Chuck Norris

Carlos Ray "Chuck" Norris hasn't made a movie since 2005's The Cutter, and the world of cinema has been made poorer by his absence. The world of cinema has also been made poorer by 2005's The Cutter, and that's kind of the dichotomy of Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris, a staunch Republican and member of the NRA who actively campaigned for George H.W. Bush and Mike Huckabee, is particularly fond of money.

The above is a shitty fan-made trailer for 1996's The Forest Warrior, a tree-hugging direct-to-video family film which is so embarrassingly liberal that even Steven Seagal would have told the producers to get that hippie bullshit script out of his face before he broke all their wrists and threw them out a window. The best bit is at 1:36, when the evil logging industry villain expresses pure terror by going "Oooooooo!"

Of course, The Forest Warrior isn't the only Chuck Norris movie to play around with political themes. It just happens to be the most recent and the most embarrassing.

Starting in 1984, the Missing In Action movies are more obviously political than any of Norris' other non-logging-industry-based films, the important message here being that it's okay to shamelessly rip off Uncommon Valor (a practice made popular a year later by Rambo: First Blood Part 2). There's also something in there about some American P.O.W.s that are still stuck in Vietnamese prison camps, but the third entry (inventively titled Braddock: Missing In Action Part III) abandons the P.O.W.s altogether, even removing them from the backstory, in favor of promoting the cause of being completely fucking badass.

1985's Invasion U.S.A. tackles topics like race relations, Cuban refugees, and America's misplaced sense of security (a theme which suddenly became very relevant about sixteen years later) in the middle of a story about some kind of multicultural collective of communist terrorists sneaking into Miami to blow up a bunch of random shit. Of course, in your average eighties action picture, you could barely even see the actors over all the piles of dead commies in the way, so the part about communism probably doesn't even count as political.

Similarly, it's hard to call out 1986's The Delta Force as being political for using Muslim terrorists as the villains. After all, "terrorists are bad" isn't exactly the most controversial statement a film can make. However, the movie does seem to display a fairly intense contempt for Islam itself, so maybe that counts.

In 2008, Norris either wrote a book called Blackbelt Patriotism or agreed to let the publisher stick his name on a book penned by some nameless ghostwriter and call it Blackbelt Patriotism. Well, he probably wrote it himself. At any rate, there is a book called Blackbelt Patriotism, and it has a picture of Chuck Norris on the cover. (on Cracked: Chuck Norris Roundhouse Kicks Politics (and Logic) on CNN) The book has been fairly successful. In a search for "Chuck Norris" in the books section of Amazon.com, it comes up as the second result. The first result that comes up is the Chuck Norris Facts book.

In 2005, some guy calling himself Scootsmagoo started a thread for "Facts About Vin Diesel" on the Something Awful message boards. In what was probably a surprising move in the eyes of his contemporaries, Scootsmagoo did not put any actual facts about Vin Diesel in this thread, instead choosing to make several impossible claims about Diesel's sexual prowess and manliness. The idea achieved some popularity, and a Random Vin Diesel Fact Generator was created.

Internet history (such as it is) was made when an enterprising soul decided to go through the Random Vin Diesel Fact Generator and replace the words "Vin Diesel" with the words "Chuck Norris." Cleansed of their association with Vin Diesel, the facts gained even more popularity, and the entire internet proceeded to run the joke into the fucking ground. (on Cracked: The 9 Most Obnoxious Memes to Ever Escape the Web)

When news of the Chuck Norris Facts reached Norris himself, the aging star was more than a little confused by the situation, remarking, "If your soul needs healing, the prescription you need is not Chuck Norris' tears, it's Jesus' blood." We're guessing that he didn't much care for the one that goes, "Jesus can walk on water, but Chuck Norris can walk on Jesus."

In 2007, when a man named Ian Spector decided to publish a book of the Chuck Norris Facts, Norris wanted his cut. Similar thoughts may have occurred to some of the people who actually wrote the damn things, but Chuck was the one with the high-priced lawyers, so Chuck was the one who sued. The headline on Reuters was fucking hilarious.

Technically, Walker, Texas Ranger was really the second Chuck Norris series to hit TV, the first being Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, a cartoon show to which Norris lent his voice and likeness. There was a comic book and everything.

About seven years after the cancelation of Karate Kommandos (coincidentally, it was also about seven years after the debut of Karate Kommandos), Norris made his triumphant return to the small screen with Walker, Texas Ranger, a popular cop show about a tough Texas Ranger who would track down a new set of criminals every week, kick their asses with his karate, and then fly off on his jet pack.

Okay, we never really watched this show past the first episode, so we don't really know what we're talking about. From what we gather, though, it was pretty fucking weird.

Walker, Texas Ranger is commonly credited with the shift in Norris' reputation from "kick-ass action hero" to "douchebag in a cowboy hat." (on Cracked: 5 Movie Martial Artists That Lost a Deathmatch to Dignity)

In 1997, Chuck Norris starred in his first infomercial for a piece of exercise equipment called the Total Gym. It seems to have worked out quite well for them. Go to the Total Gym website, and you'll see Chuck's face right there on the front page, with some random person's hand awkwardly photoshopped in front of it.

In all fairness, Norris apparently did use the Total Gym for rehabilitation purposes in 1978, and he's probably used it at least a few times since then. Not that this does anything to explain his eagerness to whore himself out for money in really embarrassing ways, unless he hit his head on the fucking thing.