Trivia / Kickboxer

• Actor-Shared Background: Like Kurt Sloane, Jean-Claude Van Damme was born in Belgium and studied ballet and Karate.
• Cast the Expert:
  • Dennis Alexio, who plays Eric Sloane, was a World Light Heavyweight and World Cruiserweight Kickboxing champion in real life.
  • Michel Qissi was a technical advisor/choreographer when he overheard the production crew say they were looking for a tall "oriental-looking" guy with a background in Muay Thai. He volunteered, and got the part of Tong Po despite not having any East/Southeast Asian background (he was born in Morocco).
• California Doubling: Aside from some location shooting in Bangkok and Ayutthaya Historical Park, the majority of Kickboxer was filmed in Hong Kong.
• Completely Different Title: The film was originally called Contacto sangriento ("Bloody Contact") in Spain and some Latin American countries.
• Deleted Scene: Seen here.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Moroccan-Belgian actor Michel Qissi as the Thai kickboxer Tong Po.
  • Most of the named Thai characters are played by actors of East Asian descent from other countries (a good portion of them come from Hong Kong, such as Dennis Chan). Rochelle Ashana is Filipino-American.
• Sequel Gap: 21 years passed between Kickboxer 5: The Redemption (1995) and Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016), though the latter is technically a Continuity Reboot.
• Uncredited Role:
  • Producers were so impressed by Michel Qissi's yellowface makeup, they decided to make a publicity stunt by having Tong Po credited "as himself" instead of Qissi's name to keep an air of mystery around the character. The emergence of the Internet made it much easier to find out about this.
  • Freddy Li's voice is provided by Jim Cummings, who went uncredited.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Chuck Norris was originally supposed to star as Kurt Sloane.
  • Tong Po was originally to be played by kickboxing practitioner Harold Diamond (the stick fighter from Rambo III). Van Damme did not get along with him, so he was replaced by Van Damme's old friend, Michel Qissi.
• Write What You Know: The scene in which Kurt has meat tied to his leg and is chased by Xian Chow's dog was inspired by a real-life event in which a young Jean-Claude Van Damme was ordered by his karate teacher to wear a protective suit and withstand the attempts of a trained dog to pull him to the ground.
• Written by Cast Member: Van Damme co-wrote the story with Mark DiSalle.

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