In France, it was popular enough that everybody knew Texas ranger before the Chuck Norris jokes.

Same in Hungary.

Same in Slovakia

Same in Italy, it was prime time TV for a few years.

Not overly popular, but many people already knew him from the Bruce Lee era, so it had a following by default.

Lots of fans in the Philippines, apparently.

India too!

We used to watch lot's of chuck Norris films back then here in Nigeria, I can't even remember the titles, but all we knew was chuck Norris alone can defeat a whole country's army. We used to think one American soldier can defeat a whole army.

I watched it all the time in Canada.

Lies. Everyone knows The Red Green Show is the only television program legally allowed in Canada.

Not just Canada. Never screened here AFAIK so I had to buy it on DVD.

It was quite popular in France.

Huuuuuuuuge in South Africa.

I loved WTR as a child in Spain! (This was like 15 years ago tho)

WTR was still on air 15 years ago? I'm getting old.

Seinfeld wasn't at all well known in Italy when I lived there, but WTR was.

IIRC Seinfeld aired on Tele Montecarlo/La 7, while WTR aired on Italia 1, the difference in audience was massive.

I seem to recall it aired at some kind of weird time too. It didn't seem to be very widely known or watched.

It was extremely popular in Russian-speaking areas in the late 90s.

Yes! Oldfagi remember. Also, he was just called "Cool Walker", which was appropriate.

I would even say that the connotation was more like "Badass Walker", which indeed further cemented his reputation.

As a gent born and raised in Texas, and has never seen the show - I am pleasantly surprised to see these comments about how popular WTR was internationally. If I had been asked to bet, I would have lost money on this one.

Yeah. As an American I would’ve absolutely never guessed it was that popular.

As others have said, WTR is very well-known in France while most people have never heard of Seinfeld.

Same with Dallas and The Dukes of Hazzard.

Assuming this sort of phenomenon extends further than France, this quite well explains many of the misconceptions Europeans have about the US.

Thinking WTR, Dallas, or TDoH are representative of American culture is... hilarious.

But I guess shows that hit the big American cultural stereotypes hard are maybe the ones that do better abroad?

I think Hazard didn't sound stereotype at all, like, nobody had a clue why the car was called General Lee, or what the confederate flag meant.

It was just a fun show. Magnum PI, Different Strokes, McGiver.. were just as popular.

From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF

Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.

And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)

that's america for me when I was a kid

If you like MwC, look up episodes of Unhappily Ever After on Youtube, it's sort of the second-generation MwC. Same sort of humour but taken even further, I can easily re-watch Unhappily but MwC is sort of a once-you've-seen-it...

> that speaking car one

Knight Rider.

> that dog playing basketball

Air Bud.

> Thinking WTR, Dallas, or TDoH are representative of American culture is... hilarious.

I’m not aware of a single person who thinks that, and neither was that the claim of your parent comment.

People understand TV shows are fiction.

dallas was huge in dubai in the 80s. like to the extent that people would plan to sit home on the evening it was on.

(I didn't watch it; my parents believed soap operas were unsuitable for kids)

I've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail.

Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period, but also often detective in a way redolent of Christie) that is made primarily for export to foreign consumers who think of British upper-class culture as aspirational.

There is US exported media that just randomly becomes popular in a specific demographic. Case in point: Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a flick with Andrew Dice Clay that got a razzie the year it came out. IIRC it got a cult following in Norway because the voice over was done by a popular radio DJ.

Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were both created by non-network studios as syndicated shows, they weren’t prime time network shows. The budgets for syndicated content is a lot lower than network produced content.

The rights to air these sorts of shows are dirt cheap compared to Friends or Seinfeld, so it makes sense that cheap syndicated garbage like Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were popular internationally, the rights were cheap.

It was a syndicated show, the goal is to license it to as many companies as possible. It was never a network TV show like Seinfeld, those syndication rights are way more expensive than created for syndication shows like WTR.

The show was also incredibly popular in Germany in the 90s.

In Spain it was on the TV also for like a decade, and everybody knows who he is. Also in France.

Haven't watched it and first time hearing about it too. But I knew who Chuck Norris was.

> Maybe for people in the US. Internationally?

It was big internationally. But the jokes made Norris known to a whole different generation than the one watching WTR.

I'm Swedish and I was only vaguely aware Chuck Norris even had a career outside the jokes.

Belgian here, only thing I ever watched that had Chuck in it was Way of the Dragon.

WTR did air here in Sweden in the 90s. From a quick search in the news archives, it was on late at night on tv3 in the late 90s and then it ran on that or/and some other cabel channels in the 00s as well (reruns?).

Czechs love Chuck Norris and WTR. It aired between 1995 and 2012. The series is still occasionally rerun.

Yeah, everyone is talking about it here - especially how Death must have screwed up to get Chuck Norrissed.

It was very popular here (Czech Republic). Not prime-time popular, but popular enough.

So Chuck Norris is an Anna Kournikova, famous for having been moderately famous and monetized ad infinitum?

I remember watching a few episodes on TV as a kid but I could not have told you who acted in it

Jesus, sounds like I'm just too young then.