July 25, 2023 • 47 mins
We've all seen Enter the Dragon and Fists of Fury, but how well do we know the man behind those films? In this episode author Ben Thompson and Professor of History Dr. Patricia Larash discuss Bruce Lee, a man who was more than just a real-life martial arts badass, he was also a groundbreaking pioneer, who paved the way for the next generation of actors and changed action cinema forever.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content, Hong Kong, nineteen fifty eight. The music
plays as Lee Jun fans feet definitely move back and forth.
The chawshaw rhythm carries him and his partner across the
dance floor. The small crowd cheers. He's graceful and elegant,
(00:23):
but there's something they don't know. Tomorrow, his hands and
feet will be lethal weapons, able to dispatch hordes of
armed men with lightning, quick maneuvers, and vicious punches that
send challengers sprawling one by one. He'll mercilessly crush his foes,
battering them with fists, feet, wooden sticks, even a pair
(00:43):
of nunchucks. Today he's about to be the chat Shaw
Champion of Hong Kong, but tomorrow he'll be Bruce Lee.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of of the Week.
My name is Ben Thompson and I am here as
(01:03):
always with my co hosts, doctor Pat Larish.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Pat.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Today we are we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Kung fu movies.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Do you have a Are you a kung fu movie
fan or do you have a favorite kung fu movie?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I don't know if I have a favorite kung Fu
movie per se. I grew up with them in the background.
You know, my sister and I would play legos on
the living room floor in front of the TV, and
my dad would have on, you know, random movies, and
so I grew up with martial arts in the background,
especially the kung Fu series with David Carradine said in
(01:36):
the Old West, Oh.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, which is great. Yeah, and the legend continues, which
was from the nineties.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, And I was young, and I thought that the
kung Fu moves were kind of funny, But I think
I grew an appreciation for them because now, you know,
I enjoy seeing Jackie Chan or Michelle Yo in a
very well choreographed martial arts scene.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Like when I was just out of college, they used
to have and I was living in Boston. Actually, when
I was out on commav in Boston, one of the
theaters that was maybe like two or three stops away
on the tee would do midnight kung fu movies. And
so every Saturday night, I believe, yeah, at twelve o'clock
(02:16):
they'd showed your I guess it started at like eleven.
They'd show one or two kung fu movies and That's
how I was exposed to some like really kind of
out there stuff from the seventies, like some old Hong
Kong stuff. There was a movie called Taoism Drunkard, which
is just like completely bonkers. There's like a woman who
fights with her hair as a weapon and who. Yeah,
(02:38):
there's this little like robot monster called the Watermelon Monster
that like shocks you with like its little electric hands
and it's got like a It basically looks like a
big robot pac Man and it tries to like bite you.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Ok. Yeah, there was another one I liked.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It was called The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms,
and it was some Shaw Brothers thing where this bad
guy shows up and kills the master of these five
kung fu warriors, and he cripples all five of them
in different ways. He puts one's eyes out, he cuts
one's leg off, he cuts one's arm off, He does
these different things to prevent them from fighting again. But
(03:11):
then they decide they're going to avenge their master, and
they have all these weird, like unique fighting styles because
of the different ways in which they were mutilated by
their enemy, which just sounds really gruesome, but it's it's honestly,
it's like kind of funny when you watch it.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
And also, if you go into a martial arts movie,
you pretty much expect that there's going to be some
violent and gruesome content.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, we kind of are hoping for it, right, Yes,
you know, like in the old days, it was, you know,
there's the style to these to this old like Shaw
Brothers style of seventies kung fu flick, you know, midnight
movies kind of thing. But you know, over the years,
martial arts has just kind of begun to integrate into
every aspect of action filmmaking. Right, Captain America does martial
(03:55):
arts now. And you've got John Wick and the Fast
and Infurious guys all no martial art arts, even though
they originally started as street racers. I don't know how
that happened, but you know, the Jason Statham's all these
kinds of action movie heroes.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Yeah, you've got the Matrix.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Even in recent Star Trek series Star Trek Discovery, which
okay features Michelle Yo, you do have her using some
martial arts moves to beat up bad guys.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yeah, it's a big transition from Captain Kirk's open hand
judo shop and double hammer fist to knock guys out right.
The way that action has been filmed in recent years
is very different from the way it was filmed back then,
and we're going to talk about kind of the reason
for that transition.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah, yeah, now, you know.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
I, you know, as a historian, there's always kind of
a podcaster and a blogger and all of the things
that I that I kind of do. You're always kind
of looking for significant dates with which to air your things,
and I've generally kind of shied away from death anniversaries.
I don't really like to celebrate death anniversaries because I
always feel like it's a it's a little bit weird
(05:02):
to talk about that.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Yeah, but sometimes sometimes that's what people do and think
of it as a celebration of a completed life. Is
that less grim? It's a milestone. And I'm a fan
of classical music, and there's often a way to look
for any excuse to have a celebration. So are we celebrating?
You know, one year, we might be celebrating the two
(05:25):
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Johan Sebashenbach's birth, and then
some years later we might be celebrating the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of his death, and it's really an
excuse to or pretext to celebrate their life and work.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, and that's that's kind of what we're going to
do today. So it has been fifty years since the
death of Bruce Lee, and he is a hero of mine,
and you know, a film and TV star that I
really admire and I enjoy his work. Also, it just
(06:00):
so happens that he's buried two blocks from my house
and I walk past his grave site most most days
when I'm either going up to the store or taken
the baby out for a walk, So I walk past
the graveyard where he or he's buried. And when we
were kind of preparing for this episode, you had told
me to stop in and say hi because I've never
(06:22):
actually i'd never actually gone to his grave before, even
though I lived there, and I walk past it pretty
much every day. It's inside of a cemetery, and you know,
I don't usually Yeah, yeah, it makes it a little
I'm not going to walk into the cemetery with the
baby and you know, look at that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
So no, no, you know, you kind of need a
reason to do that. Yeah, I guess I'm not as
phazed as much by the idea of going into a
cemetery respectfully.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Of course, Yeah, but I went and I paid respects
for you.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And thank you.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, ask for good good luck on her on our
podcast episode today, and yeah, and it's a very beautiful
little spot they have for Bruce and Brandon Lee are
buried together there. There always seems to be from what
I understand, at least there was when I went there.
There always seemed to be little flowers and tributes left behind,
(07:12):
which is very cool. So in memory of fifty years
since the tragic and very early passing of Bruce Lee,
we are going to talk about him, and we are
going to get started with that after this. In talking
(07:37):
about Bruce Lee, I am reminded of a quote that
he said. And Bruce, we will see, was never shy.
