones is busily baking a considerable tube loaf loaded with the bones of previous Bob Mortons when Bob Morton comes whirling through the door in a cloud of hubris.
Chatting with a fellow executive, tragically unaware of the extremely occupied stall behind them, Bob Morton brushes off his friendâs advice to watch his ass for Dick Jones and breezily calls Dick Jones a pussy. Iâve sat through approximately 127 viewings of Robocop, and I gasp every single time.
Does Dick Jones come harrumphing out of the bathroom stall, crabbily tugging up his trousers with a face full of bluster to confront Bob Morton? Absolutely not. Come on. This is Dick Jones weâre talking about. Dick Jones patiently lets Bob Morton continue to hang himself while quietly finishing his shit.
The rest of the executives in the lounge correctly panic and flee as soon as the disparaging wind of Bob Mortonâs words pass through his lips, so extreme is their fear. Itâs unclear whether they saw Dick Jones enter the stall or if they simply recognized the scent of his turds, which we can only assume must be rhinocerotic in both size and odor. Heâs painted the room with the scent of his butt-shouts, is what Iâm getting at, so Bob Morton is making his casual declaration of war against Dick Jones while breathing the warm air from Dick Jonesâ asshole. Heâs unwittingly signing his own warrant while smelling the farts of his destructor.
When Dick Jones finally emerges from the stall, revealing himself to Bob Morton and his friend, the friend pisses all over the front of his pants and rushes out of the executive lounge. This is both a result of his frantic hurry to escape, and a cunning display of fealty. Indeed, had Bob Morton also peed on himself, he might have avoided Dick Jonesâ wrath. With the patience of geologic time, Dick Jones corners Bob Morton in his executive fart chamber and informs him that he has just fucked up big time. I donât want to belabor the robopoint, but it truly cannot be overstated that Dick Jones delivers the prophecy of Bob Mortonâs doom five feet away from a magnificent pile of his own shit. Thatâs like serving your partner divorce papers at Disney World. Itâs a flex of pure cruelty, like the Ultimate Warrior in inquisitorâs robes.
Bob Morton struggles to recover and stand his ground, but itâs far too late. Dick Jones holds grudges like a mummy curse. In a final display of ultimate power, Dick Jones grabs Bob Morton by the skull and yanks his head back, to maximize his intake of the shitty breeze wafting through the executive lounge. âSuck my farts,â Dick Jones all but hisses. âBreathe in the rich scent of stained oak and dead horses that is your demise. My ass belches beckon you to the abyss.â
The very next day, Bob Morton is trying to forget the terror of that assy encounter by throwing himself a cocaine party with some attractive young models in his den, which has five (5) TVs. But Dick Jones is not a man who rests on his laurels. He sends Clarence Boddicker to murder Bob Morton with a lethal combination of gunfire, hand grenades, and a sassy DVD message. Clarence Boddicker chases the models out by uttering, âBitches leave,â but with the subtle understanding that he is also speaking to Bob Mortonâs immortal soul; a moment immortalized in the official Spanish lobby cards:
He then blasts Bob Mortonâs legs into a divergent timeline wherein Biff Tannen becomes president and pops the DVD into Bob Mortonâs admittedly impressive entertainment center. Dick Jones appears on all five televisions to erase what little remains of Bob Mortonâs dignity with one savage final windmill dunk, the gist of which is, âYesterday, you smelled my shit. Today, youâre gonna eat it.â
Clarence Boddicker then leaves a grenade on Bob Mortonâs coffee table next to the cocaine and walks out, gently closing the front door behind him, which is possibly my favorite detail in the entire film.
Bob Morton claws feebly at the grenade as Dick Jonesâ prerecorded roast continues to play, but only succeeds in knocking the bomb out of reach before it finally explodes. Bob Mortonâs final thought before being catapulted out of this world is, âIâm about to be murdered by a guy who forced me to smell the colossal dump he took at work yesterday.â
Thatâs what happens when you call Dick Jones a pussy, Bob.
Tom Reimann runs the Gamefully Unemployed podcast and streaming network with David Bell. He also writes for Some More News, and is allegedly a Senior Editor at Collider.
