In December of 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. As a result, Gymkata was made.
At the time, Kurt Thomas was America’s premiere superstar male gymnast, a relative phenomenon in a sport that favors female competitors. He led the Indiana State University team to national championship in 1977. Thomas has two separate gymnastics moves named after him: The Thomas Flair (on the Pommel Horse) and The Thomas Salto (a floor exercise). Over the next three years, he won gold medals at the World Championship and was all set to dominate at the 1980 Summer Olympics to be held in Moscow.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter boycotted the summer Moscow games as a response. As a result, Kurt Thomas was prevented from making his 1980 debut. At the time, the Olympics had rules about making money between games, causing Thomas to drop the dreams of the Olympics and move on to more financially lucrative endeavors. He started a gymnastics school and camp, became a commentator for ABC Sports, and led a gymnastics troupe that performed at Sea World and toured the country.
And, he also made Gymkata.
Gymkata is one of those movies whose sole idea seems like a fever dream you had after you passed out from bad sushi salmonella while watching gymnastics. Kurt Thomas plays most-definitely-not-Kurt-Thomas character Jonathon Cabot, a gymnast who developed a new martial art, Gymkata, which combines gymnastics and karate. Cabot is approached by the government to participate in a game that sounds like The Running Man meets Mortal Kombat meets Enter The Dragon. It’s an endurance race where the participants have to deal with obstacles while being chased by some vague enemies out to kill the runners. The race happens in some tiny mountain country of Parmistan, where the winner gets to make a wish, and Cabot is instructed to wish for the US to be granted permission to launch a satellite observation station so they could monitor nuclear weapons (remember, Gymkata came out in 1985, the age of Reagan’s Star Wars). And some princess/love interest has been kidnapped or something? Director Robert Clouse doesn’t care about plot, and is willing to bet that all you want to see is some legs flying up in the air.
Really, this is a grab bag of 1980s obsessions. Martial arts were huge at this point, a phase kicked off by Robert Clouse’s earlier feature Enter the Dragon. There’s Cold War fears, both in the origins and in the plot. Parmistan feels like a predecessor to the obsession with the small country of Tibet. There’s a bit of a side-scrolling video game quality to it. And, for some reason, this was rated R for violence despite there being little more nudity than one set of bare buttocks, and a bizarre down-shorts shot as Thomas is walking up stairs on his hands.
I don’t know exactly why, of all the ideas, this was the one that Kurt Thomas read and thought, “Yes, that’s what I want to be in!” But, I do know that without the Soviets invading a country they shouldn’t have, we’d be missing out on this weird wackiness.
Gymkata airs on Turner Classic Movies on Saturday Night/Sunday Morning at 11:00pmPST/2:00amEST as part of TCM Underground.