He was a little bit cocky, and take that into
account as I read this quote. But it's something that
needs to be kept in mind when we talk about
Bruce Lee. He says, quote, if I were to be
(07:59):
completely realistic in my films, you would call me a violent,
bloody man. I would simply destroy my opponent by tearing
his guts out, I wouldn't do it so artistically. So
you know, we see a lot of you know, black
light posters of Bruce Lee, but who was he really
and you know, is there there's a lot more going
(08:19):
on here than just the five real movies and the
TV show that we have seen him on, and we're
going to get into that. So he was born in
the hour of the Dragon, which apparently is seven am
to nine am in the year of the Dragon according
to the Chinese zodiac, so nineteen forty. He was born
in San Francisco, but he grew up in Hong Kong
(08:41):
and his father was a pretty prolific actor in Hong
Kong cinema. Bruce actually appeared in his first movie at
three months because he was always kind of hanging around
film sets, and by the time he was eighteen, he'd
appeared in almost twenty films. I think his first speaking
role was at the age of six in one of
his father's movies. So, growing up in China, Bruce was
(09:05):
a bit of a troublemaker, so he got into he
would get into fights, and you know, he was in
these movies, but he wasn't a great student, and he
he would kind of.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
You know, he liked to fight.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
He always liked to fight, and at some point he
had gotten into a fight and he had beaten up
a couple of kids from the neighborhood and then they
kind of jumped him back later and beat him up
pretty good. So he ended up studying wing chung kung
fu from a guy named Yip Man, who is a
big famous folk hero in China. There's a bunch of
(09:37):
movies about him, although none of them are like very
historically accurate, but he's like a he's a folk hero
in China. I think there's a Donnie Yen has done
like five different yp Man movies now and they're great,
but they're kind of pretty.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Out there them as historical documentation.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yes, it is the name of a character from history
who was very good at kung fu and lived generally
in the time period that those movies are representing him,
but you know, they take a lot of creative license anyway.
So Bruce starts studying fighting and kung fu and he's
got an aptitude for it. In nineteen fifty eight, at
(10:16):
the age of seventeen, he becomes the Hong Kong boxing champion.
He knocks out three fighters, all of them in the
first round to win the title. And that same year
he also wins the Hong Kong Chat Shot Dance competition.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Which, hey, he's got the moves, He's got.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
The moves, and there's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
So his father was an actor, but his father had
kind of come up in the Hong Kong opera and
so there is always kind of a lot of crossover
between you know, martial arts and dancing and just being
able to move your body athletically.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah, I think these two things kind of go hand
in hand. They always say that when NHL players are
talking about their hockey careers, they start off in figure
skating before they ever pick up a stick, because it's good.
You have to know how to skate before you can
you know, shoot a puff.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Anyway, so he is nineteen fifty eight, nineteen fifty nine,
Bruce is kind of this young punk teenager kind of guy. He's,
you know, he's doing fighting school and he is he's
doing dance competitions, but he's he's getting into some fights.
There is I saw one thing referencing that he had
joined a street gang called the Tigers of Junction Street.
(11:26):
Another one saying that like, he was fighting against various
other street gangs. But in nineteen fifty nine he gets
in trouble because he he beats up the son of
like a pretty powerful triad leader in Hong Kong, and.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
The triads are Chinese organized crime syndicates.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, basically Chinese mafia.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
And beating up the son of a powerful guy in
that realm is not a great thing for you. And
at one point even one of the local, like Hong
Kong police officers that patrols the streets in Bruce's neighborhood
went to his dad and was like, like, look, he's
getting into fights with some bad people. He's getting into
a lot of fights. He's hurting some of these other kids.
(12:05):
If he gets into one more fight, I got to
drag him in and arrest him. And that's going to
put you know, that's gonna put Bruce down some pretty
bad roads.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Yes, yeah, so he needs to skip town.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
He needs to skip town. So his dad sends him
first to San Francisco to go live with his sister
and then eventually up to Seattle, where Bruce en rolls
in the University of Washington. He's studying philosophy and drama
and I think it's funny to mention that he got
a C in gymnastics, which seems like really he just
shows you, like his commitment to like the school. I
(12:39):
guess he was not a great student. I think he
had like a one point eight GPA. I read somewhere.
But he was also working on his book at the time.
He was writing a book about the philosophy of kung fu,
and he was training students in martial arts.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
First, he was doing it for free.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
It was just kind of his friends and people nearby
that like might have won had some training in kung fu.
But he is at the University of Washington and he
is he's training students. He's having a little bit of
a hard time making ends meat money wise, because he's
not charging any of his friends for lessons. And eventually
his friends are kind of like, no, I do actually,
you're awesome at this. Why don't you charge us money
and we can pay you to do this so that yeah,
(13:17):
this is the thing you can do. Yeah, And he says, okay, okay,
And so he opens the school that's called the le
jion Fang Kung Fu Institute, and le jion Fang was
his Chinese name.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
And yeah, his family name, which we pronounce as Lee,
uses the same Chinese character as the last name of
Jet Lee, who spells it Li. And even though the
Americanized versions of their names are spelled differently, they're still
using the same Chinese character Lee, which translates to plum
or plum tree. Jet Lee chose a different spelling of
(13:48):
his name for his Americanized version because he didn't want
to be associated with the Bruce floitation actors, which we'll
talk about a little bit later, actors who were trying
to ride the wave of Bruce Lee fame, yes, and
would use creative versions of Bruce Lee's name, even yes,
(14:10):
their stage name.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
We will get to them a little bit later as well.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, but you know, over the course of his career,
Bruce is a is a teacher. For his entire life,
he's always training. I think he meets his wife while
he's training people in this area here and in Seattle,
But throughout the course of his life, after he goes
to Hollywood even beyond, he's always a teacher, and he
ends up actually teaching some pretty big name American actors
(14:37):
martial arts, so Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, George Lazenbee,
they all take martial arts lessons from Bruce Lee at
various points during their careers to help them, you know,
have a better stage presence and help them have some
more interesting and better fights on screen, which is cool.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah. So he was, among other things, a teacher and
clearly a successful one. He openedung fu schools in California,
and believe it or not, this was controversial. So on
the one hand, he had his friend saying, shut up
and take our money. Let us give you money to
teach us how to do kung fu. But some leaders
in the Chinese American community were upset at the fact
(15:16):
that Bruce Lee was teaching kung fu, and this included
some martial arts teachers in the Seattle area. And it
wasn't the competition per se. It was more that they
viewed kung fu as an important part of Chinese culture
and they thought that it should be taught only to
people who were Chinese or of Chinese descent. So how
(15:39):
did they settle this, Well, did they take him to court. No,
they decided to have a kung fu off and the
other teachers, the ones who thought teaching Chinese martial arts
should be exclusively for Chinese students. They got together and
they sent their best guy, Wang jack Man.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, so this is nineteen sixty four and Bruce, I mean,
we will see this, right, But Bruce is not does
not take well to being challenged. Bruce has a little
bit of an ego on him. He's got a little
bit of arrogance to him, which is understandable because he
is better than everybody that he encounters. Right, he doesn't
get beat up ever again after he starts training with
(16:18):
hit Man and and he says, okay, yeah, you want
to Okay, well we can do this kung fu off.