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Josh S, who teaches a killer business seminar on how to take a Dick Jones Power Crap.
I know it’s not Reflecting Day here at 1900đ, but like to talk about something very emotional anyway. It’s an important event from 1985 that changed everything we knew about telev– nay, art. You might be thinking, “This is a fun bit where he’s leading to something that WASN’T an earth-shattering super-event.” And now you might be thinking, “I was wrong! I was so fucking wrong! The setup was sincere! This is real!” Because I’m talking about the spectacular Season 1, Episode 6 of MacGyver… “Trumbo’s World!” The one where he fights ants!
The episode opens with MacGyver sneaking into a Spanish paramilitary camp to rescue a geologist. He creates a disguise by climbing a tree and improvising a fishing pole to steal one of their towels. The show is remembered for the amazing gadgets created from trash, but MacGyver solved a lot of problems by just taking off his clothes and hoping for the best. It’s a childhood lesson I still use to this day, yum.
The other thing worth remembering about MacGyver is that it was a full hour show and they had a lot of time to fill between diet soda grenades and power washer jetpacks. So he wanders through the enemy camp, eats some of their soup, and while a slow synthesizer remix of the show’s theme song plays, he complains it’s not as good as his mother’s Basque stew, as she experimented with many international soups. Not a word of that is an exaggeration. One of the producers said, “Get me ten minutes of shirtless MacGyver! I don’t care what you have to do! Well, I mean, don’t do something like a voiceover where he tells a childhood soup story or anyt– hello? Are you still? He hung up. Ahh, he probably heard most of that.”
Anyway, the geologist doesn’t even know why she was kidnapped, but MacGyver suggests maybe this Spanish militia thought she was a physicist and she could build them an atom bomb? No more thought is given to this extended excuse for shirtless MacGyver. He gives two completely contradictory and insane answers to questions no one asked to explain something no one needed a reason for. No one seeing shirtless MacGyver having a raft chase with a group of Basque secessionists would ever say, “Hold on, a second. I need a WHOLE LOT OF SHAKY BACKSTORY TO EXPLAIN THIS.” For instance, during the raft chase MacGyver stops, pulls out a roll of barbed wire, strings it across the river, and America recently celebrated 36 straight years of no one caring where MacGyver got that shit.
MacGyver and the geologist escaped by heating up the camp’s shower and running away while everyone laughed at the scalded guy. And it didn’t work. Everyone saw them run away. MacGyver had to wait while a panicked woman rappelled down a cliff for the first time and men a few yards behind shot at him with rifles. They missed at him for minutes. Then he rappelled through the bullets himself and covered his exit by lighting their rope on fire, which oh yeah, I should mention the geologist was being kept in a prison cell with a can of gasoline and a rope. And this amazing sequence of lucky events only bought them another two seconds because each of the bad guys had their own rope.
Please note MacGyver was sent here. He wasn’t part of this woman’s “geology mission” and forced to throw together some desperate escape. This was a plan. Some private security firm said, “This is a delicate rescue op in Spain, so we’ll have to send one man, nude. Preferably experienced in soup. Barbed wire and gasoline must be procured on-site.” He should have been dead hundreds of times over. If you wanted to remarket this as a comedy about a guy who can’t die, you would not have to change a single thing. And I worried this cold open might have used up all of MacGyver’s luck because the rest of this episode is him fucking everything up and watching his friends get eaten by ants.
MacGyver is called to the Amazon by his friend Charlie who says he has “a very strange problem.” That’s all MacGyver needs to hear.
The problem that was too sensitive to explain over the phone or letter is this: a dozen species of birds have been seen in flight. “Desperate flight,” in fact. Charlie thinks they’re running from something in the heart of the rainforest. That’s the whole thing. No one has gone into the jungle and never come back. There were no legends or unexplained noises. You know everything.
But instead of saying, “Motherfucker, I’ve been on a plane for 23 hours, a boat for 72, and I paid two hundred bucks for a night in a half star hotel and you’re telling me this is because you want to see what scared, you think, several birds,” MacGyver thinks for a moment and goes, “Here be tigers and unknown beasts.“
Charlie’s response is only, “Exactly.” Our expedition is underway!
