Episode 925: Air Bud Meets Karate Kid Meets the Secret Life of Walter Mitty

On the Overthinking It Podcast, we tackle the life and legend of Chuck Norris and rewatch his team-up with Jonathan Brandis in 1992’s Sidekicks.

by Matthew Wrather
March 30th, 2026

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Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel slam the revolving door on the life and works of Chuck Norris, the six-time world karate champion who became a legend, again, for completely different things. They track his trademark emotional self-possession back from his troubled childhood, through his rise as a karate master, expressed in the code of ethics of his martial art, Chun Kuk Do, and into his oeuvre of roundhouse-kick-related spectacles and tall tales.

Jordan and Pete rewatch and break down two of his films: Good Guys Wear Black, his first starring role from 1978, and Sidekicks, his rare self-referential meta-text, from 1992. They also map his other works, from modern frontier heroic tales like Lone Wolf McQuaid and Walker Texas Ranger to battles of might against prejudicial violence, like Delta Force and Top Dog, where he teams up with a sheepdog to fight Neo-Nazis.

Through the discussion, a central question emerges: if Chuck Norris’s artistic raison d’être is to portray a simple, straightforward moral and physical unity of thought, intention, preparation, and action in the context of morally fraught situations that fail to yield to it, does he make the case more for reconciling his methods to the world, or expressing a poetry of their irreconcilability?

In the struggle of the unstoppable force versus the immoveable object, which breaks first? It’s a trick question: they’re both Chuck Norris.