Bloodsport (1988)

Every kid who ever fed quarters into a Street Fighter II cabinet owes something to Bloodsport (1988), a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie made for $1.5 million that pulled in $63.5 million and earned its star a Razzie nomination for Worst New Star — which he lost, to Ronald McDonald, for playing himself in Mac and Me.

Nic brought this one. He caught it in his young teens, back when it was getting passed around and there just weren't many movies about guys with wildly different fighting styles punching each other in a basement. Steve had never seen it, which is funny for a man who logged thousands of hours as a Ken player and once went eight or nine deep on a single quarter at a computer camp arcade — still, he says, the highlight of his entire life.

So the whole episode is Steve connecting dots in real time. Guile is Frank Dux. Johnny Cage's splits are Van Damme's splits. Chun-Li is right there in Chong Li's name, one vowel away. Along the way there's Bolo Yeung wearing a South Korean flag while playing a character named like he's Chinese, a handler in half-tint aviators and a gold chain that Nic immediately claims as his kind of guy, and a young Frank Dux who climbs through a window in a New York Giants shirt and a San Francisco Giants hat. Steve cannot name a single human being on earth who roots for both.

They clock the koi pond and blindfold training that get replayed later in case you forgot ten minutes ago. Steve counts the splits (five, contractually). He also calls Chekhov's dead best friend on Ray Jackson and stays mad it never fires. Nic maps out the kick where Frank boots a guy behind his own shoulder like a pirate punting his own parrot, which Steve figures would break your collarbone to maybe tickle the other guy's nose. Chong Li says brick don't hit back. He's not wrong.

And then the closing title card claims 56 consecutive knockouts in one tournament, so Steve did the math on how many entrants that would take. Seventy-two quadrillion. Roughly nine million Earths' worth of people.

Frank W. Dux: the elementary school kid who swore his dog was actually a wolf, except this one got a movie out of it.