Napoleon Blownapart, MMA's wild man of history & documentaries

The wise-cracking, fraud-exposing, combat comedic absurdist strikes gold.

“You’ve got to see this.”

I receive these kinds of messages all the time. News tips. Hot rumors. Gossip. Eye-rolling Donn Davis LinkedIn posts telling us how to get rich in MMA.

You’ve got to see this.

A wise man and close confidant got my attention when he started bugging me to go watch a PRIDE documentary on YouTube.

Great, another PRIDE documentary. Another attempt at telling a story about PRIDE without actually telling the story.

As you might surmise, it takes an awful lot to convince me to watch anything PRIDE-related, especially in 2025. I didn’t participate in the Vice Dark Side of the Cage series on PRIDE, and I don’t regret making that decision for one minute.

When it comes to combat sports history — especially MMA — it’s a tragic situation. A mixture of those who want to erase the past, those who want to re-write it entirely, and those who came into the scene long after something happened and want to give their version of events about something they find cool or exciting.

That is why I dreaded the idea of watching another attempt at a PRIDE documentary.

Just watch it. Then, give me your thoughts.

And with that, I watched a now-famous PRIDE documentary on YouTube produced by popular combat cult leader Napoleon Blownapart (Patreon link here). With an all-time gimmick like that, I had to give him a chance.

And, naturally, the first questions I received from those in my circle of contacts (who were closet Napoleon Blownapart fans and/or Patreon subscribers) is whether or not I was friends with him.

To their astonishment, I had never heard of him. Apparently, he had never talked about me or acknowledged me on his Discord, according to a mutual friend.

This completely baffled everyone. This guy is made for you.

After watching his PRIDE documentary, I went down the rabbit hole and started watching his other videos, including his history of the Lineal Heavyweight Title and “Single White Jacked Boy” about Brock Lesnar.

Which motivated me to watch his latest documentary on Count Dante, the true story of the world’s deadliest man.

"Karate is the martial art you do when all other martial arts were busy that day. Karate is like aikido if it had a humiliation fetish. There's no way karate could ever be responsible for dojo wars, murder, and million-dollar heists, right?"

As a scriptwriter and narrator, Napoleon Blownapart is a madman and a perfect fit for today’s modern fight fan. A YouTuber, a narrator, a streamer, a shitposter, a humorist, a video game nerd, and someone with a low-key wicked sense of justice to both call out and celebrate the complete mythology that dominates so much of what is presented as fight history.

Naturally, I was determined to find out more about NP’s background. I finally reached out to him.

What I discovered was a guy who is a good representative of what the “older” fight fan is in today’s landscape. He’s not the Endeavor-flavored male Gen Z Trump voter. He’s not a Zuffa Myth Ultimate Fighter “UFC invented the sport” kind of guy. Anyone interested in telling some history of fight sports beyond UFC 1 is doing good work.

Napoleon Blownapart will forever be known among MMA fans as the PRIDE documentary guy. As someone labeled “the PRIDE guy” I can strangely relate. I attribute part of the renaissance in interest for PRIDE content directly to Napoleon’s documentary.

“The reaction to that [PRIDE documentary series] absolutely floored me. I've had people from all over the world message me to tell me how much those videos meant to them. I've had people tell me they cried at the end of it!! Even if I never made another video, reading comments like that means I can be happy knowing I made something that genuinely meant something to someone or even just took their mind off a bad time they were going through just for a few hours. I was a musician as an idealistic youth and I always wanted to make music that made people feel something (I didn’t though, because I was bad at it), so this is a beautiful substitute.”

There was also something very interesting I noticed about Napoleon’s documentaries — they’re long form. Not eight-minute clips. Not 44-minute ad-free clip jobs. Actual two or three-hour documentaries. This bucks a lot of trends and conventional wisdom for content creators on platforms like YouTube. And yet, he’s pulling in strong numbers for length of viewership consumption.

“I genuinely think the engagement is completely organic, because I tried to foster as positive a fan base as I could. Even with negative comments at the beginning, I'd reply politely and amicably, and I genuinely think that won over a lot of would-be trolls. No easy task when you have a let’s say... unique voice like mine! I think a lot of people just want to feel like they’re being heard by a creator when they post a comment, and it doesn't take 5 seconds to give it a thumbs up or a reply, and the reward for that is people who feel like they’re part of a community, and genuinely want to support me and these videos. It gets harder and harder as the channel gets bigger to reply to every comment, but I still try and engage as much as I can. I also never take the easy route of punching down, if I'm making fun of anyone, you can guarantee they have a bigger bank balance than mine. Hell, for as much as I hate Steven Seagal, I've never once made a joke about his weight. I think.”

