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Chuck Norris: He just keeps on kicking for adoring fans
from: courierpress.com
Chuck Norris does not fade away. By all rights he should have, by now.
"Walker, Texas Ranger," his law-and-order TV series, finished its run
on CBS in May 2001, after eight years and 203 episodes. And that should
have been that for the great Stoneface, outside of the endless cable
reruns, the Total Gym infomercials and the occasional late-night
rebroadcast of one of his '80s-era chop-socky movies ("Lone Wolf
McQuade," "Missing in Action," etc.).
But Chuck Norris, or maybe just Chuck Mania, endures.
The 65-year-old martial-arts master is the object of a kind of
sardonic cult veneration. Conan O'Brien, on his late-night show, has
been airing vintage "Walker" clips for months. Collegehumor.com, a Web
site popular among the dorm set, regularly links to all things Norris
on the Internet (recent entry: a rare photograph of Norris sans beard).
Norris popped up in a cameo in "Dodgeball" two summers ago, and in a
two-hour "Walker" movie in October, which drew respectable ratings.
While hardly an unbiased source, Jeff Duclos, who has been
Norris' publicist since the last season of "Walker," chalks up Chuck
Mania to Norris' "consistent persona."
"There are very few people who have projected that kind of
image, that kind of mythical heroism," he says. "People, especially
young men, appreciate the underlying principles of that character, the
morality, the dignity, the sense of right and wrong."
While Norris has never challenged Laurence Olivier on acting,
he certainly has been consistent during his more than 30-year movie and
TV career. Through scores of "Walker" episodes and nearly two dozen
movies, he played pretty much the same guy. As the square-jawed
embodiment of law and order, he could be counted on to do What Was
Right, even if right involved beating up people, which, in Norris'
case, it invariably did.
"Walker," which drew almost 20 million viewers at its peak, was
predictable, simple and (as Conan's clips demonstrate) often
unintentionally funny. To call "Walker" retro is to insult retro.
Although it was in the tradition of "Gunsmoke" and John Wayne westerns,
it existed in its own space-time continuum. As latter-day Texas Ranger
Cordell Walker, Norris and his sidekicks were the white hats out to rid
the West (or at least Dallas) of drug-dealin', kidnappin', gun-runnin',
no-good scum. Every week, justice prevailed. And it prevailed with
great guest stars, including Frank Stallone, JOAN JETT, Erik Estrada,
Ann Jillian, Tom Bosley and Barbara Mandrell.
There was a certain integrity to the series. To his credit,
Norris, who was executive producer of the show, never tried to do a
Very Special Episode. "Walker" never did subtlety, or ambiguity or
irony. (In fact, Norris can bend irony into balloon-animal shapes.)
Another possible explanation for Norris adulation is a
demographic one: Young adults, who grew up watching "Walker" on
Saturday nights, are reliving a fond bit of their childhood, just as
earlier generations elevated "The Brady Bunch" and "The Dukes of
Hazzard" to iconic camp status. In any case, young people seem to be
the driving force behind Norris nostalgia. The most frequent visitors
to the Chuck Norris Fact Generator (www.4q.cc/chuck/), a daily offering
of Chuck "facts," are college students and military personnel,
according to Ian Spector, the site's co-founder.
Spector, 17, a Brown University freshman from Long Island,
started a "fact" site for the actor Vin Diesel in April and joined
forces with another Web designer, Mike Lelli, to launch the Norris site
a month later. After some slow going, things have picked up: The Norris
generator got 18 million of its 28.7 million hits in the past month,
Spector reports. He has now collected some 8,000 Norris "facts" from
visitors and plans to produce a book and a calendar.
Why the passion for Chuck? Spector has a few thoughts: "I guess
he's well enough known that people know what he's done. "And he's been
out of the culture long enough so that people can go wherever they want
with the 'facts.' Beyond that, it's really hard to say."
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