Are you a fan of martial arts films and want to know more about them? Then you owe it to yourself to read Mondo Books’ upcoming These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World. Written by Grady Hendrix (Paperbacks from Hell) and film historian Chris Poggiali, with a foreword from kung-fu cinema remixer and mastermind RZA, the book conveys the outrageous cultural shifts that led to such an appreciation (and appropriation) of martial arts cinema in America, with thoroughly surprising and zippily accessible prose.
Collider has an exclusive excerpt from the book all about the sense of “Ninja Fever” that had American pop culture in its grasp in the mid-1980s, leading to the buck wild, Cannon Films exploitation franchise American Ninja. Check out the book passage below, and if you’re loving what you read, be sure to check out the full These Fists Break Bricks book when it’s released on December 7, 2021.
“What is this? Ninjas? Drug pushers? My men being kidnapped and murdered? This is really beginning to get on my tits!”
— American Ninja 2: The Confrontation
In 1985, America reached peak ninja. Ninjas conquered comic books: Storm Shadow shredded spinner racks in G.I. Joe, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shot out of the sewers and straight into stardom. 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. (“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).
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). Dungeons and Dragons added ninjas as a character class, Kawasaki’s new Ninja 900 and Ninja 600 motorcycles outsold all their other bikes. Parfums de Couer racked up $20 million with their Ninja cosmetic line which included perfume, body spray, and lotion. 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.”
He was wrong. Everyone knew it meant money.
One Halloween, a New Jersey costume shop sold 250 ninja costumes and claimed they could have sold 2,500 more. 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. 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!”
At $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. 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. Despite claiming they were just “out to have fun” they received 3 years in juvie.
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. 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. 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.
“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. Cops set stakeouts for marauding gangs of neighborhood ninjas. 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.”
Cannon 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. 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. It didn’t matter that none of them wanted to make a ninja movie. 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. Their concession to Cannon was Chuck’s codename: American Ninja. Golan realized this was a waste of a good title so he sent the MIA crew to make Invasion U.S.A. and got Sam Firstenberg to direct American Ninja based on an uncredited rewrite by Bruner. Model-turned-actor, Michael Dudikoff took over the Chuck Norris role and Mike Stone choreographed the action of what became one of the greatest bar mitzvah films ever made.
Meet Joe Armstrong (Dudikoff), an American soldier with amnesia. When his convoy is attacked by horny ninjas who want to kidnap the colonel’s daughter for sexual intercourse, he instinctively defeats them using his previously unknown ninja skills. Treated with suspicion because of the ninja rituals he clings to that remind him of his lost past, it’s not until an elderly ninja teaches Dudikoff the great traditions of his people (ninjas) that he is able to embrace his heritage and become a man. A ninja man who beats orange, red, blue, and yellow ninjas sporting wrist lasers. This celebration of manhood climaxes when, instead of reading the Torah, he jumps out of an exploding helicopter. Mazel Tov!
American Ninja 2: The Confrontation (1987) reunites Stone and Firstenberg with co-stars Dudikoff and the inimitable Steve James, as two Army rangers/ninjas investigating a series of missing marines on an island so anti- American that soldiers have to wear jams and muscle shirts instead of their uniforms so they don’t antagonize the locals and also to save money on costumes. Eventually it’s revealed that the Marines are being kidnapped and turned into genetically engineered ninja warriors to protect powerful drug dealers.
There would be three more American Ninja movies released in 1988, 1989, and 1993, each of declining quality and each featuring declining quantities of Steve James and Michael Dudikoff, but despite ending with a whimper and not a bang, the American Ninja movies are the only Cannon movies with licensed merchandise like action figures, suction cup throwing stars, and plastic ninja swords.
Cannon’s ninja boom taught audiences that ninjas come in every color of the rainbow, they are comfortable killing us with lasers and flamethrowers as well as with their bare hands, and they are very, very lucrative. Pity poor Eric Van Lustbader whose hit book, The Ninja, launched the wave but whose prestige motion picture adaptation died in development hell, while Golan and Globus made bank not just at the box office but also on home video where Ninja III: The Domination and American Ninja sold at least 70,000 units apiece. Ninjas moved the needle when it came to home video.
“The joke is you put ‘ninja’ in the title and you can sell a couple thousand extra copies,” the vice president of Master Arts Video, Rod Hurley, said in an interview.
These Fists Break Bricks is available December 7, 2021. Pre-order from Mondo here.
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