“You know what I’m gonna do?”
Local boss man Stuart Posner couldn’t take down Billy Jack. Billy kicked his butt.
Posner’s worthless, sniveling son Bernard couldn’t do anything to Billy Jack, either. Billy kicked his butt once, and when that didn’t take, made him drive his ‘Vette into a lake, and when that didn’t work, came back and killed him with a chop to the windpipe.
Deputy Mike, daddy of the pregnant runaway girl, couldn’t stop Billy Jack, despite shooting him in the gut with a rifle.
A rattlesnake couldn’t even kill him. Its multiple bites were just steps on his path to becoming stronger.
In the end, the most banal, mundane, everyday bully got Billy Jack — old age and years of failing health.
“Billy Jack” was, as anyone who has watched it again years later can attest, a painfully amateurish, rather silly film. The one thing a fair critic can say for it is that it was better than the three other films in which Tom Laughlin played the character.
But that one semester that I attended USC, the fall of 1971, the film was what Jesse Pinkman would call “the bomb.” We loved it. We’d never seen anything like it before, although we’d soon see something that copied the formula on TV — the formula being a character who’s all about talking nonviolence and exotic mysticism, but who is forced, with great reluctance, to kick bad guy’s butts on a regular basis. Which was why we watched.
The films were awful, but it would have been nice to have seen him prevail over the foe that got him in the end…
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I get him confused with Buford Pusser, who was a real person.
How can you confuse TN’s Walking Tall sheriff with Billy Jack?
They’re nothing alike. Buford Pusser had a big stick. Billy Jack didn’t need a stick. Sheriff Pusser was real-life, as you say. Billy was make-believe. Buford was in West Tennessee; Billy was out in the desert of the far West somewhere.
So, as a mnemonic device for the future:
— Buford Pusser — stick.
— Billy Jack — no stick.
Near as I can tell, they only had one thing in common, apart from a penchant for vengeance: Character actor Kenneth Tobey played a bad guy in both movies (he was the aforementioned deputy with the pregnant runaway daughter, and he was one of the gunmen who killed Buford Pusser’s wife in “Walking Tall.”
Maybe that’s the source of the confusion.
The movies came out about the same time and dominated the cinema scene in Aiken and the CSRA….they appealed to the same crowd, not the foreign film set….
That’s why Kenneth Tobey was in both of them. He was doing well playing heavies at the time.
But they were two years apart. Back then, that was like eons.
I saw “Billy Jack” in Columbia, at one of the several theaters that used to be on Main Street. I was blown away, maybe particularly because I was taking karate classes at the time.
I saw “Walking Tall” at a drive-in in Millington, TN, with a girl who had already seen it several times and thought it was the best thing ever. I was 19; she was 16. I did not lay a hand on her, let me hasten to add. She was cute, but she seemed so young. That was a huge age difference at that age. The whole experience seemed like an anthropological study. I sort of marveled at her. I couldn’t decide whether she really, truly thought this mediocre action flick was that awesome, and that’s why she sat there rapt and never said a word, or whether she was scared that I, the college man, was going to make a move on her. Or scared I wasn’t going to make a move on her. Which is what happened.
Anyway, I never took her out again. We didn’t seem to have anything in common.
Dunno. I was not old enough to see either. Just remember me and my smug nonredneck classmates scoffing…..
We had the coolest calculators….
Ya’ll did not have calculators back then! Well, maybe mechanical ones, or these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus
I was the first class who did not use slide rules.
I remember being so proud when I beat Michael Minnick using scholar’s mate, taught to me by my uebernerd Dad. Dad still wears his vinyl pocket protector.
We were a fairly large group of nerds, as children of Savannah River Lab employees might be expected to be…..
As someone who used to live at another large DOE location, I fully understand about the quantity of nerdy kids (and adults).
I don’t think I saw a calculator until about 1973. It seemed pretty amazing, but not worth the hundreds of dollars that it cost.
I’m a bit younger than you, Brad, plus the same reality that allows me to have all the Apple products I want, back then meant a lot of kids got calculators whose parents would not dream of indulging in more traditional children’s gear. For example, despite the ready availability of horses in Aiken, only one DuPont daughter actually had a horse. Her mamma was from Tennessee and is a descendant of Robert E. Lee, so, that probably accounted for it.
Do you think Billy Jack knew about the “Run to the Wall Law”?
That’s so cool you remember that!
You know, I think my sensei from that USC short course in karate died back in September. I knew him as John Bull Roper, but I think he was one and the same as John Edward Roper, whose obit was in The State on Sept. 15. He’s the right age, and it said “He taught Tae Kwon Do as an eighth degree black belt at USC.”
Here’s an anecdote he shared, by way of explaining to us something few kids understand, which is that the martial arts aren’t some form of magic.
He wasn’t a very big guy, but he raised his stature in our eyes by telling us some of his exploits as a bar bouncer. On one occasion, he found himself tangling with a huge bruiser about twice his size. He managed to get the guy down on the ground, then sat on his chest and gave him several expert karate punches — just like the ones he was teaching us — to the face.
When the guy shook the punches off, utterly unfazed, “Bull” knew he was in trouble…
I forget the rest of the story. That’s what stuck with me. These skills he was teaching us gave us certain advantages, but they didn’t guarantee we would prevail in a fight.
Mr. Roper wasn’t very old. 65 doesn’t seem as far off as it used to.
Yeah… My mind had to go, “Wait! This can’t be him — he was just a few years older than I was!” Then I realized, 65 is just a few years older than I am…
What did I take away from those classes? Well, I don’t remember any of the routines he taught us, which were sort of like choreographed dances.
But I remember one or two of the self-defense things he taught. He wasn’t for fooling around and getting fancy in a tight spot (when you had run to the wall and had nowhere else to go), as you may be able to tell from that sitting-on-a-guy’s-chest-punching-him-in-the-face story. There’s one thing I think I could still deploy (despite no longer being in what you’d call athletic condition) in a life-threatening situation — a sidekick just above the adversary’s knee. It’s a particularly nasty, vicious thing to do to another human being — essentially turning his knee inside-out and crippling him, probably for life.
It’s something I’ve never actually DONE, of course, but I think I understand the principle well enough to do it — provided that the adrenaline and fear are at such a pitch as to overcome the natural inhibition against applying that sort of force to another person.
So, you know, don’t come at me with a knife or anything…
Always bring a gun to a knife fight.
Preferably two guns…and all of your friends who have guns.
If I’m ever in a knife fight, I want you, Bryan, to be standing in front of, I mean, next to me.
Um…why would I want to go to a knife fight, anyway?
I’m the kind of guy who would show up at the knife fight without his gun. Or a knife.
I was always that way with pencils and stuff in school. I had an English teacher in junior high who would give a failing daily grade or something every time I didn’t bring a pencil. Which I always thought was unfair, because I didn’t think of it until I got there.
So it’s good to have some hand-to-hand stuff to fall back on.
It is unfair. A grade should be a measure of growth or performance. Too often it is a measure of something else entirely.
Your teacher was trying to teach you responsibility–an important behavioral skill, but not something that should have a direct impact on an academic grade like English. Of course, the logical, natural consequences of not having a pencil might be that you would be unable to demonstrate your learning for the day.
Yeah, I would have had straight As without the pencil thing.