The amazing persistence of the legend of Chuck Norris, who died on March 19 at the age of 86, says something profound about American popular culture.

At the time of his death, Norris had long ceased being a major movie star — he had not made a high-profile theatrical feature since The Expendables 2 in 2012, and even that retro effort was an anomaly — and though he had a more lasting presence on television, it had been a long, long time since the heyday of Walker, Texas Ranger. In truth, even Norris’s peak period of stardom was awfully fleeting: less than a decade passed between his signature hits, including 1985’s Code of Silence and Invasion U.S.A., and the meta-film Sidekicks (1992), in which Norris, as himself, riffed on a stardom that seemed, even then, less reality than memory. Walker, Texas Ranger, which aired on CBS from 1993 through 2001, was definitely a big success, but, then, so were the near-contemporaneous CBS shows Touched by an Angel and Nash Bridges — and no one is thinking of building statues to Roma Downey or Don Johnson. 

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At the risk of sounding uncharitable, it’s questionable whether Norris could even be considered an actor, in the sense that, say, Marlon Brando or John Travolta or even former-athlete-turned-actor Jim Brown were. Will anyone be surprised if, during next year’s Academy Awards telecast, Norris’s likeness is omitted from the annual “In Memoriam” segment? Sad to say, probably not. Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) is not exactly The Godfather (1972); Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988) ain’t Pulp Fiction (1994), either. Jim Brown made better movies, like The Dirty Dozen (1967). 

An undeniably accomplished practitioner of martial arts, Norris punched his ticket to Hollywood by using the same rationale that enabled Arnold Schwarzenegger to get cast in movie........

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