Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire.

We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney.

And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction.

We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire.

In this week's episode, we're going to be looking at bullshito, a catch-all term for martial arts

practices that are either fake, delusional, or just plain useless. This is the land of no-touch

knockouts, touches of death, and mystical masters who can't manage their own lives. We'll be asking the question.

Should you learn self-defense from someone who struggles with basic reality?

Spoiler, the answer is no.

You probably shouldn't.

This is Hit Me With Your Best Shot, the Wacky World of Martial Arts Frauds.

Music of martial arts frauds.

Ninja movies came to life in 1960s, Japan, some of them fairly serious, a lot more of them,

really silly, and for the most part they weren't seen by the rest of the world. It wasn't until 1980s the Octagon, that ninjas made a splash in the U.S. market,

with the movie taking in about $19 million, around half of what the likes of Caddyshack and Friday

the 13th made in the same year, which is honestly pretty good. It had lots of angry men

hitting each other. You got to see a boob for like a tenth of a second, and you learned that

the apogee of martial arts skill was a white American dude with a mustache. In this case,

Chuck Norris, of course. This was largely the formula followed by American ninja movies of the 80s,

which cleaned up in the exploding home video market. One notable exception was Ninja 3,

The Domination, where the spirit of an evil ninja possesses the body of an aerobics instructor

who likes to turn on her boyfriends by pouring V8 juice down her cleavage.

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