6 ms·
Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? I haven't watched a single episode of WTR, I don't know anyone who has, but everyone knows who Chuck Norris was.
by PoignardAzur 7mo ago
Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? I haven't watched a single episode of WTR, I don't know anyone who has, but everyone knows who Chuck Norris was.
- pingou 7mo agoIt was quite popular in France.
- flagos10 7mo agoIn France, it was popular enough that everybody knew Texas ranger before the Chuck Norris jokes.
- johnisgood 7mo agoSame in Hungary.
- trizoza 7mo agoSame in Slovakia
- riffraff 7mo agoSame in Italy, it was prime time TV for a few years. Not overly popular, but many people already knew him from the Bruce Lee era, so it had a following by default.
- RajT88 7mo agoLots of fans in the Philippines, apparently.
- sameerds 7mo agoIndia too!
- mmmuhd 7mo agoWe used to watch lot's of chuck Norris films back then here in Nigeria, I can't even remember the titles, but all we knew was chuck Norris alone can defeat a whole country's army. We used to think one American soldier can defeat a whole army.
- debo_ 7mo agoI watched it all the time in Canada.
- tadfisher 7mo agoLies. Everyone knows The Red Green Show is the only television program legally allowed in Canada.
- pseudohadamard 7mo agoNot just Canada. Never screened here AFAIK so I had to buy it on DVD.
- beAbU 7mo agoHuuuuuuuuge in South Africa.
- rmonvfer 7mo agoI loved WTR as a child in Spain! (This was like 15 years ago tho)
- user____name 7mo agoWTR was still on air 15 years ago? I'm getting old.
- davidw 7mo agoSeinfeld wasn't at all well known in Italy when I lived there, but WTR was.
- Anonyneko 7mo agoIt was extremely popular in Russian-speaking areas in the late 90s.
- czbond 7mo agoAs a gent born and raised in Texas, and has never seen the show - I am pleasantly surprised to see these comments about how popular WTR was internationally. If I had been asked to bet, I would have lost money on this one.
- pessimizer 7mo agoI've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail. Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period, but also often detective in a way redolent of Christie) that is made primarily for export to foreign consumers who think of British upper-class culture as aspirational.
- VTimofeenko 7mo agoThere is US exported media that just randomly becomes popular in a specific demographic. Case in point: Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a flick with Andrew Dice Clay that got a razzie the year it came out. IIRC it got a cult following in Norway because the voice over was done by a popular radio DJ.
- quickthrowman 7mo agoWalker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were both created by non-network studios as syndicated shows, they weren’t prime time network shows. The budgets for syndicated content is a lot lower than network produced content. The rights to air these sorts of shows are dirt cheap compared to Friends or Seinfeld, so it makes sense that cheap syndicated garbage like Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were popular internationally, the rights were cheap.
- pafje 7mo agoAs others have said, WTR is very well-known in France while most people have never heard of Seinfeld. Same with Dallas and The Dukes of Hazzard.
- harperlee 7mo agoIn Spain it was on the TV also for like a decade, and everybody knows who he is. Also in France.
- chistev 7mo agoHaven't watched it and first time hearing about it too. But I knew who Chuck Norris was.
- buran77 7mo ago> Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? It was big internationally. But the jokes made Norris known to a whole different generation than the one watching WTR.
- amarant 7mo agoI'm Swedish and I was only vaguely aware Chuck Norris even had a career outside the jokes.
- tmtvl 7mo agoBelgian here, only thing I ever watched that had Chuck in it was Way of the Dragon.
- 1313ed01 7mo agoWTR did air here in Sweden in the 90s. From a quick search in the news archives, it was on late at night on tv3 in the late 90s and then it ran on that or/and some other cabel channels in the 00s as well (reruns?).
- sixtyj 7mo agoCzechs love Chuck Norris and WTR. It aired between 1995 and 2012. The series is still occasionally rerun.
- m4rtink 7mo agoYeah, everyone is talking about it here - especially how Death must have screwed up to get Chuck Norrissed.
- karel-3d 7mo agoIt was very popular here (Czech Republic). Not prime-time popular, but popular enough.
- CalChris 7mo agoSo Chuck Norris is an Anna Kournikova, famous for having been moderately famous and monetized ad infinitum?
- zem 7mo agoI remember watching a few episodes on TV as a kid but I could not have told you who acted in it
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- PoignardAzur 6mo agoJesus, sounds like I'm just too young then.