Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting!

Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting!

Labels: 80's Babies

On a Saturday or Sunday afternoon in my family few things were certain, there was some shopping being done, spare ribs on the grill, Uno being played and a karate flick on the TV. Kung-Fu Theater on Channel 5 kept my family huddled around the television, running back and forth to the video store and had me believing I was Bruce Lee.

It's very hard to describe what the attraction to these movies is, the effects were cheesy, the wigs and fake facial hair obvious, the grainy film and who could ever forget the dubbed dialogue. It is just hilarious how poorly the movies were overdubbed, the way mouths continued moving long after the sentence was complete. Furthermore, I'm not quite sure the translated dialogue even went with the film's storyline in many cases. Yet, we watched religiously and our collection of karate flicks grew.

Viewing of the films went beyond weekend watching, I would come home from school and my grandmother would be watching Shaolin Drunken Monk, Shaolin vs Lama, Shaolin vs Ninja, just something with "Shaolin" in the title. As a family, we all had our favorites; some of them were The Five Deadly Venoms, The Kid with the Golden Arm, Master of the Flying Guillotine, and Chinese Super Ninjas.

A favorite by nearly all who are fans of this genre is The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, or Master Killer or Shaolin Master Killer depending on what channel or what video store you got the movie from. Whatever you call it, it is one of the greatest martial arts films ever. The film starred Gordon Liu as a student at the Shaolin Temple and goes behind the scenes and shows his training to become a Shaolin Monk and kung-fu expert.

Though Hollywood made Bruce Lee a legend, it was his early films that set the stage for the increasing popularity of kung-fu films and also led to the commercialization of the genre making stars out of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Segal, Jackie Chan & Jet Li, the latter two got their starts with Hong Kong film companies before Hollywood came calling.

Coincidently, he gave life to the genre, but also destroyed it, because Hollywood found a new market to cash in on and took the authenticity out of the films. As a result, we ended up with films like The Karate Kid, parts I, II and III.

To this day, I keep a healthy DVD collection of Karate flicks and I think I’m going to watch a few this week, just as I would do with my grandmother as a kid.