Also, serious question for people who know about martial arts: is kempo karate pretty much synonymous with "blt farm" in North America, or can it be a legitimate martial art? I took some kempo karate in middle school like everyone else did during the height of Turtlemania and it was a total belt farm, I was up to green belt in like two years (which is half a dozen belts because they had so many belts - I think green was the first one that was actually hard to advance through) and I sucked.

This guy talks about being a 6th degree black belt. In my limited understanding of this stuff, the rule of thumb for avoiding belt farms is to aim for a place that has around three belts and no degrees within the belt (or better yet, no belts). I think in kempo there were 5 or 6 belts before green, then they started having two or three degrees degrees per belt until black belt, and then black belt had 10 degrees.

So, was modern kempo more or less invented for belt farms or what?

If I wanted to do some less cynical navel gazing I could guess that the multitude of belts were invented to keep engaged an American customer base with an increasingly limited attention span and desire for bragging rights.

But it really doesn't matter if there are 50 belts/ranks or 4, it's the instructor that either uses them as real achievement award for progress or as a token of participation.

i took kenpo karate as a kid too (early 90s) and it was as follows: mediocre work out, sometimes mediocre sparring, lots of katas and techniques with mild attempt to enforce form but mostly katas and did i mention the test for your belt will include the katas, step kick turn pivot sashay away

still better than sitting on your ass but deffo a means to take money from parents generally speaking

also yeah to confirm, lots of belt colors and stripes to go around, i had enough of that bullshit by the time i ditched cub scouts

Tae-Kwon-Do here. We had white, white with black electrical tape (pre-yellow), yellow, orange, green, purple, blue, red, brown, brown-stripe and black. You had to make a serious financial commitment to get that yellow and beyond. Belt farm for sure. Took about 4 years for most people to be able to test out for black. It's fine, it's like a health club or any other club really. There were people with some serious talent and people that sucked and it was fun. If you're not one of those dorks that can't enjoy a thing unless its "truly authentic" you're good.

One time the owner was testing for his 3rd degree black and at the end the judges(other BBs from his school) decided that he was so bad-ass they'd skip him up to 6th.

Belt farm karate provided me with one those insightful moments early in life that maybe people are kinda full of shit.

The idea that anything with more than three belt levels and stripes should be considered a "belt farm" is nonsense. I think we can all agree that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is pretty legitimate, right? Because the standard progression there is white, blue, purple, brown, black. And many legitimate gyms do stripes.

As for the validity of kenpo, I think that, like a lot of karate off-shoots, some of it is fine. Chuck Liddell's background was kenpo.

Oh man, I want to party with Canadian Bob!

Yeah, the juxtapositions between what the men and women say, and all of the unintentional subtext and everything make this kind of brilliant. Completely unintentionally brilliant I assume, but still. Great find, downloaded it in case it goes off line.

Holy shit, the last act with his LA neighbors is incredible.

I only made it about 5 minutes in and then I started to feel bad for everyone involved.

Give it another try, at least skip to the last 18 minutes or so.

Jesus Christ I just started watching and the cringefactor is off the charts.

"Here we are in this absolutely authentic Costa Rican bar frequented only by American men and aging prostitutes"

Sometimes I wonder if one of these prostitutes would, given the opportunity and the right salary, sit around and play video games and watch bad movies with me on the condition that they wipe my ass when I'm too old to do it myself. Or hire someone to do it.