And then this one day, back in 2015, there was absolutely nothing on TV.
Although this certainly qualified as a hardship, the situation was hardly a new dilemma. Even back when there were just a handful of broadcast channels, all of them streamed into our living rooms through a rickety set of rabbit ear antennas, families gathered around the television set every evening, hoping they might come across some show that was actually worth watching. People “of a certain age” will remember this all too well, as the youngest children in every family were required to sit on the floor and work the chunky knob to change channels on demand. But even with the advent of remote control devices and cable services, the problem only grew worse. As viewing options increased exponentially, hope sprung eternal that there might, just might, be something good on television. Inevitably, this optimism led to countless hours spent channel surfing.
At the time, my family and I had been stuck inside for days. The rainy weather showed no signs of letting up, and we’d already reached the end of our Netflix queue. But then, all of a sudden, a new movie caught my eye:
Just in case I wasn’t completely sold by the cool graphic, the short runtime sealed the deal. Our choice made, we settled in to watch the show— even if it was more out of curiosity than anything.
But then— only a half-hour later— I’d reached the conclusion that “Kung Fury” was, quite possibly, the best movie I’d ever seen.
Kung Fury— yes, that’s the man’s name— is a police officer in Miami. A tough street cop, who acquires mystical martial arts skills after simultaneously being struck by lightning and bitten by a cobra.
But wait— it gets weirder.
After years of using his ninja skills to protect and serve, Kung Fury suddenly quits the force when he’s assigned a triceratops as his new partner. But then, when a robotic video game console tears through Miami in a rampage of destruction, Kung Fury returns to service after Adolf Hitler suddenly appears out of nowhere and assassinates the Chief of Police.
Faced with such an existential threat, Kung Fury has but one course of action:
To travel backwards in time, and kill Hitler.
Needless to say, the plot of “Kung Fury” plot is a little… out there. This unique project began as a labor of love from David Sandberg, a Swedish filmmaker who fronted $5000 of his own money to create a trailer for a made-up 1980s action movie. The resulting video clip proved so popular that before long, Sandberg was able to generate over $600,000 in additional funding. With this limited budget, Sandberg turned his dream into a reality by using green screens to create fantastic settings, and by casting his close friends in the starring roles. As the filming progressed, Sandberg kept costs down by renting just a single uniform for all of the extras cast as police officers and Nazi soldiers. The crew rotated through this wardrobe, filming the extras’ scenes individually, and then merging the clips together to create a series of epic fight sequences.
In 2015, Sandberg’s magnum opus debuted at the Cannes film festival— but “Kung Fury” really took off when the film was uploaded to Youtube, garnering more than ten million views in just a few days. And while “Kung Fury” was nominated for several prestigious awards, the film’s highest praise came from its legion of enthusiastic fans. Nerdist magazine called “Kung Fury” a “31-minute masterpiece that feels like it fell right out of 1985 and hit just about every B-movie genre on the way down”, while Vanity Fair magazine called it “the best movie ever, of course.”
And when “Kung Fury” was picked up by Netflix, the film gained a whole new audience. Sandberg’s passion project exploded in popularity, and even inspired a retro video game. In 2023, fans were thrilled to learn that Sandberg’s production company had wrapped filming on a sequel— but with no word yet on the release date, we’ll all just have to be patient.
Thankfully, the original version of “Kung Fury” is still available to watch for free on Youtube… so for now, we’ll just have to be content with this classic!