Michiko Nishiwaki, the Avenging Angel

A few people have wanted to hear about some great, sexy bodybuilders of the female sex, and I'm more than happy to oblige as I'm a real muscle omnivore. Especially with someone like Michiko Nishiwaki, who was sort of like Grace Jones, if Grace Jones was a great martial artist and athlete, and wasn't quite so terrifying. Michiko Nishiwaki was not the stereotype of the Asian woman, demure and petite. She was a champion lifter and bodybuilder.

You know, it's a funny thing about Steve Reeves: if anyone knows him at all, it's for his role as Hercules.

Yet, the amazing thing is, Reeves had a career of fifty films and he only played Hercules twice. It's the same thing with bodybuilder, powerlifting champion and martial artist Michiko Nishiwaki. In Hong Kong, she did over 40 movies all through the 1980s and 1990s, but the one movie everybody remembers her from is the Kung Fu cop film My Lucky Stars.

Everybody remembers that one scene where she takes her robe off and it's revealed she's built like a tank. They built to that reveal incredibly well, of course. All throughout the film she was in a kimono as a subservient, stereotypical, petite Asian woman, so when she throws her duds off it's a real shock. She must have the same tailor as Groundskeeper Willie and Ned Flanders.

I just know her from that one movie, so imagine my great surprise to discover that she has a filmography nearly a mile long. She always played the same kind of character: the bodybuilder assassin femme fatale. There were entire scripts were she was menacing and quiet and didn't deliver a single line of dialogue.

One crucial but interesting difference between male bodybuilders and female bodybuilders at the movies is that male bodybuilders are usually leading men and action heroes, whereas female bodybuilders usually are stuntwomen. The list of female bodybuilders in movies is almost entirely a list of stuntwomen: Spice Williams, Faith Minton, and yes, Michiko Nishiwaki: when she came to America, she did stunt work. She was Lucy Liu's stunt double for four movies, and Kelly Hu's for one. Come to think of it, the only female bodybuilder I can think of that didn't work as a stuntwoman was Rachel McLish.

(Rachel McLish is one of those people - like Dave Draper - that I sometimes wonder why they didn't make it as a movie star.)

1968 Mr. America Jim Haislop

When it comes to impressive mass and proportions, who could possibly top Jim Haislop? What a dramatic v-shape. With that narrow waist, he had a back so wide he could glide with it. His stomach was flat and hard, and he lacks the pregnant belly look of many modern bodybuilders.

You know what I miss about vintage bodybuilders? The fact that they have normal-looking thighs. Sure, they're massive and deeply cut, but his look normal, instead of an enlarged bag with cats keg like Ronnie Coleman's.

Here's my question: why didn't Jim Haislop become a big actor or something, like Steve Reeves did? He was certainly good looking enough. The answer is that he came around in the late sixties and so missed his window to be a bodybuilding movie star - by the late 1960s, the era of Dustin Hoffman, the muscle movie star was already passe, even more so for parody. There was a scene in "Beach Blanket Bingo" that had two men that were objects of fun: a leather jacket wearing, rebellious beatnik, and a bodybuilder. By the late sixties, these symbols of rebellion and virility were just objects of fun.

Periodically, our culture goes through phases of extreme redefinition of hipness, where cultures that were previously cool vanish. One major era of this was the early to mid 1990s, when Seattle grunge rock culture came in.

Here's something interesting: when was the last time you saw any Goths? It seems that a previously ubiquitous hipster subculture is starting to die out.

By the way, check out the old-school issue of muscular development. Obviously it was aimed at a different demographic than bodybuilding mags today, emphasizing great physical attractiveness. "A Greek God" indeed. What, he didn't want to be BIGGERSTRONGERLARGER?