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Originally Published July 14, 2000 |
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 CHUCK NORRIS as WALKER |
Kicking butt with 'Walker'
produces guilty pleasure
of TheColumnists.com
My Saturday night routine is always the same. About five minutes to 10 I look up and down the street in front of our house to make sure there's nobody paying me a surprise visit. I take all the phones off their hooks so I won't be disturbed by any infernal ringing attacks. I close down my computer, just in case it decides to notify me with a buzz or a clang of an incoming fax.
Only then, confident I am maintaining total privacy over my life, do I get out a bowl of chips and a soft drink and head for the TV in the study. I have this feeling of "Gee-whiz-I-can't-wait," the kind of feeling I used to get when I was a kid standing in a movie line, expecting to see a double bill of movies, a cartoon and a few previews of coming attractions, all for 12 cents.
My wife already knows what's going to happen exactly at 10 p.m. and she knows there's no use arguing about it, so she sits silently, resolved to her unmitigated fate. At a couple of minutes before the top of the hour I switch the channel to the CBS affiliate and settle back to watch another episode of enlightening, educational TV. The show: "Walker, Texas Ranger," starring a man who has been my idol for many years, Chuck Norris. Idol? Yes, it does sound ridiculous, but damn it, it's true. And later I'll tell you why.
Normally I do not discuss this "guilty pleasure," knowing the ridicule it inevitably would bring me. In fact, whenever "Walker, Texas Ranger" does come up in a conversation I'll jokingly say that my wife, Erica, loves the show and never misses it. "She loves," I'll say with the straightest face I can master under the circumstances, "to watch Chuck and his buddies kick plenty of bad-guy butt." Being the angel that she is, she simply smiles, flaps her wings a bit, and remains extra-dry mum, knowing that nobody could possibly take me seriously. After all, none of her friends or mine would be caught watching "Walker, Texas Ranger," dead or alive. Ahem.
But my editor's words echoed in my head.
"John, you must reveal your most secret viewing enjoyments, the kind of things you would not have the courage to admit to under normal circumstances. In short, you're gonna have to deal with the truth for once in your life," my editor said.
So, to hell with the humiliation and damage to my reputation. Here goes, pardner.
Yahoo!!!
I love "Walker, Texas Ranger." There, it's out. I, not Erica, am the one who loves to watch Cordell "Cord" Walker kick plenty of bad-guy butt on Saturday nights. I revel in each karate movement, in each pseudo-kung fu twist and whirl/swirl and leap and jump and dropkick. Watching Chuck as "Cord" turn the baddies into so many heaps of Cord-wood is truly a pleasure, fulfilling all my visceral needs to see evil bruised, shellacked and then vanquished. And in the politically incorrect way that justice should triumph: An eye for an eye, with no physical violence held back in the name of justice. Wham, bam, take that you filthy ornery lowdown rat. Now that's justice.
Yeah, you liberal dunderheads, that's the way Cordell handles it. The evil Mr. Big of each episode gets his just desserts before it's over. Usually a few well-placed karate kicks to delicate places. The crotch is often the target area, the expression on the face of the dastardly receiver one that walks a thin line between abject pain and Three-Stooges buffoonery. This well-placed final blow makes up for all the sadistic crap Mr. Big Shit has been pulling off for almost an hour. It's just retribution for all the innocent people he's murdered or kidnapped or made into dogmeat.
It's as if Chuck Norris, bless his law-enforcement heart, has studied every Clint Eastwood movie ever made and knows what makes Dirty Harry click. As in click . . . click . . . click. Oh gosh, my .44 is empty. Did I shoot all those nasty bullets at those nasty men?
I love the way that Chuck, showing not a single emotion on his frozen face, does his action scenes without showing a single ounce of effort on his taut body, as if leaping into the air, whirling and thrusting out a piston-like leg is something he does in his sleep. I love it when he spins in midair while the idiot opponent thinks nothing of rushing closer, growling like an animalistic brute, so as to receive the full brunt of the movement. Speaking of sleep . . . some degree of sleepiness is eternally showing in Chuck's eyes, as if his Walker walked through life without looking once into a mirror. Always looking like an unkempt gent who leaped out of bed that morning, forgetting to shave or take a refreshing shower, before he ran out of the house to leap into his manure-knocking law-enforcement truck and raced off in a cloud of gosh-darn Texas dust.
And I also secretly dig the way his partner, a cool black Texas Ranger beknighted Jimmy Trivette, smashes his fist into the faces of the scumbag adversaries who always constitute the villainy on "Walker, Texas Ranger." No matter how many clever maneuvers or wily postures these scuzzbuckets attempt, the actor Clarence Gilyard dodges them and just keeps punching away, never fazed by the infrequent blow that is landed on his hardened, upright, staunch body. When his fist smashes into flesh to a superloud "SOCK" sound effect, I imagine teeth being shoved backward and out of their sockets, the sockets filling with blood. A downward plunge of the surviving teeth dig into the bad guy's tongue like vampire fangs. Tiny bones in the nose being pulverized beyond repair. A wham against the eyeball sockets and all I can think of is, in a short while that sumbitch scuzzy gonna have an eye as black as the ole hole in Calcutta. I have to image all these visual horrors to receive the full benefit of evil getting whacked, as blows to the face on "Walker, Texas Ranger" never leave any visual residue and you gotta fill in the blanks yourself.
Then there's the cool Nordic blond who often stands in the center of the hurricane of danger that always blows over Walker's parade. She's County Assistant District Attorney Alex Cahill, that name reminding me of John Wayne's "Cahill--U.S. Marshal" because no matter how delicate or beautiful she looks, she's always tough in the clinches, always has the right words to tell off the criminal lowlifes she's destined to prosecute or get kidnapped by. They tie her up and look at her lustily, but I know Chuck'll get there before they get their pants unzipped, and so far I've never been wrong. I love it when virtue gets saved, especially a woman who belongs to a pillar of the community like Cordell Walker.