When you watch Count Dante, it’s impossible not to come away with a feeling that each of Napoleon’s documentaries takes months to write. Only other writers can truly understand writers and their weird quirks. The obsessive note-taking patterns. The feeling of panic when you think of something late at night and forget to write it down before it vanishes from your mind, only to resurface two years after the fact.

If you know, you know.

This is why I completely understood the first thing Napoleon told me about his workflow for producing his popular YouTube videos.

“I'd like to pretend that my process for video creating is very zen in that "the process is that there is no process", but in reality, the reason there is no process is because it's mostly just unbridled chaos, and right up until I hit the upload button I'm still just making it up as I go. I'll get an idea for a video at 3am, get up, scribble it down, and if it still makes sense or at the very least makes me laugh the next morning, it's a runner. If I see an interesting article or have a brainwave during the day I'll pop it in the notes app on my phone. My notes app currently resembles a CVS receipt of sentences like HOLY SHIT BROCK LESNAR REALLY HATES FRANK MIR etc. Each video generally takes about 1-200 hours of work so yeah, it's a good thing I had no life prior to taking up YouTube as a second job/hobby.”

In other words, his notes app on MMA content resembles mine.

Napoleon Blownapart is part-historian, part-absurdist, part-storyteller, and the perfect blend of comedy, ironic dryness, and appreciation of fraudulent fairy tales. He gets close enough to the truth while laughingly observing the exaggerations of the cons that fight scandals and tall tales are built upon.

He's ironic but not insulting. He's fascinated with time traveling but is not yelling at the clouds about how bad things are today.

One of my biggest takeaways from watching his most recent Count Dante video is how he subtly blends different cinematic themes. His most recent documentary alternates presentation style between 1960s JFK Assassination black & white TV coverage, 1970s Grindhouse, and 1980s VHS style formatting. It’s an interestingly unique concept that rewards close attention.

And his incredible research! As a detail-oriented writer, the level of information NP’s YouTube documentaries cover is pretty intense. This isn’t some AI-generated clickbait rehash production.

His videos are amazing time capsules, and you can tell how much time and effort Napoleon puts into researching the details that make his documentaries stand out.

The power of Black Belt Magazine

One of the great things about Napoleon’s documentaries is his ability to time travel. He’s trying to capture the essence of previous eras.

It’s one thing for an old baseball fan to tell their grand-kids how much they spent on baseball cards and why they thought they could get rich. It’s another thing to show that card collection, the old Beckett value guides, and then show off some very lucrative cards that somehow ended up getting bent by the spokes of bicycle wheels.

One of the key points made in the Count Dante documentary is a focus on Black Belt Magazine.

Black Belt Magazine was to martial arts what Pro Wrestling Illustrated was to the American wrestling scene, except wilder and crazier in mythology, gimmicks, and advertising.

Napoleon does a fantastic job of capturing the absurd essence of some of the claims made by Black Belt Magazine and the various “martial art” techniques they pushed.

But you don’t have to take Napoleon’s word at face value. Go look at the Black Belt Magazine archives on Google Books. It is a true time warp.

One of the key points raised by Napoleon is how Black Belt sold different martial arts before the UFC circus came to town. A really dark and depressing fact is that some of the martial arts advertised as deadly and effective were largely built on stolen valor. Exaggerated or outright lies about military and government service to hawk the effectiveness of certain ideologies and techniques. Stolen valor for martial arts frauds.

"I've blown away a lot of people that were supposed to be prisoners. Just wasted them. That's part of war."

Napoleon’s research on various characters hyped up in martial arts publications of the past exposes what a total con job fantasies were built upon. For instance, he accessed FBI files on one Count Dante aka John Timothy Keehan and found out the guy went AWOL from military services for a month and a half, supposedly to find weed.

And then the Feds turned right around and wrote reports that made the guy sound more lethal than he really was.