I'm totally down for it. And so in nineteen sixty four,
him and Wang jack Man are going to fight. I'm
just gonna give you Bruce Lee's personal accounting of what
happens in this encounter. So we had talked about, I
(16:40):
believe before we had talked about the Chevalier de Saint
George and how the different schools were going to duel
and have a battle to see what school was superior.
And one jack Man is older than Bruce Lee, and
we're more trained and more experienced. He's a grand master
and Bruce Lee is kind of this up and coming,
you know, twenty something punk kid who who wants to
(17:00):
teach martial arts and they're going to fight. And here's
what Bruce said about this fight in an interview he
gave to black Belt Magazine. I gotten into a fight
in San Francisco with a kung fu cat and after
a brief encounter, the son of a bitch started to run.
I chased him and like a fool, kept punching him
behind his head and back. Soon my fists began to
(17:22):
swell from hitting his hard head. Right then I realized
Wing chung was not too practical and began to alter
my way of fighting. So while Jackman goes on to
train people who like MMA fighters who fight on the
Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit, but not only was Bruce Lee
kind of disillusioned with the martial arts style because the
(17:42):
grand master he had defeated in like three minutes. He
was also kind of mad at himself because he thought
should have taken less time to beat this guy up.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
He's hard on himself. He's a perfectionist.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
I mean, I think that's the only way to get
to the level that he attained, right, He is extremely
hard on himself. Yeah, and so he kind of gets
really really into training and also into the philosophy of
martial arts. I don't know, have you ever done any
kind of martial arts taken, like a martial arts class
or anything like that.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
No, I haven't really, but you have been right.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Yeah, So I took martial arts for maybe ten years
when I was in high school and college and stuff,
So I have spent a lot of time with it.
And you know, it's not just about how to defend
yourself if somebody tries to beat you up, or how
to beat up your enemies. There is a whole like
philosophy of behind this, and I think we do encounter
this a little bit in ancient Greece, where there's some
(18:37):
kind of combination of philosophy, art and sport. You know,
kind of it's a mindset and there's some really cool
stuff that Bruce Lee comes up with here. So what
he creates in nineteen sixty five is a martial arts
style called g Kundo. Bruce is kind of ahead of
his time in that he's studying anatomy and physics and
philosophy and trying to put all of that into his
(18:57):
fighting style, So g kundo is the the way of
the intercepting fist. Bruce had kind of grown up doing
wing chung and boxing, but what he wanted to do
was he calls it.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
The form of no form.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
He says that quote, I hope to free my followers
from clinging to styles, patterns.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Or molds.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
You have to adapt, right, You have to.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Adapt, And he says, you know, the idea is kind
of One of the ways it's described is that not
everybody can fit into a size forty two coat. So
you can't have this very rigid rules on how the
fighting style works, and here's how you fight, and here's
how you do it, and you do it exactly this
way every single time. You know, you got to get
that coat tailored to fit you. And what Bruce wants
(19:37):
to do is kind of take things from everywhere and
let's see what works, let's see what doesn't work, Let's
see what works for me versus what works for you.
We got to be adaptable and open to new ideas
and open to incorporating things that you know, thinking outside
the box, not just with your fighting style but also
just in life.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
To be adaptable. And I think there's some really cool
stuff with that.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah, sounds like teaching. Actually, yes, you know, you have
ways and philosophies and methods of teaching, but ultimately you
have to find a way that works for the particular
students in front of you in a particular moment.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
It's an it's an eclectic philosophy, and eclectic as in
like capital E eclecticism, which is just like adaptability. Right,
what you know, there is no there is no schematic
for how to do this. Don't You can't do it
exactly like this every time and it will always work.
He gives a great interview, and it's one that you'll
see a lot if you do any kind of research
(20:36):
on him or YouTube being on him or whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
And he says, be formless, shapeless like water. This is
what it is.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
Okay, I said, empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless like water.
Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.
You put water into a bottle would be I'm used
a bottle. You're putting a teapot, It become used a teapot.
(21:03):
Now water can flow, how it can crash? Be water
on my phone?
Speaker 1 (21:11):
And that was kind of the strategy he took towards
fighting and towards training. He was extremely hardcore about working
out and training from the very beginning. As far as
training goes, Bruce Lee is kind of famous for having
all of these crazy, weird, innovative, I guess training regimens.
(21:34):
He would do, you know, we all do push up
sit ups, that kind of thing when we're trying to
work out at home without any tools or anything. But
he would do two finger push ups thumb and four finger,
and he could it was said he could do something
on the order of two hundred of those in a row.
He would do some with like he would do one
hand with his other hand behind his back, so just
off the two fingers, or he could do both thumbs.
(21:57):
He would do push ups like that, you know, one
armed China. He would fill heavy bags with gravel so
that he could punch and kick them and toughen up
his knuckles and his feet and also because regular heavy
bags were too light for him. And if you watch
those videos of him punching these heavy bags and it's
a it's a heavy bag. It's the kind of thing
you see in like a boxing gym, and you watch
(22:18):
you can watch a video of a boxer punching a
punching bag. Then you watch Bruce Lee and the thing
is flying all over the place. He was not a
huge guy. He was super ripped. I mean, as you
can tell because he's always kind of shirtless in his movies.
But it wasn't a very like huge guy like height
and weight wise. But he would generate just unbelievable amounts
of power that are kind of we're kind of unprecedented.
(22:41):
He had a His diet was generally raw blended hamburger meat,
which just, yeah, sounds awful.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Well, I guess, I guess we could call it steak
tartar or something like that, or carpacciotare fancy names for meat.
He don't sound convinced now, I'm not. But it worked
for him.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yes, it worked for him.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
It worked for him.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
He had an exercise called the Dragon Flag where he
would just lay on his back and like but he
could lift his entire body up from like just his
shoulder in the back of his head would touch the
ground and he'd grab onto something and he could lift
the entire rest of his body up off the mat
and hold it for seconds or minutes at a time.
He liked to train his reflexes and his manual dexterity
(23:28):
by throwing grains of rice up in the air and
catching them with chopsticks. He was apparently extremely talented at
doing this, and that might have been the inspiration for
you know, mister Miyagi catching the fly with chopsticks and
the karate kid. Anyway, So he's off doing all of
these things. He is training really hard, he's creating his
own martial art. He's teaching it to people he's not
supposed to be teaching it too. He's kind of a rebel.
