The makers of The Lego Ninjago Movie were wise in casting Jackie Chan and Olivia Munn. The former is a legend of martial arts cinema. The latter is a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo and did her own fight choreography as Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse. Wired was also wise in hiring them to answer tweets posing martial arts questions for their YouTube series Twitter Tech Support.
The premise is simple: Wired presented the actors with several simple questions related to martial arts. They tried their best to answer the questions, while demonstrating how to block a knife with one’s hand and chop wooden blocks. Chan and Munn left replies on these tweets through a joint Twitter account, “Jackie and Olivia” (@MartialArts_WI). They uploaded their posts on September 20, meaning this may be the date when Wired shot the video.
How Did They Get These Questions for Chan and Munn?
Surprisingly, the tweets they answered had between zero and three likes. Only one even had a comment before the actors graced it with their presence. The chosen posts’ timestamps also piqued this reporter’s curiosity: only one was from this year, back in March. They go as far back as 2010.
This is solely based on the five tweets I could see on the Jackie and Olivia Twitter page. One reply was to a private account, @chrstophrrrr. I also could not find the first tweet answered in the video. @Bianca_Conti posted it in 2013, but I couldn’t see any of her posts on her page from before 2014. For reference, I did this research less than a week after Wired filmed this video.
This is noticeably different from the first Twitter Tech Support video, which featured cooking tips from Gordon Ramsay. Wired filmed this near the end of February 2017. Ramsay answered two tweets from 2012. All the rest came out within the six months before filming. He even answered more tweets, though that may be because more people tweet about cooking than martial arts. Ramsay’s verbal delivery, much faster than Chan and Munn’s, may have allowed him to answer more questions within the same general timeframe.
This just makes me wonder: how did Wired find the tweets they used for “Jackie and Olivia?” They easily could have done a Reddit AMA-style post on Twitter calling for questions. Instead, they’re leading us to believe that they comb through search results for keywords until they get something amusing? That may well be the case. Of course, all this is a curious tangent from the video itself, which is, indeed, amusing.