This is only the sixth episode of MacGyver ever and already the writers seem to be specifically saying “FUCK YOU” to anyone who cares how MacGyver gets into all these hijinx. It’s like someone told them they weren’t allowed to just start the episode with MacGyver in a giant anthill with a handful of thumbtacks and writing this scene was their temper tantrum.
They don’t mention how MacGyver and Charlie know each other, but it doesn’t seem to be from adventuring. Charlie is useless. He’s a fussy scientist with no leash on his childlike sense of wonder and no sense of danger. Even before you find out the thing that scared the birds was a big colony of ants, you’d look at Charlie and say, “This whiny flight-of-fancy guy is going to get eaten by ants before the end of Act 2.”
The two best friends get a boat, but can’t find an “Indian guide.” Apparently you can send MacGyver after a group of heavily-armed terrorists with his nipples and nothing else, but he can’t figure out how to walk the opposite direction of birds in the woods. They get a lead on a villainous chocolate plantation owner who is notorious for attempted murder and also does not offer a native guide service. They call him Trumbo, and MacGyver is like, “Trumbo sounds like a guy who can help.” They boat there and they are immediately fired upon with guns and arrows.
Sure enough, Trumbo, the evil slave owner holding them at gunpoint, who does not run a jungle tour company, can’t supply them with a guide. MacGyver offers to fix his irrigation pump as a trade, Trumbo says no, but MacGyver fixes it anyway. It almost feels like the script said, “EXT or INT. SOME TIME OF DAY. Random, unrelated things and conversations TBD happen between the engineering bits and fist fights.”
MacGyver is so good at fixing the pump that Trumbo offers him a job, but he turns him down. MacGyver tries to explain how slavery is bad, and Trumbo explains that’s not what is happening. He brags about how good he is at the noble act of cutting down the rainforest and turning it into cocoa plantation. It’s weird. If you wanted to remarket this as a comedy about an action show being meddled with by sinister corporate sponsors, you wouldn’t have to change a thing. Trumbo might as well have turned to camera and said, “MacGyver, you and I are like the heroes at Nestle, makers of the new Mochablast Jiggle Chillers, fighting courageously for freedom. Every day, that great company brings us closer to a world with fully deregulated clearcutting and a return to ownable humans.”
Anyway, the cocoa baron who shot at MacGyver for rowboating near his plantation is the good guy. And the only reason he isn’t offering them a guide is because he won’t risk any of his men on a spooky mystery. So he’ll go himself.
So now the main bad guy has joined our heroes and they finally set off to solve The Mystery Of Some Maybe Scared Birds. But they soon find out it’s more serious than that when they come across a new piece of the puzzle. Charlie says, “WHAT? What could possibly cause panic in both birds and small ground animals!?” Here’s what he was looking at:
This is not a wild animal stampede. This is a fuzzy buddy messaround. This is a Friendship Falls Gumdrop Festival’s 80th Annual Gerbil Race. And look, I don’t know what the logistics were for setting up a hamster stampede for a union TV production in 1985, but I do know this is adorable and hilarious.
The dream team of bird, and now small ground animal, investigators make a plan to hike three kilometers to a native village Trumbo knows about. But MacGyver stops them. He’s noticed one more subtle clue– a terrible screeching coming from nearby. He walks toward it and sees a canyon filled with the show’s secret real main villain: ants. “An eating machine. Two miles wide and ten miles long,” he says. Then the show, for the first of many times, cuts to random ant footage from at least three different ancient nature documentaries. Which only makes their choice to film seven furry best friends having a little race even stranger. The producers don’t care about the shots matching, so they could have cut to stock footage of an actual stampede!
Anyway, they now hear human screams over the sound of the ant screams so they head over to the village. It’s more like ten feet away than three kilometers, but MacGyver writers would like to remind me to fucking get over myself and realize we’re not here to make goddamn maps.
At the village, a group of native caricatures are just getting their asses kicked by ants. They are a pre-pants civilization absolutely at the mercy of insect swarm attacks. And while they bash an ocean of ants with sticks and writhe on the ground in itchiness, they leave one of their women for dead under a canoe.