(23:49):
And in nineteen sixty four he gets the opportunity to
demonstrate a lot of this stuff at the World Karate
Championships in Long Beach, California. He goes up on stage
and he demonstrates these two finger pushups and the dragon
flag and his workout style, and Patty demonstrates a couple
of other unique skills that he has.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, including the famous one inch punch. So imagine Bruce
Lee standing in front of you, like very in front
of you, very close in front of you, and you okay,
I say you as if this applies to anyone, but
a general member of the public shouldn't be doing this.
You should be a trained martial arts person because it
takes some stamina to be the recipient of this move
(24:33):
from Bruce Lee. So you're standing there and Bruce Lee
is standing in front of you, and behind you is
a chair, and Bruce Lee extends his arm out and
puts his hand. It's there in the air, very still,
right in front of your apps, right in front of
your stomach, and he's perfectly still, and then something happens.
(24:58):
He curls his fingers into a fist and then just
thrust it one inch into your gut.
Speaker 5 (25:06):
Bam, you go flying back six feet into the chair.
And that's the one inch punch. He's able to generate
the energy from his legs and the way he stands
and channel that into his fingers. It's called fog in
or explosive power, and bam, there you go flying back
(25:27):
into the chair.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
And there's video of this. These guys like they are
martial arts like experts. They're there for the World Karate Championships.
They're wearing their gee's and their black belts. And these
guys get hit and they hit that chair and the
chair slides across the floor or these dudes kind of
hit the chair and bounce out and hit the ground
like they don't land, like if they don't land perfectly
(25:49):
on it, or if they're trying to like fight it
too hard. They hit the ground and brustally gets up
there and he does these demonstrations in front of I
mean a humongous audience of you know, Marshall arts maniacs, right,
people who are super into this stuff. He comes back
in sixty seven and he does it again at a
different World Karate championship. He's got a move called the
Unstoppable Punch where he got the world champion.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Vic Moore, who is also a badass.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
He stands there and Bruce Lee stands six feet away
from him and is like, block me before I punch
you in the face, and he gets He's so fast.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
There's video of this.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
And I absolutely recommend that you watch it. Bruce covers
six feet and gets his fist in this guy's face
and the dude barely moves. The dude doesn't flinch until
Bruce has already stopped with his fist an inch from
this guy's face. And this is a world karate champion
he had just beaten up. Like all of the greatest
fighters in the world. Vic Moore got annoyed and was like,
give me another try, and Bruce gave him six and
(26:46):
he did the same thing every single.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Time, and vic Moore couldn't block it.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
And then he tried it with a bunch of other people's,
any other volunteers, and nobody could stop this.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
It was the unstoppable punch.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And that's a Bruce Lee thing that he was famous for,
just kind of showing up at the World Karate Championships
in sixty four and sixty six, not competing in them,
and then giving a demonstration that was just like I'm
the best one here.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Just so you know, yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
He would do another trick later on, where he would
stand the same thing six feet away from you. He'd
tell you to put a quarter in your palm and
hold your arm out as far as like maximum extension
of your hand and put the coin in the palm
of your hand, and he would say, don't let me
steal his quarter. Close your fist, close your hand before
I take this quarter from you. Lightning flash. You'd get
(27:32):
your hand closed, he'd hold the quarter up and when
you opened your fist, you would see you had a penny.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
In your hand.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Wow wow.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
And so that's kind of what we're dealing with here,
and his demonstrations at these karate tournaments, especially the one
in nineteen sixty four, end up being kind of a
springboard for him to enter Hollywood and enter film because
as stories of this guy up until this point, he's
(28:03):
kind of just basically famous in the martial arts world.
But you know, he's in California, things are going well,
like he's kind of a celebrity. He's, you know, the
best of the best at this and Hollywood starts calling
for him. And when we get back, we are going
to get into the beginnings of Bruce Lee's film career. Okay,
(28:34):
and welcome back. We are talking about Bruce Lee, who
up until this point in the story has been kind
of a martial arts celebrity and he is about to
become an international film and TV celebrity. So in nineteen
sixty six, Season one of The Green Hornet comes out.
(28:55):
The Green Hornet is a kind of a superhero type
of show. The Green Hornet is a detective and Bruce Lee,
all of his success with the demonstrations he's put on
at these Long Beach International karate tournaments, they get him
a role as Kato, who is the chauffeur for the
(29:15):
Green Hornet, kind of like the Robin to the Green
Hornets Batman, and I use that analogy because it's by
the same producers. So the guys who created Green Hornet
were also the guys who created the Adam West Batman show.
So kind of the iconic moment from this that kind
of introduced Bruce Lee to the world is there's a
(29:36):
bit where Kato there's a light hanging from the ceiling
and Bruce Lee as Cato, enters and he does a
jumping front kick and breaks the light with his foot
that at the time was pretty mind blowing. We're a
little bit desensitized to seeing really badass martial arts in movies.
We've seen Jason Stathan movies, We've seen The Matrix, We've
(29:56):
seen stuff like that. But at the time nineteen sixty
this show was on primetime TV back to back with
Adam West's Batman. So if you think about the fights
in that series, the pow thwock zapp you know, guys
wrestling around.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
You mentioned Star Trek.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
This is like Captain Kirk time period, with the double
hand hammer fists and the open hand Karate Chop and
you know what's in the movies right now, Thunderball, Goldfinger,
like that time period, the James Bond stuff, which he
wasn't doing a whole lot of martial arts. I mean,
I'd wager that probably the most badass fight sequence in
television or film history up until this point might have
(30:33):
been maybe the train fight from Russia with Love, where
Sean Connery fights that guy in the train compartment. But
that's nothing like jumping front kick, flying sidekick, any of
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
No, Yeah, it's good stage fighting, but it's not this
next level stuff that all of a sudden Bruce Lee
is putting on the scene.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
And you know, we had action movies, but there's a
lot of cowboy movies and war movies, a lot of shooting.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Most of the fighting was punching and stuff. You didn't
see a lot of kicks.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
He didn't see a lot of the speed that Bruce
Lee brings to the table. And we've talked about the
unstoppable punch and the stealing the quarter.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
He was fast.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
He was extremely fast, and that actually caused a problem
on the set of Green Hornet because in nineteen sixty six,
right now we can do whatever, sixty frames per second,
we can do HD, you know all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
But movie camera in nineteen.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Sixty six it was lucky if it could hit twenty
four frames per second, and according to legend, Bruce Lee
could punch nine times in one second. So they said
that there was footage from Seizon one of The Green
Hornet where it looks like Bruce Lee is standing perfectly
still and everybody around him is falling down because the
camera couldn't catch him. He was moving too fast and
(31:45):
it looked funny on camera. So what they ended up
having to do was to make him slow down, and
he still looks fast. If you watch reruns from the show,
he still looks really fast, but he had to slow
down to like fifty percent speed so that the camera
could catch him doing the things that he was doing,
which is just awesome. Yeah, So The Green Hornet only
runs for one season and it just doesn't catch on
(32:06):
and it gets canceled. And Bruce Lee is in Hollywood
now and he's doing some bit roles here and there,
and you know, one of these American producers says, you know,
you kind of have this cred of being an American
film and TV star. Now, why don't you go back
to Hong Kong make a couple of movies there. Hong
(32:27):
Kong has You know, It's a thing worth talking about
with Bruce Lee is that he didn't invent martial arts movies.