And I think it's cool the way Sheree J. Wilson always finds time, as Alex, to be away from what she should be doing, prosecuting or investigating offenders. Instead she's hanging around C.D.'s, that grit-kicking Texas pub owned and operated by C. D. Parker, the wise old ex-Texas Ranger who's seen it all and been there and done that as played by nobly-postured Noble Willingham. Got shot in the leg doin' his duty, so they gave him disability and retired his aging ass. Pour that beer, Noble, dole out fatherly, sagacious advice that only an old Texas Ranger can dole.
Speaking of clinches, in a recent two-hour episode, "Wedding Bells," Alex finally tied the knot in her Cord. Looking embarrassed and wishing he were in Philadelphia, Chuck got hitched to the beauty. I'm not sure I need domesticity in "Walker, Texas Ranger," as I'm looking for rousing action and two-fisted fistfights. Plus plenty of car/truck/semi chases through Dallas, where this sucker has been filmed since 1993. But I bet they send Alex back to the D.A.'s office and they'll forget about the rest of that home-live stuff. Such as that scene where Cordell had to get rid of all his masculine, macho symbols from the house, like deer horns on the wall and non-feminine lamp fixtures. Who needs "The Home Life of a Texas Ranger" as a sequel.
Better they should keep focusing on the newcomers to the show, obviously thrown into the thick of things when some marketing guys from Texas found out that not as many younger viewers were tuning in as TV execs like. Demographics is what TV is all about, so that's why I get an additional kick out of watching Nia Peeples, the gal who hit the big time when she starred in "Swimsuit: The Movie" and then "I Don't Buy Kisses Anymore." They put her through the same training school as Chuck, because she pretty much does her kung fu/karate/martial-arts-of-all-kinds with the same effortless, stone-faced indifference. Neat how someone can perform gallant actions and still look bored, like she'd rather be wearing miniskirts as a guest star on "Sex and the City" and get laid like the rest of the girls in the cast.
Then there's her partner, the also-young Judson Mills, a hunkaguy whose credits are so minimal I got to figure Chuck's casting director hired him to be a law-enforcement hunk purely on his physical looks and not his ability (or lack of ability) to deliver a line. And his believability in hanging out with Nia, looking like he's either going to protect her from bad guys or invite her to a candlelight dinner where they can discuss socially relevant issues. Her place or his?
But I guess what really lures me back each Saturday is Chuck himself. Remember I told you Chuck was my idol? Well, it goes back to a warm day in 1979 when he was still an up-and-coming action star, and he came to San Francisco with his brother Aaron (who is now one of the producers of "Walker, Texas Ranger") to do an interview with me for my show "Creature Features." Chuck was doing it to plug his new movie "Good Guys Wear Black," a film that would help to catapult him into the big time.
In those days Chuck was still affecting his wholesome, clean-cut image. No stubble of beard, no bags under his eyes. A decent haircut adorned the top of his head, a well-trimmed blonde mustache set perfectly groomed above his upper lip. In short, he was a handsome hero who had a ways to go before he would become the unhandsome, grizzled anti-hero.
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First I donned my martial-arts costume, assuming a brand-new guise as The Channel 2 Dragon. I would wear this costume again in my sequel minimovies "Return of the Channel 2 Dragon" and "Revenge of the Channel 2 Dragon." I slipped through the back door of a Korean martial arts school, Kuk Sool Wun, located on Van Ness Avenue. There, Chuck and Aaron were fighting it out in a duel of martial-art cunning and strength as I cautiously approached with a microphone, with the intention of talking to Norris about "Good Guys."
After demolitioning Aaron to such a degree that the younger brother was sprawled out on the canvas, seemingly incoherent, Norris whirled around, grabbed me around the neck and threw me down to the carpet with such impact that for all purposes I was down and out for the count.
Realizing his mistake, Chuck helped me to my feet and apologized for his hastily formed conclusion that I was some agency of evil who had nefariously tried to sneak up on him when he was least expecting it. Chuck began answering my somewhat groggy, foggy questions about his career as a martial-arts champion and his booming movie career, always being certain to give "Good Guys Wear Black" a plug.
"The Channel 2 Dragon," he commented, "isn't so tough after all."
This interview, which ended with Chuck throwing me over his shoulder to the canvas a second time after I had imprudently asked a personal sex-life question, proved to be so popular that the scenes of me being thrown through the air by Chuck were used over and over again in the clips that opened my show.
And when Chuck returned to the Bay Area in 1981 to make his actioner "An Eye for an Eye," he invited me and my cameraman to return for more action-packed interviews. I could see in his eye he was hoping to throw me over his shoulder again, this time with greater force behind it, but I cleverly asked my questions from a distance that afforded me complete physical safety. Chuck was so disappointed, he only came back one more time to promote his movie "An Eye for an Eye" and then left "Creature Features" and me behind forever. He was mumbling under his breath as he went out the studio door.
So you can see, it's no wonder that I return each week to "Walker, Texas Ranger." To think, I was one of the chosen few to be hurled to the canvas of a martial arts school by none other than action movie star Chuck Norris. It is heady stuff, the kind of heady stuff that keeps us going as we become longer in the tooth and grayer in the hair, and have only past moments of glory in which to revel.
And there you have it. The story of Chuck Norris and why I never miss "Walker, Texas Ranger."
Guilty, Your Honor, as charged.
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"Walker, Texas Ranger" was cancelled by CBS after this column originally appeared. Stanley now believes Saturday night is the loneliest night in the week. |
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