"Keehan should be considered dangerous because he reportedly is subject to a violent and anti-social behavior pattern and has suicidal tendencies."

This guy’s best press shop was the FBI.

What Napoleon recounts is how Black Belt Magazine was 50% National Geographic, 50% National Enquirer, targeting a demo of middle-aged mall ninjas.

Nate Wilcox at The MMA Draw recently talked about the role of Black Belt Magazine in the rise (and fall) of the Gracies in the UFC.

Black Belt Magazine was a publication that controlled information flow of fight propaganda and advertisements, including this gem:

BE A WELL-DRESSED MARTIAL ARTIST

"The absolute best part of Black Belt [was] the advertisements. Do you urgently need to kill someone at your office with a roundhouse kick but you're worried that your slacks might not accommodate that level of violence? Then you need the Chuck Norris Action Jeans for when you want to kick someone in the face and comply with a business casual dress code."

Dark, wicked, sadistic, absurd humor. A common theme for Napoleon Blownapart is "look at how stupid this really is!" delivered in a spirit of curiosity and a good dose of self-awareness with a stinging vocabulary. I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of this guy’s verbal beatdown.

If you’re wondering why I have a soft spot for someone who wants to create or document MMA history as it’s unfolding, it’s because there are not a lot of people interested in doing it.

I think about past contributions from really sharp talent like Bobby Razak and Esther Lin, but I also think about a lot of the amateur or semi-pro documentarians who got into Mixed Martial Arts only to discover what a dead-end the environment was.

I really miss one contributor in particular, Jason Leib and his MMAI Patreon/Youtube channel. His work product may not have been for everyone, but his full-feature editorials on world history and how it interconnected with fight sport was something that deserved much higher accolades — and a bigger platform.

However, Endeavor is a media monopoly, and they run the show with UFC. Those who represent everyone on all sides of the table can tell whatever version of events they want. He who has the gold makes the rules.

Telling the truth in fight sports doesn’t just cost you money; it can also generate some powerful enemies. Enemies willing to fight the dumbest of battles over the smallest of stakes.

This is why I wasn’t surprised by what Napoleon described to me as one of his biggest obstacles as both a documentarian and an MMA fan struggling to stay motivated in 2025.

“Somehow I've managed to avoid making any enemies, as I think for the most part even when I make jokes about people they know it's coming from a place of respect for what they do, being something I could never do myself. When I awarded Victor Henry the inaugural End of Year award for Best Low Blow, he saw the funny side and reached out to me on Insta to laugh about it.

“I think the only enemy I may have made is the UFC itself as I cant upload a single video without their copyright bots swarming me like Nicholas Cage in a Bee suit in that one movie. It might be because of my fondness for posting that photo of Dana White teaching a cardio kickboxing class. Who knows.

“The UFC as a company has gotten worse and worse in recent years. From banning any kind of legitimate journalism from press conferences and only accepting softball questions, to taking millions from Crypto companies and plastering every square inch of the Octagon in adverts while fighters are literally begging for a raise in post-fight speeches. Dana sees no problem dropping 250K on a twitch streamer’s birthday party but if you complain about fighter pay expect your next matchup be against an undefeated Dagestani power wrestler whose name ends with -medov.

“I'm honestly unsure what the shelf life for creating videos like these is, but I do have to remind myself that the UFC does not equal MMA and I make videos about fighters themselves not the company. At the end of the day, without those fighters the company is nothing. No one is watching a PPV to hear Joe Rogan's scintillating commentary.”

With bigger corporations buying out websites, Twitter accounts, and other social media platforms, there is a justified fear that history will constantly get erased like dubbing over footage on an old VHS tape. The digital scrubbing is happening in real time. Not only are we in a battle to preserve past information on Mixed Martial Arts, we’re also in a battle to try to find historians who can find the motivation to stay in the game. With UFC churning through fans every five-to-seven years, the life cycle automatically means fewer people exist to tell the good, the bad, and the ugly about MMA’s past and present situation.

Luckily for us, Napoleon Blownapart seems motivated and ready to create more content about the absolute pomposity of pugilism and politics marrying each other.

“As far as what history is left in the sport to cover, thankfully, today's drama will be tomorrow's history, so there's always gonna be some wild stories to write about. If you think I'm not going to do an hour-long autopsy of Conor McGregor at the White House at some point, my God, think again.”

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.