For the first time in over a decade he was suddenly relevant in a way. People remembered he existed, and they were playing off his tough guy image.
And what did he do? Try and shut it down and start suing people. Stupid.
It took him a couple of years to come around to it. If it wasn’t for those jokes would he be remembered anywhere as well? Or would he be a much more obscure celebrity by now?
You underestimate how popular Walker, Texas Ranger was. It wasn't pulling ratings like Seinfeld, ER, or Friends, but it was a solid primetime staple for almost a decade.
I never watched it myself, but the 50+ demo loved it.
Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? I haven't watched a single episode of WTR, I don't know anyone who has, but everyone knows who Chuck Norris was.
We used to watch lot's of chuck Norris films back then here in Nigeria, I can't even remember the titles, but all we knew was chuck Norris alone can defeat a whole country's army. We used to think one American soldier can defeat a whole army.
WTR did air here in Sweden in the 90s. From a quick search in the news archives, it was on late at night on tv3 in the late 90s and then it ran on that or/and some other cabel channels in the 00s as well (reruns?).
As a gent born and raised in Texas, and has never seen the show - I am pleasantly surprised to see these comments about how popular WTR was internationally. If I had been asked to bet, I would have lost money on this one.
From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF
Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.
And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)
If you like MwC, look up episodes of Unhappily Ever After on Youtube, it's sort of the second-generation MwC. Same sort of humour but taken even further, I can easily re-watch Unhappily but MwC is sort of a once-you've-seen-it...
It was a syndicated show, the goal is to license it to as many companies as possible. It was never a network TV show like Seinfeld, those syndication rights are way more expensive than created for syndication shows like WTR.
I've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail.
Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period, but also often detective in a way redolent of Christie) that is made primarily for export to foreign consumers who think of British upper-class culture as aspirational.
There is US exported media that just randomly becomes popular in a specific demographic. Case in point: Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a flick with Andrew Dice Clay that got a razzie the year it came out. IIRC it got a cult following in Norway because the voice over was done by a popular radio DJ.
Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were both created by non-network studios as syndicated shows, they weren’t prime time network shows. The budgets for syndicated content is a lot lower than network produced content.
The rights to air these sorts of shows are dirt cheap compared to Friends or Seinfeld, so it makes sense that cheap syndicated garbage like Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were popular internationally, the rights were cheap.
Personally I was at a prime age watching a lot of Conan O'Brien's Late Night show and one of his best skits was the Walker Texas Ranger Lever. They would pick the most ridiculous clips from the show and just run them out of context. IIRC Chuck Norris even showed up on the show one time to give him a "stern talking to".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpIEyn9G6_8
The only time I ever saw Walker,Texas Ranger was when I was living in Italy for a few months in the aughts. It was dubbed in Italian. Apparently it was popular there.
> You might be able to argue he was a bigger star than any of them.
I think that's a hard argument to make.
Candace Bergen's career was just as long. Her first movie role was 1966, she was nominated for an Oscar in 1979, and she was on a popular sitcom from 1988 to 1998 that won her five Emmies and attracted national commentary after criticism from the Vice President.
I was a kid in the 80s and 90s and to me even then Chuck Norris was a B-movie self-parody joke character. He was not an A-list "action star" in the sense that Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or even Van Damme were.
The dude was a badass, 6 time undefeated karate world champion (!!!), created his own variant of karate mixed with korean martial arts, was a good friend with Bruce Lee and that scene in Colloseum - probably the coolest thing I saw as a kid growing up behind iron curtain... not many actors can have such a resume on top of their acting career.
Those who cared would/will know him regardless. But obviously those people would be relatively few and far apart.
An immense amount of time, dedication and talent must have went into all those achievements. This requires mastery of body and mind at an exceptional level. Putting aside all jokes and acting roles, the martials arts is where he earned my full respect and that will also stick in my memory about him.
"World champion" is an embellishment, but he was a strong point fighter within North America. His six championships were for a tournament that crowned self-titled "Professional [weight class] Karate Champions", with the "World" embellishment added later. To be fair, people from other countries did occasionally appear at these tournaments, but there weren't Japanese fighters there, and Japan dominates the gold medal count for the WKF World Karate Championship that started in 1970.
That is hands down one of my ATF scenes in any movie. Expendables 2 was IMO just about the most "fun" movie I've ever seen as well. It wasn't great cinema, or a specific classic.. but it was fun. I have similar feelings about Gremlins 2 as well. We need more fun movies, but too many people seem to have not been issued a sense of humor these days.
Found out about his passing from my teenage kids. They knew him as some legendary tough guy based solely on the jokes, but had no idea who he actually was. To be fair, looking at some other comments here about his political and personal leanings, I didn't know who he actually was either.
> Isn't that an obligation when you own a trademark? That you sue people, or else you may lose the trademark?
It's not quite as cut and dry as you suggest. Besides, in which way was a trademark being violated? Last I knew merely talking about and referencing a celebrity by name was not a trademark violation.
Is it trademark, or IP. If someone made a list of Mickey Mouse jokes, Disney's law department will send them a letter too. Chuck Norris is a person/name but also a persona.
His proximity to Bruce Lee earned him more or less permanent kung fu cinema fame. Walker,Texas Ranger and other work he did definitely boosted it, but the memes clinched it.
>> If it wasn’t for those jokes would he be remembered anywhere as well?
You’re assuming the jokes make people dive deeper. In reality I know the jokes and didn’t have a clue who he was and never cared enough to find out. The reality is the probably didn’t make much of a difference to how well he or his work was actually known.
> How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately.
Good stats are hard to come by, but the Linux : BSD ratio is probably no larger than the Windows : Linux ratio (which is actually running relatively low these days--Linux seems to be closing in on ~3% desktop share). That puts the BSD overall in the 0.01% range, which is really too little market share to accurately measure.
There seem to be a lot of people in other places in these comments saying things work for them with Nvidia just fine.
But it also sounds like whether things work is heavily dependent on how up-to-date the distribution is. I’m not sure if that’s tied in with Nvidia or not.
In my experience, there are a lot of problems with Optimus-like set-ups (laptop with an Nvidia graphics card which is not active all the time), so having different problems with multiple Nvidia graphics card is something I can believe even if my experience with a single main Nvidia GPU is great.
Nope, there has been tons of commits in regard of X11, code refractions, bug fixes and new features, in the past 17 years.
Yes most of them blocked for the sake of ideology, not conspiracy, it's more like a religious thinking.
Nope, I stopped using Apple devices in early 2019. I can't accept their attitude anymore, of deciding what I'm allowed to install on my hardware. macOS is a bit more open than iOS, but is every year shifting more and more into the same direction.
How much you want to bet that’s why it was 20 seconds?
reply