He wasn't the first ever kung fu movie star. Hong
Kong has been doing these films for a while, but
they just didn't have an American audience at the time.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Yeah, So his producer in the States says, why don't
you go back to Hong Kong make a couple of
movies there, and then I can leverage that if you
make a movie in Hong Kong, I can leverage it
into something that I can sell in the States. Okay,
why not? Bruce goes back to Hong Kong. He talks
a little bit with the Shaw brothers and ends up
signing with a company called Golden Harvest, and he makes
a movie called The Big Boss and it blows up.
(33:05):
It makes him a huge celebrity in China and eventually
in the US as well, and it's the first of
like kind of the five main Bruce Lee movies that
everybody talks about when they think about this guy so
he did Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Return of the Dragon,
Enter the Dragon, in Game of Death. Those are the
five big ones. And I had talked about Midnight kung Fu,
(33:27):
but like, they wouldn't show any of these movies at
midnight kung Fu because it's not cheesy enough and it's
too mainstream or whatever.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
You know.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, And I don't know, Pat, have you seen any
of these? You watched a lot of movies, not really
a few clips here and there. Yeah, they hold up okay,
especially Enter the Dragon. They hold up fine. But it's
you know, it's it's hard to if you hadn't seen, say,
for instance, The Big Boss, and you've watched a lot
of Avengers and The Matrix, it's it's kind of hard
(33:57):
to go back and watch some of the older stuff.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Put it in historical perspective. Nothing comes out of a vacuum.
And one of the reasons we have these moves in
the Matrix and the Avengers movies is because we've had
Bruce Lee and other martial artists on screen paving the way.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Right, you know, before Enter the Dragon, Sean Connery is
kind of punching a guy in a train compartment after
Bruce Lee, Daniel Craig is doing judo throws and yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
And that sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
So, you know, this is an interesting thing when you're
studying history of any kind, right, even you know, say
sports history. You have Steph Curry who does all of these,
you know, amazing dribbling, amazing ball control dribbling techniques.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
But he grew up watching Doctor J. And Doctor J's
stuff doesn't.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Look as good now, but it's because when he did it,
nobody had ever seen it before. And then Steph Curry
grew up learning like watching Doctor J and trying to
emulate that and build upon that. So everything kind of
builds and grows based on what came before.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
And in addition to the martial arts moves, we also
have nunchucks being introduced to American audiences. Yes, people in
the States hadn't really seen nun chucks.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah, that was a pretty new thing. That was a
pretty new thing here, and it's awesome. I love nunchucks. Yeah, yeah,
I suck at them, but I like them. And well,
we see the influence of a lot of these movies today.
So Mortal Kombat came out of Enterre the Dragon, the
old kung Fu Master game, came from Game of Death.
You know, fighting game heroes to this day always kind
(35:34):
of seemed to make some Bruce Lee noises. So Bruce
Cosney makes these movies and they end up, you know,
getting big in in Hong Kong and China, but also
in the US. And it's how he kind of introduces
the Western world to martial arts and like you said,
nun chucks and fighting movies and even some like Jackie
Chan's first movie was as a stuntman. He gets punched
(35:56):
in the head during Enter the Dragon, Samuel Hung is
introduced to the Western audiences. I have a personal love
of Jim Kelly as black Belt Jones, which was from
Enter the Dragon as well, but then he ended up
getting a couple of action movies of his own, and
even it's even how the world was introduced to Chuck Norris.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Yeah, and Chuck Norris in a way is the canonical badass.
I say this because there have been Chuck Norris memes
going around the Internet for I don't know, a decade
and a half at least, and maybe they existed even
before the Internet. You know, there's a picture of Chuck
Norris on a landline and it says Chuck Norris catches
(36:34):
all the Pokemon from a landline, and you know, and
then there's a picture of Chuck Norris with thumbs up.
Chuck Norris hit eleven out of ten targets with nine
bullets and you know it's supposed to be goofy. But
I'm saying this to say, this is the reputation Chuck
Norris has in a way. He's the canonical badass and
(37:00):
comes along.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah, and Bruce Lee kind of introduced him to the world.
At the time, Chuck Norris was just. He was just,
but he was a world karate champion, but he wasn't
an actor. Bruce and him had been training together a
little bit. He got Chuck Norris his first acting role
in Return of the Dragon. It's also known as The
Way of the Dragon. It's the only movie that Bruce
Lee wrote and directed. He wrote, directed, and stars in
(37:23):
it and got Chuck Norris to be the bad guy
in it. Chuck Norris begrudgingly was like, do I have
to get beat up? And Bruce is like, yeah, you
got to get beat up. And Chuck was like, all right,
well I'm going to give you a good fight though, Okay,
we can do that, and it's it's really like, you know,
the most Bruce Lee gets beat up in any of
his movies is in this like fantastic martial arts sequence
at the end of Return of the Dragon. Yeah, Chuck
(37:46):
of course goes on to be one of America's first,
like you know, American born martial arts heroes and kind
of the iconic one as you mentioned, but it's just
a it's a cool story.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Yeah, and he in a way got his start through
Bruce Lee.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Yeah, exactly, and a lot of people did, right, So, yeah,
Bruce is not just groundbreaking in the fact that he was,
you know, bringing martial arts to American audiences, but he's
also inspirational to a lot of He's an Asian American lead.
He's an Asian man leading a movie right that is
successful in the US, And he's the first real Asian
(38:20):
movie star, first real martial arts hero, and he's inspirational
to a lot of people who kind of came after him.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:27):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
He kind of paved the way for basically a non
white person to be the lead in a movie, which
he got a lot of blowback.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
On of course. Yeah, that's how things work.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Yeah, But after this, like you have. Like I said,
Hong Kong's been making martial arts movies for a long time,
and so maybe not even just in front of the camera.
But what you end up with after this is Hollywood
directors and producers are like, we need to do martial
arts in our movies. We need to step up the
fighting in our movies. And so they bring over Hong
(38:58):
Kong action here, choreographers, stunt directors, and you start to
see an influx of, you know, diversity in Hollywood cinema,
of people coming over and getting into positions they that
were closed to them before.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah, totally. And Bruce Lee is playing an action hero.
He's not playing a stereotypical villain, yes, which was one
of the stereotypes for roles that Asian American actors were
kind of steered into playing before this.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Yeah, And like as we saw with Christopher Lee playing
Fu Manchu a lot of times, like they cast a
white actor in that Asian role right as the bad guy, which.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Is just bad all around.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, you know, so this is kind of groundbreaking and
it opens a lot of doors for people to come
past it. The most successful movie that Bruce Lee had
in the States and the first real American major release
of a martial arts movie was Enter the Dragon in
nineteen seventy three. Sadly, Bruce Lee wasn't able to attend
(40:04):
the premiere. He passed away six days before its release.
