The Most Underratedly Insane Film Franchise Ever Made

The films attempt to compensate for earlier depictions of Native Americans as subhuman by painting Billy Jack as downright superhuman. But even if Laughlin were Native American (he is almost remarkably white), there'd be something off-puttingly narcissistic about him casting himself as a god. Laughlin is living out his corniest Native American noble warrior fantasies on screen, and the results are consistently embarrassing, as well as endearingly strange.

Laughlin is so square that if he were to encounter a joint, he'd try to either karate-chop or lecture it, yet he is surprisingly open-minded in depicting the counterculture not as seedy or debauched, but rather as home to society's greatest hope and purest spirits -- after Native Americans and Billy Jack, of course. The hippies are on hand mainly to worship Billy Jack, but he was a square who was 150 percent behind the kids, who have seldom been as alright as they are here. In this time period, hippies were mostly in movies to give the film a higher body count before the villains finally made it to the last house on the left.

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The accidentally high-camp approach to Native American mythology in the Billy Jack series involves such psychedelically misguided setpieces as a snake bite ceremony involving a vision quest, an eagle's feather, a old wise man with a halting, wooden delivery, and Laughlin dancing around a rattle snake wearing what appears to be a cross between unusually trendy buckskins and a Super Friends disguise. Laughlin fake-Indian dances like only a white man from Milwaukee can fake-Indian dance, while being bitten over and over by a rattlesnake that I like to imagine is punishing him for his vanity and Jesus complex.

Laughlin's trippy visions leads him to "The Fourth Way," about which, well, the less said, the better.

Just as Laughlin obviously had enormous respect for Native American customs, he also has incredible reverence for Eastern martial arts. But he expressed that affection in sometimes-problematic ways. Billy Jack and The Trial Of Billy Jack helped popularize Hapkido in the United States, but that also meant making a beefy, stoic white dude from the Midwest the face and particularly the feet of the form.

That said, I would be lying if I was to claim that Billy Jack wasn't at least a little bit awesome. There's a reason the film series took up permanent real estate in the brains of folks like me. Part of it is the hat. Part of it is the name. And part of it is scenes like the following, wherein Billy Jack is outnumbered by a whole squad of evil bystanders, yet slowly, confidently tells the creep in charge, "I'm going to take this right foot, and I'm going to wop you on that side of your face, and you wanna know something? There's not a damn thing you're going to be able to do about it."

You know what? That's exactly what he does, and it's pretty fucking badass.

One of the Laughlins' progressive ideas about education involved the role Second City/UCB-style improvisation might play in tuning into the peculiar frequencies of young people and uptight townspeople alike. To that end, there are two separate scenes involving a comedy troupe blowing squares' minds and opening the minds of the young people with some Improv Everywhere shenanigans. These involve a bit of street theater so realistic that it fools a dopey police officer and a skit about, get this, cops smoking marijuana. I know. Get back in line, George Carlin. There's a new king in town.

Yes, the Freedom School is a pretty groovy place before a bunch of squares get all up in its business, but in The Trial Of Billy Jack, the school has ballooned into the alternative school of Laughlin's wildest fantasies. It says a lot about the kind of guy that Laughlin was that I suspect that his wildest fantasies all involved running large, ambitious alternative schools.

The Freedom School is no longer just a school; it's a way of life, man. Inspired by the example of Billy Jack, whose trial made him a "symbol to live by," the embodiment of all that is right and holy and sacred in this corrupt world, they decided to make the Freedom School "bigger and better than ever before." If that sounds like a really nice way to say "You're gonna get these movies' themes and YOU'RE GONNA LIKE THEM," that's because it definitely is.

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Freedom School 2.0 is built over an abandoned military academy and owned by the students, who "govern themselves on the simple philosophy that where there is power, there can never be love, and where there is love, there is no need for power." Simple, huh? Why can't the rest of society be governed by that clear, not-at-all-confusing-or-nonsensical dictate? The programs at the school include "belly dancing, music, band, drill team, arts, crafts, advanced physics, mathematics, psychology, the classics, even into athletics, which they called yoga athletics." And that still doesn't include the students' foray into extensive activist journalism, a plot point that was added just in case audiences started enjoying themselves.

So while it might suck to have Billy Jack, the finest human being since Jesus Christ, in prison, maybe it's worth it if it means the creation of the only school in the world offering advanced physics, yoga tennis, meditation, and the opportunity to bring down entire corrupt industries with muckraking Nader-style exposes. We can see why Billy Jack was willing to side-kick the whole world in its face for it.

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The Trial Of Billy Jack boldly announces its pretension with an opening sequence recounting the body count of real-life instances in which our country killed student protestors while an eagle soars and a wise old Native American man chants, ending with the Freedom School: "3 Dead, 39 wounded." That's right, Laughlin paid reverent homage to the student martyrs of Kent State by comparing their real-life deaths to the make-pretend bloodshed that concludes the film. And it somehow only gets crazier and more self-indulgent from there.

