He's Got a Gold Medal in Kicking Your Ass

On this week's installment of the always excellent Pop Culture Happy Hour on NPR, the PCHH foursome discuss "Tomorrow's Rediscoveries": former stars who are "either currently out of fashion or currently not taken seriously [that] might have an opportunity to rise from the ashes, as if by magic, to take what you might call a Rourke-ian journey to redemption."

After Linda Holmes makes an earnest plea for Tony Danza based on his upcoming reality series, regular Cinéma sur le toit attendee Glen Weldon trotted out a pick -- at 22:15 if you're looking for the clip -- that left his cohorts shocked and awed. Well, at the very least, amused. They laughed. A lot. I'll leave the description to Weldon:

I'm talking about a man who made but one film, and then vanished into Hollywood legend. That one film, that one man, is Kurt 'Gymkata' Thomas. Gymkata, a 1985 film, tagline: "Gymnastics Skills, Karate Kills". Kurt 'Gymkata' Thomas, who is a gold medal gymnastics guy, plays a gold medal gymnastics guy who is picked up by the S.I.A., the "Special Intelligence Agency" — see what they did there — and dropped into the fictional, remote, Himalayan country of Parmistan. What happens next is the best scene in the history of cinema, where our mulleted hero is being chased down an alley, which dead-ends into what else, of course, a pommel horse. Which he then proceeds to mount. These Parmistanians with scimitars are coming at him (one at a time), and he is dishing out, you know, your Rear Double Scissor, your Mushroom, your Direct Stockli, your Reverse Hecht, your Russian Wendeswing.

In other words, Gymkata has the one thing that I was expecting, but didn't get, from our last feature, Never Too Young to Die, which also had a gymnast turned secret agent in the lead, but which never delivered ANY pommel horse, rings, or parallel bar action from John 'Not Gymkata Material' Stamos.

In addition to that, we also get some additional nonsense about winning a Parmistanian competition that will get Thomas a wish, which the U.S. government wants to use to magically create some kind of satellite monitoring system as an early nuclear attack warning system. Yeah, sounds like the 80s, alright.

So, in the interest of getting what was missing from the Stamos film, and in the interest of making Glen 'Gymkata' Weldon's (Klimek tells me that we're now authorized to refer to him thusly) fondest rooftop movie dream come true, we'll be kickstarting (so to speak) the Kurt Thomas renaissance on the roof this Thursday, September 2, somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 p.m.

Bring a snack, bring a drink, bring a friend, but most importantly, bring yourself.