In November 1987, Conservative MP John Patten praised Home Secretary Douglas Hurd for not hesitating to ‘ban the sale of abhorrent weapons such as death stars, hand claws and similar apparatus from the sick survivalist culture and the wilder shores of the martial arts world’ if the legislation was passed. For example, Labour MP Tony Banks claimed that an eight-year-old boy in Newham had purchased ‘a device called a Ninja’s claw which is, in effect, a spiked knuckleduster.’īy the time of the 1987 election, the Tories were promising to ‘strengthen the law dealing with the sale and possession of offensive weapons’ in their manifesto. These guidelines were questioned in parliament throughout 19, with MPs from both sides of the House asking whether new laws were needed to prevent children getting hold of these ‘potentially dangerous martial arts weapons’.
In 1986, the Martial Arts Commission in the UK, in conjunction with the government, published new guidelines for traders of martial arts equipment that endorsed that weapons should not be sold to minors. There were claims that people were using throwing stars at football grounds, and this tied into another moral panic about football hooliganism in the 1980s. In the mid-1980s, concern was raised about the sale of ninja-style weapons in martial arts shops and through mail order, appearing in catalogues and the back pages of magazines. In the wake of the ‘video nasty’ phenomenon, there was a renewed concern about ninja-style weapons and their portrayal in film, television and books. This was a particular problem, as a picture of Lee holding nunchucks adorned promotional posters for the movie. For example, when Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon was re-released in 1979, the BBFC Secretary James Ferman requested that all scenes with ‘chain-sticks’ be removed. There was also a longstanding concern by the BBFC about the violence of martial arts movies from Hong Kong and Japan, particularly those involving weapons like nunchucks (also known in the 1970s and 1980s as ‘chain-sticks’), shuriken (ninja stars), and samurai swords. With the Video Recordings Act of 1984, many infamous films, such as Driller Killer, The Last House on the Left, and The Evil Dead, were effectively banned. The moral panic about violent martial arts and their depiction in film was preceded by the moral panic about extreme horror films (primarily from the US and Italy) being available on home video, known as ‘ video nasties‘. To explain how the UK ended up with the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, we need to look at concerns about portrayals of violence in film and television in the 1980s and the ‘law and order’ agenda of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Forgotten by many, those who were children around this time remember it well. One of the more unusual examples is the late 1980s moral panic over ninjas and martial arts weaponry, which meant that when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first appeared in the UK in 1990, they were rebranded as the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. But ‘cancelling’ films, televisions shows, books, and musical acts has long been a tradition of the conservative right on both sides of the Atlantic. An oft-repeated right-wing claim today is that the Left have produced a ‘cancel culture’, where individuals, companies and creative works are at risk of being deemed beyond the pale if they transgress the boundaries of ‘wokeness’.
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