Tae Bo
Billy Blanks in the headset mic, punching and kicking the air in front of a room of glistening people, and the infomercial promising that Tae Bo would do the rest. From late 1998 the four-tape set was in every living room: the VHS that turned taekwondo and boxing into aerobics and had your mom throwing jabs at the TV.
Tae Bo is a blend of taekwondo and boxing, the stances, punches and kicks of the martial arts run at an aerobic pace, with no throws, grappling or ground fighting, because the only goal is fitness. Billy Blanks, born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1955, the fourth of fifteen children, was a nationally ranked point-karate competitor in the 1980s who took a bronze medal at the 1981 World Games. He has said he began working on the routine in 1976, at 21, and by the late 1980s he had moved to Los Angeles and opened a studio in Sherman Oaks to teach it. It was first called Karobics, until he found that name was already trademarked, and clients like Paula Abdul, Sugar Ray Leonard, Ashley Judd and Sinbad spread the word around town.
The craze came from the infomercial. Producer Paul Monea launched the campaign in August 1998 with sets of workout tapes starting at $39, buying airtime at a reported $1.5 million a week until the spots were running as many as 2,000 times a day across the country. Nearly a million tapes sold in six months; by 1999 an estimated 1.5 million sets had gone out, the program had grossed about $75 million by March 1999, and Tae Bo sat third on VideoScan's overall video chart, ahead of new studio releases like City of Angels. Blanks' daughter Shellie was a fixture in the videos, and the studio that had moved to a bigger Sherman Oaks space in 1995 was handling some 16,000 participants by 1999.
Because Blanks held a trademark on the name, gyms that wanted to ride the wave had to pay a licensing fee or call their version something else, which is how cardio-kickboxing classes ended up on every health-club schedule. The fad had faded by the late 2000s as newer trends took over, but Blanks never stopped teaching, and the name still carries a specific memory: the punch-punch-kick count, the sweating class behind him, and the tape rewound for tomorrow.
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