Like her people, Charlie abandons the canoe woman and starts taking pictures of ants. He can’t believe it. Ants! Real ants! He takes dozens of extreme closeups of ant faces to really communicate the size of their colony, never believing it for a second. Amazing! Ants! It was ants all along! The colony swarms him, mindlessly unaware of their luck in finding meat too excited about ants to move away from ants.
MacGyver and Trumbo try to rescue the woman from the canoe, but two men and half a woman are no match for a canoe. Three men might be, but Charlie is too busy having never fucking seen anything like these ants. MacGyver finally gets his attention, and instead of helping, he hands a stick to MacGyver and runs back for more antwatching. This woman has never laid eyes on an American before, but after watching a slave owner, a hunk, and a fucking idiot make themselves at home in her ancestral lands and let her die from an easily preventable death, she’s already an expert.
Let’s check in with Charlie.
He’s not doing great. Charlie is what ant soldiers call “an easy day at work.”
MacGyver’s homemade canoe winch works, and they pull the woman to safety as Charlie is off somewhere shrieking for help. And here’s where we seriously almost lost Richard Dean Anderson. He’s an athletic actor who does a lot of his own stunt work, but if the stunt coordinator told him what was going to happen when a goddamn bamboo spear uncoils with the force of a full canoe, Richard forgot about it after the cameras started rolling. Look at that! They were one inch away from having to replace most of their lead actor’s head! Why did this stick prop come to a deadly point at all? And why was the pointy end on the, surprise, much longer half? Did the ants do this!?
Speaking of, the ants are tearing this village up and MacGyver has no ideas. He saw these primitive tribesmen rolling around and clubbing the ground and thought, “Well, I can’t improve on this.”
Let’s check in on Charlie again.
He’s fucking dead. Devoured to the hat by ordinary ants right in front of his best friend and world’s greatest rescue hero, MacGyver. You can’t screw up harder than that. This is like opening a book on cat safety and getting mauled to death by a kitten while sharing an elevator with celebrity bad boy of cat training, Jackson Galaxy. So MacGyver has let the quest giver die, teamed up with the villainous baron, and the village he tried to rescue has been wiped off the map by insects. It’s over. There’s nothing left to save. In only his sixth episode, MacGyver has suffered the greatest loss in syndicated television history. The end.
No. There are thirty fucking minutes of show left.
They go back to Trumbo’s lawless chocolate mine for a last stand against this unstoppable force of nature. Not to rescue anyone, because all the slaves are leaving. By the way, Trumbo responds to this by opening fire on them and would have murdered them all if MacGyver hadn’t pulled him off his horse and kicked his ass. In any piece of media other than this very specific episode of MacGyver, Trumbo would be a nefarious scoundrel who must be stopped at any cost. Here, MacGyver agrees to stick around and help him defeat the ants and save his plantation! Why, you ask? Goddamn it, it’s like you haven’t been listening at all. The writers don’t care! Before Nestle’s PR guy came in with notes, the first draft of this episode opened with MacGyver getting sentenced to execution by combat arena by the Snake Council of The Moon.
Trumbo and MacGyver hatch an unlikely plan to create tiny rivers around the plantation. Unfortunately, these rivers need to be held open by a wheel located directly in the path of the ants. This job was given to the only worker to stay behind, some guy named Luis. If MacGyver could have rigged something to hold the wheel in place that wasn’t made out of delicious human ant food, he didn’t bother. And more bad news for the abandoned slave fields: the ants accidentally invent boats.
The little rivers get smaller and smaller while MacGyver and Trumbo wonder why that darn Luis isn’t keeping the water flowing. See if you can guess what happened!
You were wrong! Luis was, get this, eaten by the ants!
Trumbo and the writers seem to think Luis died a hero, but he died for nothing and from not walking to a location without hungry bugs. MacGyver has now watched 66% of the named characters in this episode get swallowed by ants, so he moves onto Plan B: homemade flamethrower! This lasts about two seconds and doesn’t work, so it’s onto Last Resort: blowing up the dam and destroying the entire plantation he (for whatever reason (fuck you)) has sworn to protect.
AAAAAIIIEEEEEE! SHIT! FUCK! IT DOES NOT GO WELL!