He had a cerebral edema and died at age thirty two,
just kind of right in the prime of his life.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, and there were a lot of theories circulating his
untimely death. We're not going to deal with them here.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Yeah, Yeah, I really don't want to get into any
of the conspiracy theory stuff that circulates around Bruce Lee's
death there is, except to say that maybe there's like
a fascination with that sort of thing of people who
were taken out of the world in their prime, right,
the James Dean's, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, keep Ledger, you know,
(40:43):
even a JFK. Right, somebody who was kind of at
the height of their like just huge rising star and
then it's over. He left behind a wife and two kids,
one of them was Brandon Lee, who played the Crow
before his own untimely death on the set of of
that movie. Enter the Dragon goes on to gross four
(41:03):
hundred million dollars worldwide, becomes a huge hit, and it
kind of creates a whole new genre of like copycat
you know, martial arts movies. And that's kind of what
you were alluding to before when you were talking about
Bruce sploitation, right, placitation.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And some of these Bruce sploitators or
Bruce Lee imitators actually would use variations on the name
Bruce Lee as their stage name, misspelling it creatively. Kind
of reminds me of Annie Oakley and Annie Oakley's.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Pploitation arrested for cocaine possession.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Well yeah, yeah, And even before people were getting arrested
for cocaine, there were people using there were other women
using kind of versions of her name as their stage names,
and they just wanted to ride the crust of popularity.
So but we're here to talk about actual Bruce Lee,
not his imitators.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Yes, but he was such a cultural phenomenon that it
inspired imitators, which is kind of worth mentioning. Yes, the
final movie of his career, Game of Death, is basically
it's a Bruce Lee movie, but it's also bruce'sploitation. He
had filmed parts of it before he left to go
do enter the dragon and the film company was trying
(42:19):
to capitalize on his success, and they finished the movie
with only fifteen minutes of Bruce Lee in the movie.
Only fifteen minutes of him make the final cut. They
used body doubles, and they used stock footage. They used
clips from other movies to try to finish this thing. Nowadays,
they just like cg it.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah, like with Star Wars.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
One of the only bits that exists exists from that
is that fight with Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who was one
of Bruce's students in real life.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Yeah, and that's that's iconic.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
That's iconic. Yeah, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar is a badass
in his own right, but that's the story for another day.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Absolutely absolutely great, like big time sports badass.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Kareem's awesome.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, this is the you know, the yellow jumpsuit and
he fights Kareem and Bruce's maybe five eight and Kareem
is like seven to two, so the fight is really impressive.
But yeah, that movie was kind of has a place
in the Bruce Lee library, and it's not necessarily a
really positive one because of how much the studio manipulated
(43:17):
his likeness to try it I think at one point
in it, he gets plastic surgery to look different, and
that's how they get like the Bruce Lee impersonator to
you know, if they have to show his face, it's
not great, but that scene is great. It sounds like
it was slapped together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about
Star Wars where they put the CGI faces DH people
(43:39):
and all that stuff. That's how they do it now,
which I argue is not that much more tasteful than
what they were doing back then. But you know, bringing
Peter Kushing back from the dead to play grand mof
Tarking again, I don't know how I feel about that.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
But yeah, but it's a thing that Hollywood does, however
we may feel about it.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Yes, everybody wants to capitalize. I mean even Quentin Tarantino.
Quentin Tarantino did him extremely dirty and once upon a
time in Hollywood, but he also like ripped off the
yellow tracksuit and the one inch punch for kill Bill,
So who knows what's happening there.
Speaker 4 (44:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
So anyway, Bruce was a pioneer for Asian actors, for
stunt coordinators, choreographers, for martial arts in general. I think
Dana White of the UFC once referred to him as
the father of mixed martial arts. The Gracie family, who
are very influential in Brazilian jiu jitsu, they talk about
him as one of the greats, and not just because
he was doing some martial arts movie stuff, but he
(44:33):
was also doing you know, leglocks, he does an arm
bar and enter the Dragon. He was doing groundwork. He
was really into the science of fighting and adapting a
little bit of everything from the different styles, and that
is kind of how mma works today. And he was also,
you know, in addition to all of that, he was
a philosopher and a writer. He wrote and directed Way
(44:54):
of the Dragon, as I said, and he also pitched
a show called Warrior when he was towards the end
of his life. It was a show that was going
to be about a traveling monk who was going around
during the Old West and having adventures. You had mentioned
earlier that your dad was a big Kung Fu fan,
and Bruce's pitch was rejected because they didn't want any
(45:15):
Asian leads in a TV show. They didn't think that
was going to sell. But then the next year they
came out with a show called Kung Fu starring David
Carodine and it was a hugely successful series.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Yep, that's what I grew up with in the background.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, and they actually made a show called Warrior now
it's on HBO and they do credit him as the
creator of it, and it does have Asian American lead actors,
which I think is cool.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
So that's the story of Bruce Lee. He was more
than just an actor. He was a martial artist. He
was kind of a groundbreaking person and a really fascinating
badass character and broke down a lot more doors than
just like the physical ones.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Indeed, all right, well, I think that is all we
have for today.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
We really hope that you guys liked the show, and
please don't forget to subscribe and share this with your
friends because that really helps us out a lot. Thank
you guys so much as always for listening, and we're
looking forward to seeing you on the next one.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
Stay Badass, but be water, I said mt.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
Your mind before this, Share this be water on my friend.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, me Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by Me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.
(46:55):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart that Is of
the Week based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
(47:16):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
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you get your podcasts.
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content, Hong Kong, nineteen fifty eight. The music
plays as Lee Jun fans feet definitely move back and forth.
The chawshaw rhythm carries him and his partner across the
dance floor. The small crowd cheers. He's graceful and elegant,
(00:23):
but there's something they don't know. Tomorrow, his hands and
feet will be lethal weapons, able to dispatch hordes of
armed men with lightning, quick maneuvers, and vicious punches that
send challengers sprawling one by one. He'll mercilessly crush his foes,
battering them with fists, feet, wooden sticks, even a pair
(00:43):
of nunchucks. Today he's about to be the chat Shaw
Champion of Hong Kong, but tomorrow he'll be Bruce Lee.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of of the Week.
My name is Ben Thompson and I am here as
(01:03):
always with my co hosts, doctor Pat Larish.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Pat.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Today we are we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Kung fu movies.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Do you have a Are you a kung fu movie
fan or do you have a favorite kung fu movie?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I don't know if I have a favorite kung Fu
movie per se. I grew up with them in the background.
