The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things, of sailing ships and sealing wax and whether pigs have wings…and ninjas!

I started thinking about ninjas today. This is a dangerous practice, I know. If you think about ninjas, they might appear, Candyman-style. They could be anywhere. One could be hiding in the filing cabinet next to my desk as I type. Heck, a ninja could be the filing cabinet. I wouldn’t know…not until I heard the zing of a drawn sword and felt the air pressure of awesome on the back of my neck.

As a boy-child of the 80s, I had a ninja phase. Okay, I guess I still have a ninja phase if I start thinking about them out of the blue. This raises two questions. What was my gateway experience to the ninja world and why do ninjas continue to haunt our imaginations?

Recalling my first ninja experience took some thinking, but thanks to the investigative powers of Google, I pinpointed the moment the world of ninjas sank its climbing-claw hooks into me. At first, I believed this moment involved G.I. Joe’s Storm Shadow.

Reason: I got a three-pack of G.I. Joe comics as a kid. One issue featured Storm Shadow, who quickly became my favorite G.I. Joe character. This comic was published in 1985. I also remember getting a G.I. Joe figure of Storm Shadow after I had the comic book.

Problem: I was a ninja for Halloween in 1984. Therefore, the dates don’t jibe.

My first ninja experience then got adjusted to seeing Revenge of the Ninja, which came out in 1983.

Reason: my Halloween costume from 1984 was based on seeing Revenge of the Ninja. Mom came into the room when ROTN was on, and I asked her if she could make such a costume for me for Halloween. She did (possible best-mom-ever material there).

Problem: I remember wanting to watch Revenge of the Ninja strictly because it contained ninjas. Hence, I must have known about ninjas before Revenge of the Ninja.

I know ninjas appeared in You Only Live Twice, which I had probably seen at that stage, but YOLT did not feature enough of their iconic attributes for me to take note (namely the black costume).

I also watched USA’s Kung Fu Theater a couple of time. I distinctly remember a movie called Karate Killers, which had one guy who killed other guys with a small hula hoop and another guy with a knife attached to the end of a long braid of his hair, which he would whip guys with. In the final battle, the hero caught the braid in his teeth and ripped it out by jerking his head to the side. Another Kung Fu Theater entry I recall was Tower of the Drunken Dragons, which had guys playing King of the Mountain on a tower with ladders, and, get this, the ladders had swords for their rungs, cutting edge up.

Now that’s entertainment! But no ninjas…

So how did I recognize the concept of ninjas in Revenge of the Ninja before I even watched it? I do remember that when the new TV guide came out, I would sit down and read through the glossary of movies at the back and target films I wanted to see. Revenge of the Ninja could have conceivably made it through that vetting process and was then put on my must-see list.

Except I knew that wasn’t the case.

Then, like a shuriken out of the dark, it hit me. The answer was, as it often is to a variety of life’s questions, Chuck Norris (what should I do today? Chuck Norris; what color shirt should I buy? Chuck Norris…). When we first got satellite TV, I discovered Chuck Norris and voraciously sought out his movies. One of those movies from 1980 was The Octagon. It featured ninjas.

Mystery solved. The Octagon was my gateway experience into the world of ninjas. Mostly, I remember that even though it had Chuck Norris and ninjas, I found the whispering, echoing voiceovers to be a bit of an odd stylistic choice. Oh well, it was still Chuck Norris…and ninjas!

I’m glad to finally have an answer to the question of how my ninja fascination began. Knowledge is power, and the more we know about ninjas, the better our chances to stop them.

As a kid, I also had a book about ninja secrets, complete with ninja stretching exercises. I had my own shuriken, which I threw at an old door (a couple of times, I even hit my target). I read the novel, The Ninja, by Eric Von Lustbader, which, like Koko by Peter Straub and Predators by Mark Washburn and Robert Webb, made me want to roll around in sawdust afterward to absorb the coating of sleaze they left behind. In the present, I have studied ninja websites, or at least the ones delving into ninja movies (good bad movies like Ninja III: the Domination, bad good movies like American Ninja and bad bad movies like Nine Deaths of the Ninja, which I tried to watch as an indiscriminate youngster and still shut off; I have since learned the movie was a spoof and maybe need to view it with more discernment). But none of this has explained the essence of ninja fascination to me? Why have they endured in popularity, up to and including the point of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

Most likely it is nothing more complicated than a confluence of awesome: awesome costume, awesome weapons, awesome skills and awesome aura. Plus, you compare ninjas to samurai, and an underdog thing comes into play, as well. Ninjas were a mysterious little group within the common folk. Samurais were the overlords. Samurai have everything going for them, but the ninjas made up the gap with superior skills, unconventional warfare and unique weapons. That’s pure misanthropic male fantasy stuff (the only thing lacking is helpless women in torn clothes menaced by monsters). Furthermore, the ninja concept is part of the genesis of all storytelling because they also show up in the Bible. Since I claimed that on the Internet, it must be true, right?

Read Judges 13-16. Samson was a ninja.

You got your common folks, the Israelites. You got your overlords, the Philistines. You got your mysterious little group, the Nazarites. You got superior skills, Samson. You got unconventional warfare, the foxes and torches. You got unique weapons, the jawbone. Heck, Samson even started the whole blind warrior trope for martial arts stories (maybe Karate Killers copied his hair thing, as well).

Yep, Samson was a prototype ninja, perhaps Gideon, too.

Another ninja that was a big deal to me was Ryu Hayabusa from the video game Ninja Gaiden. I remember reading about that game in Nintendo Power and needing to have it. It was nowhere to be found in my locale. I had to wait until we went to a bigger town. At first, I couldn’t see it on the shelf. Then it suddenly jumped out at me. My brain wasn’t prepared to register a cover that awesome. I had a great time with that game, so great that I never noticed its difficulty. A video game…with a ninja…that told a story…with cinematics…all of that was too tailor-made for me to be anything but mastered. I got to the point where I could pretty much go through it without dying.

How about you, didja ninja?