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Haaaiii-yaaaa!

Remember the karate chop? In the ’60s and ’70s, it was the martial arts move, at least in the world of pop culture. It’s a simple strike with the edge of the hand, delivered with deadly efficiency, and more often than not, a loud yell. Movie spies used it all the time; so did bodyguards, astronauts and Miss Piggy. There was even an aftershave called “Hai Karate” which featured the distinctive strike in its advertising and on the label. The idea was that the scent of “Hai Karate” made you so irresistible to women that you'd have to use martial arts to fight them off. Each bottle came with a karate instruction booklet.

The karate chop (now better known by its more awesome title, “the knifehand strike”) is a legitimate martial arts technique that can cause pain and unconsciousness when applied accurately to pressure points such as the carotid artery. You can still see public demonstrations of young karate students using the move to break bricks and planks — a stunt that helped make karate famous. It once was a particularly useful move in movies and TV, because it immediately identified the user as a skilled martial artist. The strike also allowed heroes to disarm and/or disable opponents without killing them, and the move itself rarely hurt the actors. Fight choreography doesn't get much simpler than “Hero karate chops goon on the back of the neck; goon falls down.” Unco-ordinated movie stars could knock out an entire legion of bad guys without breaking a sweat. In fact, that's what more or less happens in the famous 1964 Flintstones episode, “Dr. Sinister.” This classic cartoon sees Fred and Barney trapped in the lair of an evil supervillain. They try out the “judo-chop” move they saw in a movie and are amazed to see that it works. After that, they run through the compound like a pair of giggling schoolboys, knocking out henchmen and chanting “Judo chop chop!” as they go.

When kids tried to emulate their TV and movie heroes by karate chopping their siblings, they discovered that the strike was usually gentler than a slap, and often hurt the hand of the attacker. It's fortunate that this easy-to-mimic move is so difficult to utilize effectively, or else hospitals would have been filled with preteen karate chop casualties after every episode of Hong Kong Phooey.

Eventually, audiences found themselves unable to take the knifehand strike seriously, and as far as popular culture is concerned, it is now used almost exclusively for comedic effect. Karate chops are still seen in films, but are usually delivered by out-of-touch, deluded characters like Buzz Lightyear and Austin Powers. Even as a once-cool joke move, the knifehand strike comes second to the “Crane Kick” from The Karate Kid (1984).

Still, Derek Flint's favourite martial arts strike isn't dead yet. Who could forget Colin Farrell karate chopping a racist dwarf in 2008’s brilliant In Bruges?