Chuck Norris Played Himself In This Awful Karate Kid-Style Movie

Chuck Norris starred in some of the most violent action movies of the 1980s, but what he really wanted to do was entertain children. Poorly.

Kids were wild about martial arts in Norris' day, primarily because of Bruce Lee. They could throw on "Fist of Fury" and watch Lee open up a case of ice-cold whup ass on an entire dojo. Every child in the throes of bully trouble at school wanted to learn how to bring the pain the Bruce Lee way. Alas, when Lee died in 1973, martial arts cinema lost a bit of momentum in the United States. Unless you lived in a major city with a large Asian-American population, you had to settle for, basically, Norris and David Carradine.

Like his 1980s action movie brethren, the now deceased Norris knew that when he made a film where his "Missing in Action" protagonist, Colonel Braddock, gets a burlap sack containing a starving rat thrown over his head (which he subsequently chomps in the squishiest, bloodiest manner possible), teenagers would be exchanging high-fives over the grisly sight. All sorts of nasty stuff happened in Norris' movies, and kids loved it most of all.

You know what kids didn't love? All five episodes of Chuck Norris' "G.I. Joe" ripoff cartoon series "Karate Kommandos." The show represented Norris' first attempt to make a child-friendly piece of entertainment, and, to put it kindly, it sucked out loud. You'd think Norris would've gotten the hint, but when his commercial appeal went poof in the early 1990s, he decided to take another crack at that family audience. This resulted in 1992's "Sidekicks," an atrocious "The Karate Kid" clone in which Jonathan Brandis defeats his bullies with the help of the real Chuck Norris (minus the starving rat).

"Sidekicks" was reportedly produced on a budget of roughly $8-10 million, with, per the AFI Catalog, more or less the entire film being financed by Houston, Texas home furnishing magnate Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale. In return, Chuck Norris lent his celebrity to McIngvale's mattress commercials and supported his anti-drug campaign.

I was 18 when I saw "Sidekicks" because I was bored, and the film happened to be showing at a Toledo-area multiplex that inadvertently had an open-door policy to movies you did not pay to see. "Sidekicks" notably pulls a double Miyagi by introducing an ancient martial arts teacher, Mako's Mr. Lee, who teaches Jonathan Brandis' Barry Gabrewski everything he needs to know before Norris shows up as himself. Norris' opponent winds up being the d-bag dojo master Kelly Stone (the John Kreese of the film, to use "The Karate Kid" parlance), as portrayed by Joe Piscopo (who, at this point in his acting career, was a musclebound, has-been comedian). Meanwhile, Beau Bridges plays Brandis' dad, Jerry, and he just looks sad the whole time.

"Sidekicks" is a dreadful waste of talent. Brandis, Bridges, Mako, Danica McKellar (that's right, Winnie from "The Wonder Years" got dragged into this), Richard Moll, and Gerrit Graham pass in and out of the movie in search of meaning, and even Roger Ebert couldn't muster up anything more polite in his two-star review than calling the film "sweet but predictable, the kind of movie where you enjoy the ride but recognize the terrain." Meanwhile, children were watching, and they were getting force-fed McIngvale's anti-narcotic nonsense. Honestly, I'd rather they'd watch a man save his own life by eating a starved rat. Or Chuck Norris fighting crime with a pooch in "Top Dog."