Their concession to Cannon was Chuck’s codename: American Ninja. Norris had recently read an article in Reader’s Digest about terrorists in America so Bruner wrote him a ninja-free script about terrorists on American soil. It didn’t matter that none of them wanted to make a ninja movie. However, they had a terrific title, American Ninja, and so they presold it as the latest from the team behind their hit film, Missing in Action: star Chuck Norris, director Joseph Zito, and writer James Bruner. A delegate to the Maryland General Assembly, Nancy Murphy, cosponsored a bill to make throwing stars deadly weapons, saying she wanted to fight the “kung fu epidemic.”Ĭannon Films craved a piece of the action, but they’d lost their in-house ninja, Sho Kosugi, to his own success in movies like Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination. Cops set stakeouts for marauding gangs of neighborhood ninjas. “It’s getting to be a hassle in the streets.most everybody tries to put it under the rug, but it’s an ongoing problem,” one karate instructor in Buffalo said.
Enter the ninja cast serial#
Some of these fake ninjas racked up real body counts, like serial killer Charles Ng who murdered over 11 women while engaged in an elaborate fantasy that he was a ninja warrior. Disgruntled former employees, ex-boyfriends, and sometimes total strangers showed up on college campuses, in back yards, and in houses carrying swords, uzis, and crossbows. Over the next few years, people dressed as ninjas stole Halloween candy from children, slashed motorcycle seats on vandalism sprees, knocked over gas stations, blew blowdarts into the doors of Chinese restaurants, robbed nightclubs, took hostages, and committed murder. Despite claiming they were just “out to have fun” they received 3 years in juvie. The criminal ninjapocalypse began in 1984 when two teenagers dressed in ninja suits and armed with samurai swords invaded the home of Laverne & Shirley actress Penny Marshall, holding her hostage and stealing several hundred dollars. In Tampa, Master Jhoon Rhee opened his latest taekwondo school with an ad promoting a two-for-one discount and “Halloween NINJA costumes ON SALE!”Īt $39.95 with an additional $6.95 for the hood ($10 extra to come in camouflage), ninja costumes became the affordable badass fashion choice for malefactors everywhere. Constant calls forced them to record a terse message on their phone, “We are out of Ninja costumes.” When a surprise order of ninja costumes arrived two days before October 31st they sold all 40 of them in under three hours.
One Halloween, a New Jersey costume shop sold 250 ninja costumes and claimed they could have sold 2,500 more. The company’s president said of the ninja name, “It’s short, pronounceable and Oriental.Most Americans don’t really know what the word means.” Parfums de Couer racked up $20 million with their Ninja cosmetic line which included perfume, body spray, and lotion.
Dungeons and Dragons added ninjas as a character class, Kawasaki’s new Ninja 900 and Ninja 600 motorcycles outsold all their other bikes. Remco released ninja action figures both small (their “Ninja Strike Force” line) and large (the “Secret of the Ninja” line, which generously included not just ninjas, but Shaolin monks, judo kings, commandos, karate black belts, taekwondo warriors, and Thai kick boxers).
Enter the ninja cast tv#
(“The Arrow That Is Not Aimed”), The Greatest American Hero (“30 Seconds Over Little Tokyo”), and in a TV pilot that aired on ABC ( The Last Ninja). The ubiquitous Japanese-American actor Mako, a frequent face on M*A*S*H* and McHale’s Navy, played a ninja on an episode of Magnum P.I. Joe, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shot out of the sewers and straight into stardom.
Ninjas conquered comic books: Storm Shadow shredded spinner racks in G.I. “What is this? Ninjas? Drug pushers? My men being kidnapped and murdered? This is really beginning to get on my tits!” RELATED: Kung Fu and Wuxia Movies to Watch if You Love 'Shang-Chi'