New Beverly, Monday 8/25/25. Double header: American Ninja and American Ninja 2: The Confrontation. I asked Melodist-K if he was game, unknowing of the background, the pure nostalgia and beyond, this suggestion was soon to generate. His response, an enthusiastic hell yeah. Because we both have children, the 7 p.m. showing for the original was out of the question. Part 2 at 9:30 p.m. was more our speed. It meant losing sleep in order to have fun (I normally wake up at 6 or so and go to bed at 11). My exact words when I got into the car: I am going to lose sleep anyway, so may as well have some goddam fun. This fun was in the form of a tall, bulbous hefeweizen over at Wirsthaus on La Brea and a medium, well buttered popcorn during the movie itself…And…Let’s not forget, some decent action in the form of…Ninja!

We arrived and while waiting in line were told there was a surprise Q&A going on between showings. Could it be? No. No way…I waited with baited breath…

We paid, sat down with popcorns in hand and a bunch of old dudes were standing up in front of the screen. No one recognizable, yada, yada, until the MC made a shocking introduction and Michael Dudikoff himself came strolling and grinning down the aisle to stand in front of us all and speak about his experience working on the movie.

Yes! Dudikoff! The American Ninja! Coming to the tiny New Beverly Cinema house on a Monday night to bestow his presence upon us all. And Jesus did he still look good. 70 years old, all his hair intact, still tan and jacked. Looking as if he could still whip some butt. Back in the day, this guy was the shit. You have no idea. Women loved him, men (well, very young boys) wanted to be him, kick serious ass like him and yes, we all practiced our spin kicks and flips, imagined ourselves slicing down enemy ninja with swipes of our katana while uttering few words, our crew cut barely out of place, and in the scrum of it all delivering a perfect smoldering look toward the camera…

And, just as dramatic as he entered, he also exited. The lights went down, the Cannon logo smushed together and we were off. The action began from the get go where three marines entered a seedy joint called The Blind Beggar’s Bar and a bunch of local toughs started some shit.

The basic premise from then on: Joe Armstrong (Michael Dudikoff) and sidekick Curtis Jackson (Steve James) end up in Cape Town, (actually Simonstown) South Africa, to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances of marines from their posts at a U.S. embassy. Pretty cut and dry. The movie is mostly action with many ninja extras and imaginative ways in which to dispatch of them. Believe it or not, there is a tough guy that Dudikoff has to fight at the end…

As a youth in South Africa, Melodist-K’s dad worked on the film and Melodist-K played with the props between scenes. Pretty cool. So this was not only a fun time but cool to see because he was reliving much of the movie through the eyes of his youth.

As a ninja obsessed kid, I had never seen American Ninja part 2 back in the day. The first one, yes, but not the second. During this era, there was also the TV show, The Master, with Lee Van Cleef and in those most influential of times we all ran around during recess springing out from behind trees and doing flips off the monkey bars, not to mention the occasional karate chop to the back of a friends neck or flying kick that more often than not led a young boy straight into the principal’s office.

Ninjas were very important in those times. We wanted to be ninja. We thought someday we could be ninja. We dreamt of butterfly knives, dual wielding a pair of sai, becoming masters of nunchucks, throwing the dreaded shuriken with deadly accuracy, swinging the sickle with the chain attached, possessing all the accoutrement of the formidable ninja.

At any rate, the most bizarre thing about the movie is how entertaining the movie still is, even at my advanced age, despite any consideration of what I/we deem as the correct way to write a script. For instance, there is no hero’s journey whatsoever. Dudikoff’s character, the invincible Joe Armstrong, goes through no struggles, no internal battles throughout the entirety of the film. There is no mentor, no denial of the call to duty. The character isn’t making any choices that lead him into worse and worse situations. All he does is whip ass. The bad guys are the ones who choose what direction the story goes. None of this really bothered me, however, what did bother me during many of the fight scenes was when, after beating up a ninja, Dudikoff would walk away empty handed when there was a sword on the ground. This sort of thing always bugged me, even as a kid and still does, in almost every action movie ever made. Grab the sword dude! What are you doing?!?

So what gives? Where did the American obsession with ninjas come from? Part of it was for sure the mystery present in the ninja themselves. In the pre-internet era one could only glean the facts from movies and word of mouth on the school bus. My personal theory is that the incredible rise in popularity all came from legendary comic book artist and writer (and Vermonter!) Frank Miller. Talk about obsessed. His first big break came into being with the comic Daredevil in as early as 1980 and, in January 1981 is where he reinvented the character basically as a ninja giving old hornhead a ninja girlfriend in the form of Elektra, a ninja trainer, Stick, and many, many ninja enemies, The Hand. From here he inserted ninja characters into Wolverine comics and visited some samurai based themes in a limited series over in DC called Ronin.

During this epic Daredevil run, Cannon and Golan Globus released a movie called Enter the Ninja (October 1981) and subsequent sequels. Revenge of the Ninja (1983) and Ninja III: The Domination (1984). The creative and patriotic follow ups to these were American Ninja (1985), American Ninja 2: The Confrontation (1987), American Ninja III: Bloodhunt (1989), American Ninja 4: The Annihilation (1990), and finally, American Ninja 5 (1993).

Let us not forget the G.I. Joe character, Snake Eyes, who arrived in 1982 and his nemesis, Storm Shadow who came around in 1984. Very iconic. So much so that they even made a Snake Eyes movie a few years back to cash in on this nostalgia.

From this point in the early 80s, Ninja culture took off. The biggest and best of all, however, was the colorful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) who arrived in 1984, the creators citing Miller as a major influence. The early comics were even drawn similar to Millers style.

The Turtles comics spawned a million such rip offs as Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, Geriatric Gangrene Juijitsu Gerbils, Pre-Teen Dirty Gene Kung Fu Kangaroos, and Mildly Microwaved Pre-Pubescent Kung Fu Gophers. None of these amounted to much. The Turtles, however, have become firmly ingrained into the zeitgeist. To this day, new movies every few years, ongoing comics, etc.

During the heyday in 80s comics and toys, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood began to cash in on the ninja craze which we can probably speculate came straight off the karate and martial arts craze in the late 70s and began to evolve. But did they? Not really. Not at that time, anyway. No major studios made ninja movies and Cannon made a few million but nothing exorbitant. Fast forward to the present, however, and we see the TMNT have grossed over a billion bucks with seven feature films. 1.3 to be exact. Not too shabby when you think this doesn’t include all the toys, video games, etc. The latest, in 2023, is said to have made over $200 million in profit all said and done for Paramount Studios.

And what the hell is a ninja anyway? To a kid a ninja was a master of stealth, of the deadly art known as ninjitsu. But was it ever really a thing? Who knows? Were they really assassins clad in black and armed with grappling hooks and those claws on the palms of their hands?

Skynet tells me they were an actual thing, but not what we think of today. Yes, spies and saboteurs in the twelve century of Japan but most of the time clad as ordinary people so as to blend in. You can thank Frank Miller, Cannon, and the creators of the Turtles, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, for fully changing them into the black pajama clad, masked wielders of many different sorts of weaponry we imagine today. Also, smoke bombs…

American Ninja 2: The Confrontation. 3 out of 5 stars.

Your AI generated image for this post, #432, 8/30/25