You don't need to follow Mike Huckabee, or even politics, to appreciate that Chuck Norris is everywhere these days.
On television spots for the former Arkansas governor, Norris, the star of shoot-'em-up fare like Missing in Action and Walker, Texas Ranger, is there. ("My plan to secure the border?" Huckabee says in deadpan. "Two words: Chuck Norris.") On T-shirts, Saturday Night Live skits, Mountain Dew ads, and Web sites like the satirical Thetruthaboutchuck.com, Norris - or at least his image - is there.
Now, suddenly, he is not alone, as several other action stars who peaked in prominence in the 1980s are rejoining him on the pop culture landscape.
Sylvester Stallone, at 61, is starring in the first Rambo film since 1988, called simply Rambo. Hulk Hogan, 54, who was doing face plants in wrestling bouts back when Frankie Goes to Hollywood was still riding the charts, re-emerged this month as the face of NBC's unlikely new hit, American Gladiators. Mr T, the Mohawk-sporting muscleman who squared off against Stallone in Rocky 3 back in 1982, when Leonid Brezhnev was still the Soviet leader (and when there was still a Soviet Union), is back as a television pitchman for the popular World of Warcraft video game.
Even the Terminator is back - in Fox's new series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - although the original star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is too busy with other engagements in California to participate.
The leading action symbols of the Reagan era - with all their excess, jingoism and good vs evil bombast - have returned, as outsized and obvious as they were in the decade of stonewash. Yet as stars of prime-time hits and feature films (not to mention Republican mascots), these actors are still as ripped and imposing as they were 20 years ago, and they continue to carry an undeniable authority with fans old and new.
Indeed, at a time when the US is faced with a new tangle of problems, the return of the 1980s action hero suggests that some Americans, particularly men, are looking to revel in the vestigial pleasures of older times and seemingly simpler ways. (Witness the popularity of the best-selling Dangerous Book for Boys, a celebration of the traditional rugged joys of boyhood.) It helps that these figures need no introduction. "Stallone and Rambo are huge, iconic images already," said Tim Palen, who works at Lionsgate, the Rambo studio, as a co-president for theatrical marketing. "It's really kind of holy territory, especially when it comes to young males, and males in general."
When marketing executives were deciding on a strategy to sell the new Rambo film, they shunned splashy posters in favor of a minimalist image of a black spray-painted stencil outline of Rambo's head on a white background.
"We called it Che Guevara crossed with Jesus Christ by way of Andy Warhol," Palen said. "In a way, he's all of those."
At an age when mere mortals find their biceps reduced to cookie dough, these human action figures have retained not only their muscle tone but, more important, their value as brands. Mark Koops, an executive producer of American Gladiators, attributes its success in part to Hogan's enduring status as a symbol of both high-testosterone swagger and integrity in the eyes of fans - certifiable dudes, undoubtedly - of all ages.
"Since the summer, when we first sold the show, we put together a target list of who we thought could capture what the show was," Koops said. The list had just one name: Hogan. "He has such a huge following - kids from 6 to 60." When Hogan and Koops attended a recent San Diego Chargers football game, Koops recalled, "all the NFL players came running up to him, even when they were supposed to be warming up." Without a doubt, nostalgia on the part of Generation X is a strong factor in the continuing appeal of these actors. The same guys who grew up watching First Blood and The Delta Force on VHS are now old enough to hold positions of creative power at advertising firms and film studios, Palen said. "I'm in my 40s," he explained, "and growing up a young guy in Kansas, Rambo was huge."
But in a digital age, old icons never die, he said - they just end up on DVDs in the family SUV. "To kids under 18, they never did have that experience," Palen added, "but with DVDs they did, and they've experienced it over and over and over again."
It is hardly unusual for pop eminences to be recycled by taste-making connoisseurs. Usually it starts with young creative directors or screenwriters who seize on a relic from the frothy pop culture of their youth and reanimate him for one more campy go-round on the carousel. Tom Jones, Burt Reynolds, William Shatner: This is your second life.
Usually it is, you know, a joke.
But Koops, speaking on the day of the New Hampshire primary, said the appetite for these action figures represents more than a joke. Rather, it speaks to a sincere desire among some men - likely not Hillary Clinton supporters - to return to what he called "a comfort zone" symbolized by heroic characters of yore.
"Everyone is talking about change" in the political sphere, he said, but many guys in fact "want to go back to the way things were, the things they knew."
This is a moment in American history bedeviled by a sinking economy, the possibility of environmental catastrophe and violent conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. So it's not surprising to see men who were raised on cartoonish images of the fictional John Rambo taking out more Soviet soldiers in two hours than the Afghan mujahidin did in a decade show an appetite for characters who tend to fix even big problems with room-clearing brawls, monosyllabic wisecracks and large-caliber firearms.
Anxious Americans, after all, are suddenly very unsure of their position in the world, which leaves some open to any "fantasy having to do with a sense of traditional masculinity," said Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California. She said that these living GI Joes communicate a "not-so-deep code of American exceptionalism," as well as the American instinct to cut through obfuscation with plain talk and "to not bother with politics, just go in with force and fix things."
Tracy Lovatt, the head of strategy for BBDO New York, the advertising agency that produced the Mountain Dew campaign with Norris, said that the myriad troubles facing the country have created an appetite for the heroes who seemed omnipotent during the 1980s, a time when the country appeared to have dug itself out of a quagmire.
"We have weak, uncertain political leadership right now," she said. "Everything seems to be up for grabs; we don't believe in institutions. This country needs stability, and in an archetypal, hyperbolic way, that's what these figures represent."
Indeed, heroic caricatures seem comparatively less cartoonish at a time when nonfiction heroes like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds have been tarnished by accusations of fraud, said David Zinczenko, editor in chief of Men's Health.
"The sports field is littered with false heroes and antiheroes and fallen heroes right now," Zinczenko said by e-mail. Norris represents a perfect antidote because he remains, unlike the athletes, forever two-dimensional. "We've never known anything about the guy, except for what we see on big and little screens," he said. "He's square-jawed, muscular, action-oriented - everything we want in a guy who can get things done."
However unfashionable these macho caricatures may have seemed even five years ago, their cartoonish image of macho rectitude actually may be enhanced by their dogged efforts to protect an all-American image.
Ian Spector, who founded the satirical Thetruthaboutchuck.com in 2005, is finding this out the hard way. Last month, Norris sued Gotham Books, the publisher of Spector's companion book to his Web site - The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About the World's Greatest Human - asserting that the book misappropriated his name and image and associated him with unsavory and illegal behavior. (The suit is continuing.)
"He takes himself very seriously," Spector, 19, a cognitive neuroscience major at Brown, said of his muse and adversary. "Maybe because he takes himself so seriously, it makes it all the more ridiculous."
So, then, like Shatner, is Norris really just a joke?
"I don't want to say yes," Spector said warily, "because I don't want to have him see me calling him a joke."
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