You know, my sister and I would play legos on
the living room floor in front of the TV, and
my dad would have on, you know, random movies, and
so I grew up with martial arts in the background,
especially the kung Fu series with David Carradine said in
(01:36):
the Old West, Oh.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, which is great. Yeah, and the legend continues, which
was from the nineties.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, And I was young, and I thought that the
kung Fu moves were kind of funny, But I think
I grew an appreciation for them because now, you know,
I enjoy seeing Jackie Chan or Michelle Yo in a
very well choreographed martial arts scene.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Like when I was just out of college, they used
to have and I was living in Boston. Actually, when
I was out on commav in Boston, one of the
theaters that was maybe like two or three stops away
on the tee would do midnight kung fu movies. And
so every Saturday night, I believe, yeah, at twelve o'clock
(02:16):
they'd showed your I guess it started at like eleven.
They'd show one or two kung fu movies and That's
how I was exposed to some like really kind of
out there stuff from the seventies, like some old Hong
Kong stuff. There was a movie called Taoism Drunkard, which
is just like completely bonkers. There's like a woman who
fights with her hair as a weapon and who. Yeah,
(02:38):
there's this little like robot monster called the Watermelon Monster
that like shocks you with like its little electric hands
and it's got like a It basically looks like a
big robot pac Man and it tries to like bite you.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Ok. Yeah, there was another one I liked.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
It was called The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms,
and it was some Shaw Brothers thing where this bad
guy shows up and kills the master of these five
kung fu warriors, and he cripples all five of them
in different ways. He puts one's eyes out, he cuts
one's leg off, he cuts one's arm off, He does
these different things to prevent them from fighting again. But
(03:11):
then they decide they're going to avenge their master, and
they have all these weird, like unique fighting styles because
of the different ways in which they were mutilated by
their enemy, which just sounds really gruesome, but it's it's honestly,
it's like kind of funny when you watch it.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
And also, if you go into a martial arts movie,
you pretty much expect that there's going to be some
violent and gruesome content.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, we kind of are hoping for it, right, Yes,
you know, like in the old days, it was, you know,
there's the style to these to this old like Shaw
Brothers style of seventies kung fu flick, you know, midnight
movies kind of thing. But you know, over the years,
martial arts has just kind of begun to integrate into
every aspect of action filmmaking. Right, Captain America does martial
(03:55):
arts now. And you've got John Wick and the Fast
and Infurious guys all no martial art arts, even though
they originally started as street racers. I don't know how
that happened, but you know, the Jason Statham's all these
kinds of action movie heroes.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Yeah, you've got the Matrix.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Even in recent Star Trek series Star Trek Discovery, which
okay features Michelle Yo, you do have her using some
martial arts moves to beat up bad guys.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yeah, it's a big transition from Captain Kirk's open hand
judo shop and double hammer fist to knock guys out right.
The way that action has been filmed in recent years
is very different from the way it was filmed back then,
and we're going to talk about kind of the reason
for that transition.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah, yeah, now, you know.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
I, you know, as a historian, there's always kind of
a podcaster and a blogger and all of the things
that I that I kind of do. You're always kind
of looking for significant dates with which to air your things,
and I've generally kind of shied away from death anniversaries.
I don't really like to celebrate death anniversaries because I
always feel like it's a it's a little bit weird
(05:02):
to talk about that.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Yeah, but sometimes sometimes that's what people do and think
of it as a celebration of a completed life. Is
that less grim? It's a milestone. And I'm a fan
of classical music, and there's often a way to look
for any excuse to have a celebration. So are we celebrating?
You know, one year, we might be celebrating the two
(05:25):
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Johan Sebashenbach's birth, and then
some years later we might be celebrating the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of his death, and it's really an
excuse to or pretext to celebrate their life and work.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, and that's that's kind of what we're going to
do today. So it has been fifty years since the
death of Bruce Lee, and he is a hero of mine,
and you know, a film and TV star that I
really admire and I enjoy his work. Also, it just
(06:00):
so happens that he's buried two blocks from my house
and I walk past his grave site most most days
when I'm either going up to the store or taken
the baby out for a walk, So I walk past
the graveyard where he or he's buried. And when we
were kind of preparing for this episode, you had told
me to stop in and say hi because I've never
(06:22):
actually i'd never actually gone to his grave before, even
though I lived there, and I walk past it pretty
much every day. It's inside of a cemetery, and you know,
I don't usually Yeah, yeah, it makes it a little
I'm not going to walk into the cemetery with the
baby and you know, look at that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
So no, no, you know, you kind of need a
reason to do that. Yeah, I guess I'm not as
phazed as much by the idea of going into a
cemetery respectfully.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Of course, Yeah, but I went and I paid respects
for you.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And thank you.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, ask for good good luck on her on our
podcast episode today, and yeah, and it's a very beautiful
little spot they have for Bruce and Brandon Lee are
buried together there. There always seems to be from what
I understand, at least there was when I went there.
There always seemed to be little flowers and tributes left behind,
(07:12):
which is very cool. So in memory of fifty years
since the tragic and very early passing of Bruce Lee,
we are going to talk about him, and we are
going to get started with that after this. In talking
(07:37):
about Bruce Lee, I am reminded of a quote that
he said. And Bruce, we will see, was never shy.
He was a little bit cocky, and take that into
account as I read this quote. But it's something that
needs to be kept in mind when we talk about
Bruce Lee. He says, quote, if I were to be
(07:59):
completely realistic in my films, you would call me a violent,
bloody man. I would simply destroy my opponent by tearing
his guts out, I wouldn't do it so artistically. So
you know, we see a lot of you know, black
light posters of Bruce Lee, but who was he really
and you know, is there there's a lot more going
(08:19):
on here than just the five real movies and the
TV show that we have seen him on, and we're
going to get into that. So he was born in
the hour of the Dragon, which apparently is seven am
to nine am in the year of the Dragon according
to the Chinese zodiac, so nineteen forty. He was born
in San Francisco, but he grew up in Hong Kong
(08:41):
and his father was a pretty prolific actor in Hong
Kong cinema. Bruce actually appeared in his first movie at
three months because he was always kind of hanging around
film sets, and by the time he was eighteen, he'd
appeared in almost twenty films. I think his first speaking
role was at the age of six in one of
his father's movies. So, growing up in China, Bruce was
(09:05):
a bit of a troublemaker, so he got into he
would get into fights, and you know, he was in
these movies, but he wasn't a great student, and he
he would kind of.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
You know, he liked to fight.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
He always liked to fight, and at some point he
had gotten into a fight and he had beaten up
a couple of kids from the neighborhood and then they
kind of jumped him back later and beat him up
pretty good. So he ended up studying wing chung kung
fu from a guy named Yip Man, who is a
big famous folk hero in China. There's a bunch of
(09:37):
movies about him, although none of them are like very
historically accurate, but he's like a he's a folk hero
in China. I think there's a Donnie Yen has done
like five different yp Man movies now and they're great,
but they're kind of pretty.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Out there them as historical documentation.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yes, it is the name of a character from history
who was very good at kung fu and lived generally
in the time period that those movies are representing him,
but you know, they take a lot of creative license anyway.
