Van Dammage: The Tape Freaks Binge

Once upon a time the Tape Freaks household was sucked into an epic Jean-Claude Van Damme marathon. We watched 36 of his films from 1986-2012 leading up to the release of Expendables 2, and each one was wonderful in it's own right. Here are some of the tidbits we learned on our epic journey through the Jean-Claude Van Damme catalogue.

He plays doubles more than you'd think: If you were to guess, you might say JCVD played his double in maybe two movies. But you'd be wrong, because Van Damme played his double in four different movies. Early on he played twins in Double Impact, and then later on in Maximum Risk (though both twins are never on screen at the same time in that one). He also played multiples of his character in Time Cop, and in Replicant he plays his character's genetic copy. (Replicant is the outlier of the group as it came out in 2001, and the other three came out in the 90s. Why was that so popular in the 90s?)

Bloodsport and Kickboxer are basically the same movie: And we watched them way too close together.

JCVD had to cool it on doing the high kicks: His signature high kicks were apparently extremely hard on his hips, forcing him to have surgery on both. (Rumor has it that not long after his surgery, he shot that commercial where he does the splits over two semi trucks.)

Almost all of his movies explain his accent in throwaway dialogue, but it's (almost) never about him being Belgian: There are lines in his movies about being everything from French to French-Canadian, but only in JCVD do the filmmakers go with him being Belgian. (Though JCVD takes place in Brussels, so it hardly counts.) This would be less aggravating if Van Damme hadn't been referred to as "The Muscles from Brussels" for most of his career.

He had a reality TV show: Oh no, I'm sorry according to his IMDB he had a "TV series documentary", my mistake. Never the less, if you wanted to know all about what JCVD was getting up to in 2011, I'm sure you can find the whole series on the internet.