In his panic, MacGyver throws off his makeshift bee suit and blows the dam up while he’s still right in front of it. He is only barely not killed while stock footage of a flood washes away everything the noble Trumbo built on the backs of local natives displaced by his deforestation. Every good guy is dead! The only survivor was the main bad guy whose sadness farm MacGyver tried to save and failed! The end!
The art of turning a man’s brain off with your hands was perfected in 1930 by Seattle patrolman Svend Jens “Jorgy” Jorgensen. If you’re crime, you already know him as your greatest enemy, the author of AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU.
Looking at the drawing on the cover, you might think, “That sad cop won a medium amount of medals.” You idiot fool. “Jorgy” was so decorated he had to tailor a sleeping bag to hold them all, and I don’t think I’m kidding. When you open the book, there’s a photo of him dressed as what can only be described as a cranky award tube. Just a meat-faced caterpillar of recognition. And this is also unusual: right after his name he lists his address in case you’re looking to get fucked up.
Google tells me that today, 515 3rd Ave in Seattle is the address of a housing non-profit. It probably wasn’t in 1930, but try to imagine my delight when I picked up a cop karate book, saw the author was dressed like a class ring catalog, realized it was about insane karate chops for defeating guns, and then found out it was published from a homeless shelter. That’s not a series of happy coincidences– that’s a coded message from my future self telling me we will one day have a vintage printing press, a time machine, and best of all, nothing very important to do.
Before we begin learning AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU, we need to take some safety precautions.
“Jorgy” says our human experiments may suffer permanent injuries if we don’t follow his instructions to the letter, which seems reasonable until you find out every move is described with three photos and half a page of vague text. He doesn’t exactly give you a list of detailed tactics and safety precautions when he takes you from “certain death” to “holding a human heart” in three pictures. Luckily, by the end of the book I think I’ll have made a case for how there’s no safer place to be in the world than on the receiving end of AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU.
Oh, one more thing to consider before we begin:
It’s a little bit safer if you take the bullets out of your gun before your human experiment points it at you. Or better yet, find one of your old guns that probably doesn’t shoot anymore. Of course, this will make you a little less safe if you and your partner are attacked during jiu-jitsu practice, so to compromise let’s use your fourth or fifth best gun with some bullets. Okay, we’re ready to do this:
Svend starts with a classic stabbing defense. First, the easy part: you get stabbed. Second, karate chop the inside wrist of their stabbing arm. This will help defl– wait, immediately paralyze that hand!? Ha ha okay, Svend. Maybe! Just in case, use your other hand to slap their chin which should create spa– whoa, knock Mr. Knife Man completely out!? How? Is this like a polio thing? Were human nervous systems different in 1930? If this was how you defeated them, shouldn’t our grandparents have died during their first mistimed handshake? How did their delicate skeletons survive the invention of horse?
Let’s lower the stakes a little bit. Say, for instance, a good friend is choking you:
Getting out of a choke hold is simple once you know how. First, you break out of the choke hold. Then you kick that fucker in the ass. I have no notes on this one; I think it’s great.
Let’s build on what we know to get out of a situation a bit more complicated: GUN TO YOUR HEAD.
Officer Jorgensen says, “Oh, is there a pistol to my head? Two slaps. One to the gun, the other to the face. And good luck shooting me with one arm, no gun, and half a face.”
Assuming skulls and wrists work the way “Jorgy” thinks, this could work, and there’s something to be said for not overcomplicating things, but let’s be clear: there’s no conceivable advice less helpful. If you were raising a baby chimpanzee with nurturing love and stuck a gun in its face, it would pioneer this exact move. So, sure, give it a shot. But on the very, very slim chance your enemy has reflexes, wrists that don’t get paralyzed when you touch them, or a skull protecting their brain, you’re going to die. If the gunman is left-handed, reverse instructions.
Let’s assume you’re battling a man without a knife or gun. First, square up to them with your arms crossed and wait for a punch. That punch? Their first mistake. Having a skull made out of cream cheese? Their last mistake.
At first glance this fighting technique seems simple. Chop until dead. But let “Jorgy” walk you through the subtleties of these chops.
