Got a question for you. What do you get when you cross Mortal Kombat, WWE and Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood? A local access TV show where The Rock and Sub-Zero teach kids about the joys of sharing? A crossover MK game where the WWE roster is playable, but the only finishing moves are friendships?
What you get is WMAC Masters, a short lived, live action children's show that ran as part of various Saturday morning TV blocks from 1995-1997. Between the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the emergence of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and the smashing success of shows like Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, martial arts were all the rage for kids in the 90's. It seems like every single one of us begged and begged our parents to put us in Karate classes. It was all 'Karate' to us, none of us realized that the 'Karate' we were doing was (most likely) actually Tae Kwon Do, or that there was even a difference. The folks at 4Kids entertainment decided they wanted a piece of the martial arts action. But rather than go the route of MMPR or its contemporaries, grabbing footage from a Japanese TV show and having ordinary teenagers suddenly become martial arts experts to defeat bizarre monsters, they decided to go a different direction.
Which brings us to the subject of today's review. WMAC masters centered around a competition created by the fictitious World Martial Arts Council, where fighters from around the world competed for its ultimate prize: the Dragon Star. Fighters each had a nickname and persona, kind of like a wrestling gimmick. The show was hosted by Bruce Lee's daughter Shannon, who provided narration for the fights. Each episode would feature two preliminary bouts, where the goal was to drain the opponent's life bar MK/SF style. The two winners would face off in a cage match, where the winner would receive the emblem, called a Ki symbol, of their vanquished adversary to add to their dragon belt. Collect 10 and a fighter could challenge the Dragon Star champion, in a fight taking place on an elevated platform. As a wrestling fan, I dislike using the F word to refer to WWE so I won't do it here either, we will say this combat was "worked" rather than use that other word. This competition was all written around kid friendly WWE style angles, most focused on teaching life lessons and values to young viewers. The fighters would talk about difficult times in their lives or challenges they had to face and how the martial arts helped them through all of it. These were, of course, depicted through awful, cheesy vignettes that have 'mid-90's' written all over them. That the acting of some, or I should say most, of these guys and gals was suspect didn't help.
What wasn't suspect here though were the caliber of martial artists involved. This may have been worked combat, but the fighting prowess of these folks was very real. Olympic Gold Medalists, NASKA champions, kickboxing titleholders, you name it they were represented here. And even if you didn't recognize a single one of these people, you had still probably seen them before. Most of them had done some level of stunt work for Power Rangers and many also did stunts in major films. A handful of them had even appeared in the 1995 Mortal Kombat film. Perhaps the most recognizable was "Superstar" Ho-Sung Pak, who gamers might have recognized as the motion capture artist for Liu Kang from MK 1 and 2 (any MK fan would recognize the pose he strikes on the matchup screens as the motion for Liu Kang's fireball). In the first episode, he takes on Chris "Red Dragon" Cassamassa in one of the preliminary bouts. Cassamassa played Scorpion in the MK film, so you are essentially watching a real-life MK fight, which is cool when you think about it. Hakim "The Machine" Alston, was also in the MK movie, he's the monk that loses to Liu Kang and promptly gets his soul taken by Shang Tsung in the film's first bout. He also loses to Pak in the first episode of WMAC Masters, making him 0-2 in fights against various iterations of Liu Kang for 1995. Tough year.
Anyway, the fights are actually pretty well done, I think they made a smart move in finding martial artists and trying to teach them some acting skills rather than vice versa. Sure, the between-the-fights banter and teaching moments suffered as a result, but lets be honest we were all tuning in for the martial arts exhibitions. The preliminary fights all took place in themed battle zones, like a ghost town, a dark alley and an abandoned dock. Fighters would have to contend with ninjas before turning their attention to each other. The combat against the ninjas was usually a bit lacking, but the 1 on 1 fighting was usually better. Just as with wrestling, you could tell some of these fighters were more comfortable working with each other than others. You can also tell some were more comfortable with worked combat in general, a lot of the pulled punches in their fights were really obvious. But a lot of their techniques were just so cool it didn't matter. Hien "Tsunami" Ngyuen's flipping kick and Jamie "Great Wolf" Webster's capoeira whirlwind aren't practical in a real fight, but they sure are awesome. Rey Mysterio jumping onto someone's shoulders and flipping them over isn't practical either, but WWE fans still pop every time he does it. And it also helps add variety when the more dramatic stuff is balanced out by some of the more hard-hitting matches. I'm pretty positive that Pak and Alston were actually hitting each other at points during their fights.
While the vignettes and 90's cheesiness were hard to ignore, I can't help but feel like the fighters did a pretty good job making their characters interesting. It's not as pronounced as it is in wrestling, but there definitely are faces and heels here. Mike "Turbo" Bernardo, who had some acting experience from his role in the b-movie Shootfighter series, was a pretty convincing bad guy and Ngyuen does a good job as a plucky underdog. Herb "Olympus" Perez was basically post face turn Kurt Angle circa 2001, but six years earlier. The cast is diverse, though I wish they included some more martial arts styles. Most of the fighters are Karate or Kung-Fu practitioners, which was to be expected, but I still would like to have seen more. I'm partial to grappling based martial arts, so I would have liked to see some Jiu Jitsu, Judo or even amateur Wrestling (which I do consider a martial art, at least at its core), though I can imagine it would have been hard to mix those with the striking arts in this context.
While the show was fairly successful, 4Kids eventually decided they had enough, cancelling WMAC masters in 1997 after its second season. A third season had already been in production, with new fighters lined up and merchandise already produced for them. While the second season retained its competition format and focus on teaching life lessons, it did veer a little bit more into fantastical plots and storytelling. Because of this, the series ends on a pretty serious cliffhanger and it's a shame there will never be closure to the story, no matter how corny it was. This wasn't exactly game of thrones and even as kids we were really watching this for the fights, but something about incomplete stories makes sad. A lot of the folks on the show were really starting to get comfortable as actors and the martial arts boom wasn't quite over, so I think a third season would have made for good television, especially compared to kids shows that are on now. It's not like you could get everyone together for a revival, all the fighters featured are in their 50's and 60's now (though almost all of them are still in phenomenal shape, a lifetime of studying martial arts will do that for you) and most stopped acting, though some continued to do stunt work. I think a modern revival would be cool, but that could just be me.
Look, no one was ever going to confuse WMAC Masters for Emmy-winning television. But that wasn't the point. This show gave a lot of us 90's kids something we wanted to see while also delivering messages we needed to hear. So many people, even today, look at martial arts and just see violence. It can be difficult to dictate to those people how that isn't true. It's hard to put your finger on just how impactful the lessons learned from martial arts can be and its near impossible to explain it to someone who's never stepped on/in the platform/ring/mat/cage/etc. Sure, there's the easy stuff, discipline, respect, physical fitness, etc. but its more than that. Tons of kids got into martial arts in the 90's, but, lets be honest, most of us got started because we wanted to learn how to kick people in the head and how to defend ourselves from putty patrollers. But many of us found something more, and that came through in the messages conveyed on the show. WMAC Masters was a window into the martial arts mindset for many and it's a shame it only lasted a few episodes. I don't know if it's quite worth revisiting today, but I think it would be a great target for a modern update.
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