Retro Ads

Yes, now you can learn martial arts the fast and easy way in the comfort of your own home! That's right. All you need to do is scrape up some pocket change and we'll rush you deadly Asian fighting secrets never before revealed!

Martial arts enthusiast Dan Kelly has compiled an interesting albeit hilarious collection of mail-order self defense courses from yesteryear. Talk about "buyer beware"! I know I'm giving away my age here, but some of these ads I actually remember. They were typically found on the back pages of many popular comic books which also carried products like X-Ray Glasses and the now classic The Day Mac Became A Man ads that were run by bodybuilding guru Charles Atlas. The credentials of some of these so-called karate masters that were featured on these courses were questionable to say the least. Needless to say, most of the ads were geared toward testosterone driven young men who either thought that learning martial arts overnight would turn them into chick magnets, or had visions of becoming the next Kato (Bruce Lee's first TV gig as a kung fu crime-fighting superhero c. 1965).

There was still some public naivete in the West about the martial arts during the era that these ads ran; it was a time when judo was popularly used as a generic term to describe any martial-art style, and black belt "holders" were regarded as invincible warriors.

I truthfully never knew anyone who actually sent away for one of those pseudo-self defense courses. One friend of mine did get the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension muscle building program. I got the X-Ray Glasses. And somewhere Bruce Lee is having a really good laugh.