If you’re a Washingtonian who spent your Reagan-era Saturday mornings watching cartoons in a Cocoa Puffy narcosis, you remember it.
Taekwondo master Jhoon Rhee is kicking his way through a grainy video void while a mysteriously catchy 26-second jingle plays in the background, tough words set to a gentle melody.
Nobody bothers me . . .
Nobody bothers me . . .
Then the music stops, and Rhee’s 4-year-old daughter, Meme, repeats the commercial’s catchphrase: “Nobody bothers me!” Cut to big brother Chun, age 5: “Nobody bothers me, either!” He winks.
“A wonderful touch,” says Nils Lofgren, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, who is playing a pair of solo gigs at the Birchmere this weekend.
The jingle remains forever chiseled into the memory of area youths, but Lofgren knows this tune better than most. He wrote it.
“It was a very simple, basic, homegrown thing,” the 60-year-old songwriter says of the ditty he recorded in 1978 for Jhoon Rhee Self Defense, a local chain of martial-arts studios. “I’m thrilled it had an effect on people.”
Quite an effect. Rhee says the jingle boosted business by 20 percent for the school, which, at its peak, taught more than 10,000 students at 11 locations. And Lofgren was one of them. He wrote the jingle in exchange for free lessons.
But even for kids who never signed up for a class, the song resonated at elementary school bus stops, on playgrounds and in stairwells. Anytime someone stood up to a bully, onlookers might break into song.
Nobody bothers me . . .
Nobody bothers me . . .
The commercial went off the air in 1986, but Rhee says he was pleased to see it reincarnated on YouTube in recent years. In addition to the original clip, there’s footage of the rock band OK Go covering Lofgren’s tune at a concert in Indiana. There are weird parody videos. And there’s an interview with Foo Fighters frontman and Springfield native Dave Grohl, singing along:
When you take Jhoon Rhee self-defense,
Then you too can say:
Nobody bothers me . . .
Nobody bothers me . . .
Call USA-1000.
Jhoon Rhee means might for right!
* * *
1-2-0-2-U-S-A-1-0-0-0.
Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.
“You have reached the Sprint voice-mail box of 2-0-2-8-7-2-1-0-0-0.”
BLEEP!
USA-1000 is now Jhoon Rhee’s cellphone number. He will call you back. And when he does, you will learn that the taekwondo master is now 81 and living in McLean. He’s credited with popularizing taekwondo in America and said he came up with the “Nobody bothers me” slogan to promote his schools in 1968. In 1972, he made a television commercial featuring the catchphrase and included cameos of his kids at the end.
“The children saying ‘Nobody bothers me’ would make it cute,” he remembers.
About six years later after the commercial was filmed, Lofgren began taking lessons at Rhee’s Kensington location. His hard-rock band, Grin, had broken up a few years earlier, and he was enjoying a fruitful solo career, splitting time between California, his home town of Garrett Park and the road.
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