In Trial Of Billy Jack, we learn that Billy Jack's disillusionment with the United States really kicked into high gear when he was posted in Vietnam. This approach demands at least some kind of subtlety, but the Billy Jack franchise makes Vietnam seem like it was largely a matter of American soldiers hurling grenades at terrified widows and feasting on Vietnamese baby barbecue. The movies see everything in moral absolutes, with Billy Jack and his rainbow brigade of hippie dreamers and Native Americans as eternally right and the evil white establishment as absolute wrong.

So even though Billy Jack is the one on trial in The Trial Of Billy Jack, the evil that's really on trial is the Washington war machine, a corrupt administration, and a complicit media that covers their crimes. The Trial Of Billy Jack finds Laughlin in a confrontational and angry mood, as always. As prosecutor, jury, judge, and executioner, Billy Jack finds the establishment guilty of pretty much everything and sentences them to all getting karate-chopped.

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Thankfully, a template already existed for a movie in which a hero goes to Washington to combat corruption. It was called Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and despite being the work of a lesser filmmaker like Frank Capra and starring the less charismatic and likable Jimmy Stewart, Laughlin nevertheless dug it so much that he decided that he would straight-up remake it as a Billy Jack movie. Because for some reason he could do that.

Columbia Pictures

Thus was born 1977's Billy Jack Goes To Washington, in which Billy Jack becomes a senator and stands up to nuclear power to fight for a youth camp. Yet despite the popularity and influence of Billy Jack and The Trial Of Billy Jack, this installment never got a real theatrical release.

How did Billy Jack Goes To Washington essentially become one of the most expensive direct-to-home-video films of all time? According to Laughlin, it was political pressure. In 2005, he told Showbiz Tonight:

"At a private screening, Senator Vance Hartke got up, because it was about how the Senate was bought out by the nuclear industry. He got up and charged me. Walter Cronkite's daughter was there, [and] Lucille Ball. And he said, "You'll never get this released. This house you have, everything will be destroyed."

The failure of Billy Jack Goes To Washington sadly precluded subsequent Laughlin vehicles that puckishly placed its hat-wearing, karate-chopping hero inside other classic movies. We were sadistically spared It's A Wonderful Life For Billy Jack (why should Mr Smith Goes To Washington be the only Frank Capra classic improved through the addition of Billy Jack?), When Billy Jack Met Sally, Bob & Carol & Ted & Billy Jack, Billy Jack's Casablanca, and of course, The Billy Jack Horror Picture Show.

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The Laughlins continued to try to bring Billy Jack back to the screen for decades after that. A 2005 New York Times article describes their plans for an aughts-era Billy Jack sequel that "will take on social scourges like drugs, and power players like the religious right. They say they will also outline a way to end the current war and launch a political campaign for a third-party presidential candidate. They have already formed a 527 nonprofit committee with the aim of ending the war, and say they will run full-page ads in major newspapers beginning next month explaining their plan to withdraw from Iraq. (Money raised for that committee is separate from the film project.)"

In a shocking turn of events, this film was not made. And my memory is fuzzy, but I also don't remember Laughlin ending any war ever or being behind a legitimate third-party presidential run. The Laughlins continued to work on their dream of a Billy Jack comeback movie, and their plans for it grew more ambitious with time. In keeping with their fierce antiwar views, the couple toyed with titling this comeback vehicle Billy Jack's Crusade To End the War And Restore America To Its Moral Purpose, and having Billy Jack "debate" George W. Bush through movie magic. Laughlin told a reporter from The St. Petersburg Times that it "will influence the presidential election in 2008."

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Not coincidentally, Laughlin himself ran several times for president as a Democrat, Republican, and Independent. Your history books are not lying to you -- he did not win. In fact, he didn't really win anything but the knee-jerk scorn and pity that typically greeted novelty presidential runs in the age before Trump. They seemed so innocent then.

When not being elected president or finishing late-period Billy Jack sequels, Laughlin whiled away the time the way old folks do, writing books about Jungian psychology and cancer and, in a departure, the movie business. Laughlin never seemed to have given up on his ferocious dream of changing and saving the world through Billy Jack, but at a certain point, the public did.

It's Spring Break! You know what that means! Hot coeds getting loose on the beaches of Cancun and becoming imperiled in all classic beach slasher ways: Man-eating shark, school of piranhas, James Franco with dreadlocks. There are so many films about vacations gone wrong, it's a chore to wonder if there's even such a thing as a movie vacation gone right. Amity Island and Camp Crystal Lake are out. So what does that leave? The ship from Wall-E? Hawaii with the Brady Bunch? A road trip with famous curmudgeon Chevy Chase? On this month's live podcast Jack O'Brien and the Cracked staff are joined by some special guest comedians to figure out what would be the best vacation to take in a fictional universe.

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