Since your lack of hip rotation will be generating tremendous power, the first chop should be enough. But Officer Jorgensen doesn’t take chances, and he didn’t earn nine furlongs of police medals by “being enough.” So you’re going to want to follow up with at least one more knockout neck blow. Keen-eyed police fighters may have noticed “Jorgy” putting his non-chopping hand in the way of the other man’s punch in picture 17. Why would he do that? Well, it’s complicated:
I was sort of making fun of Officer Svend earlier, but he’s right about this one. For certain rare punches, it’s better to block with your hand rather than your face. However, not every fight is going to be this gentlemanly out there on the 1930 Seattle streets. Some criminals are going to fight like savages:
You know when an assailant is running his head into you while also… shit, how do I describe this? When he at the same time is grabbing with both hands behind your knees, intending to push you over backwards? I guess I’m back to making fun of “Jorgy” because he’s a combat specialist standing in the country where they invented American football and somehow never learned the word “tackle.” Anyway, whatever this forward-movey tumblegrab is called, let’s learn how to stop it.
As humans know from 4000 years of wrestling, you stop a takedown by standing up straight and putting a hand on your attacker’s shoulder. Without getting too technical with the momentum science, it’s similar to how you stop runaway roller skates by waving your handkerchief at the most handsome boy. It’s basic physics and it leaves your other hand free to chop your enemy’s kidney, their other kidney, and their brain-off button.
If you’re meek or kind-hearted, you may find yourself being legsnatch-tummybonked(?) by someone you don’t want to kill. When this happens, direct your third chop four inches from the base of their brain. It will still completely fuck them up, but it’s safer than swatting them directly on the brain.
The point is, don’t worry about where you hit them. Any impact on any point of the body should paralyze or kill them. I’m making fun of him again, but Svend Jorgensen might actually be suffering from some kind of untreated trauma. The simplest explanation for AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU is that the author dropped a baby and he now he sees that tiny, f-fragile body everywhere he looks.
There will be occasions when you’re being stabbed and you don’t want your opponent dead or unconscious. Maybe you need to get information about his stab supplier, maybe he’s your wife, maybe both. In those cases, you want to carefully, almost comically, poke the points of your fingers into his belly. Surely this –this– won’t shut off his entire nervous system.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
You might be starting to think AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU is only useful for getting out of easy situations. Well, think again, cop. You’re being robbed! You have a gun pointed at you and your hands are up! You’re helpless! Okay, now chop the gunman in the neck.
The human neck is home to “the nerve centers,” so the fight is already over. Still, you don’t rob a policeman in Jorgy’s town and walk away with your genitals right-side out. Fuck that guy’s crotch. The bad way.
You need to do this at flashing jiu-jitsu speed, so practice this simultaneous neck-chop/crotch-knee as many times as possible with your most durable friend or lover. Use a moose if you have one. You know what? Leave the moose alone. Let’s see if I can find a gun escape with fewer steps.
There we go. If you’re being held up, take their gun, and this next part is important so listen carefully: kick them in the dick.
If your work shoes haven’t been treated for crotch fluids, you can also use your knee. It’s crazy to think that before 1930, crime victims had no idea you could just grab your murderer’s gun and shatter their penis.
Sometimes when you’re on patrol, grateful citizens will sneak up behind you and express their love with a sudden gentleman’s hug. You have a lot of personal discretion here, but policy suggests remaining in the embrace for 30 seconds before putting your finger in their asshole and carrying them to the nearest bowling alley. We’re all in this together, citizens!
As every good cop knows, if a citizen is hugging you from behind over your arms, this is a sign of disrespect. Blast them off you completely with a reverse pelvic thrust and then hit them with a short elbow to the gut. And if you’re ever taken a light impact to the torso, you know what that means:
IT IS A COMPLETE KNOCKOUT. You’re ready! Go get ’em jiu-jitsu cops!
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Haraka: who has just been knocked out by this dedication.
In 1949, Hollywood star Lash Larue, King of the Bullwhip, got his own comic book. And for twelve years, he and his whip tamed the frontier! Do you think you would have had what it takes to do that? Now you can find out! I selected over 700 hair-raising, cliff-hanging moments from some of Lash’s greatest adventures. See if you would have handled things the same way!
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Eric Spaulding: Who has personally taken 863 medically significant conks and can still work a spoon!