So Bruce starts studying fighting and kung fu and he's
got an aptitude for it. In nineteen fifty eight, at
(10:16):
the age of seventeen, he becomes the Hong Kong boxing champion.
He knocks out three fighters, all of them in the
first round to win the title. And that same year
he also wins the Hong Kong Chat Shot Dance competition.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Which, hey, he's got the moves, He's got.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
The moves, and there's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
So his father was an actor, but his father had
kind of come up in the Hong Kong opera and
so there is always kind of a lot of crossover
between you know, martial arts and dancing and just being
able to move your body athletically.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah, I think these two things kind of go hand
in hand. They always say that when NHL players are
talking about their hockey careers, they start off in figure
skating before they ever pick up a stick, because it's good.
You have to know how to skate before you can
you know, shoot a puff.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Anyway, so he is nineteen fifty eight, nineteen fifty nine,
Bruce is kind of this young punk teenager kind of guy. He's,
you know, he's doing fighting school and he is he's
doing dance competitions, but he's he's getting into some fights.
There is I saw one thing referencing that he had
joined a street gang called the Tigers of Junction Street.
(11:26):
Another one saying that like, he was fighting against various
other street gangs. But in nineteen fifty nine he gets
in trouble because he he beats up the son of
like a pretty powerful triad leader in Hong Kong, and.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
The triads are Chinese organized crime syndicates.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, basically Chinese mafia.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
And beating up the son of a powerful guy in
that realm is not a great thing for you. And
at one point even one of the local, like Hong
Kong police officers that patrols the streets in Bruce's neighborhood
went to his dad and was like, like, look, he's
getting into fights with some bad people. He's getting into
a lot of fights. He's hurting some of these other kids.
(12:05):
If he gets into one more fight, I got to
drag him in and arrest him. And that's going to
put you know, that's gonna put Bruce down some pretty
bad roads.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Yes, yeah, so he needs to skip town.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
He needs to skip town. So his dad sends him
first to San Francisco to go live with his sister
and then eventually up to Seattle, where Bruce en rolls
in the University of Washington. He's studying philosophy and drama
and I think it's funny to mention that he got
a C in gymnastics, which seems like really he just
shows you, like his commitment to like the school. I
(12:39):
guess he was not a great student. I think he
had like a one point eight GPA. I read somewhere.
But he was also working on his book at the time.
He was writing a book about the philosophy of kung fu,
and he was training students in martial arts.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
First, he was doing it for free.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
It was just kind of his friends and people nearby
that like might have won had some training in kung fu.
But he is at the University of Washington and he
is he's training students. He's having a little bit of
a hard time making ends meat money wise, because he's
not charging any of his friends for lessons. And eventually
his friends are kind of like, no, I do actually,
you're awesome at this. Why don't you charge us money
and we can pay you to do this so that yeah,
(13:17):
this is the thing you can do. Yeah, And he says, okay, okay,
And so he opens the school that's called the le
jion Fang Kung Fu Institute, and le jion Fang was
his Chinese name.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
And yeah, his family name, which we pronounce as Lee,
uses the same Chinese character as the last name of
Jet Lee, who spells it Li. And even though the
Americanized versions of their names are spelled differently, they're still
using the same Chinese character Lee, which translates to plum
or plum tree. Jet Lee chose a different spelling of
(13:48):
his name for his Americanized version because he didn't want
to be associated with the Bruce floitation actors, which we'll
talk about a little bit later, actors who were trying
to ride the wave of Bruce Lee fame, yes, and
would use creative versions of Bruce Lee's name, even yes,
(14:10):
their stage name.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
We will get to them a little bit later as well.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, but you know, over the course of his career,
Bruce is a is a teacher. For his entire life,
he's always training. I think he meets his wife while
he's training people in this area here and in Seattle,
But throughout the course of his life, after he goes
to Hollywood even beyond, he's always a teacher, and he
ends up actually teaching some pretty big name American actors
(14:37):
martial arts, so Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, George Lazenbee,
they all take martial arts lessons from Bruce Lee at
various points during their careers to help them, you know,
have a better stage presence and help them have some
more interesting and better fights on screen, which is cool.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah. So he was, among other things, a teacher and
clearly a successful one. He openedung fu schools in California,
and believe it or not, this was controversial. So on
the one hand, he had his friend saying, shut up
and take our money. Let us give you money to
teach us how to do kung fu. But some leaders
in the Chinese American community were upset at the fact
(15:16):
that Bruce Lee was teaching kung fu, and this included
some martial arts teachers in the Seattle area. And it
wasn't the competition per se. It was more that they
viewed kung fu as an important part of Chinese culture
and they thought that it should be taught only to
people who were Chinese or of Chinese descent. So how
(15:39):
did they settle this, Well, did they take him to court. No,
they decided to have a kung fu off and the
other teachers, the ones who thought teaching Chinese martial arts
should be exclusively for Chinese students. They got together and
they sent their best guy, Wang jack Man.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, so this is nineteen sixty four and Bruce, I mean,
we will see this, right, But Bruce is not does
not take well to being challenged. Bruce has a little
bit of an ego on him. He's got a little
bit of arrogance to him, which is understandable because he
is better than everybody that he encounters. Right, he doesn't
get beat up ever again after he starts training with
(16:18):
hit Man and and he says, okay, yeah, you want
to Okay, well we can do this kung fu off.
I'm totally down for it. And so in nineteen sixty four,
him and Wang jack Man are going to fight. I'm
just gonna give you Bruce Lee's personal accounting of what
happens in this encounter. So we had talked about, I
(16:40):
believe before we had talked about the Chevalier de Saint
George and how the different schools were going to duel
and have a battle to see what school was superior.
And one jack Man is older than Bruce Lee, and
we're more trained and more experienced. He's a grand master
and Bruce Lee is kind of this up and coming,
you know, twenty something punk kid who who wants to
(17:00):
teach martial arts and they're going to fight. And here's
what Bruce said about this fight in an interview he
gave to black Belt Magazine. I gotten into a fight
in San Francisco with a kung fu cat and after
a brief encounter, the son of a bitch started to run.
I chased him and like a fool, kept punching him
behind his head and back. Soon my fists began to
(17:22):
swell from hitting his hard head. Right then I realized
Wing chung was not too practical and began to alter
my way of fighting. So while Jackman goes on to
train people who like MMA fighters who fight on the
Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit, but not only was Bruce Lee
kind of disillusioned with the martial arts style because the
(17:42):
grand master he had defeated in like three minutes. He
was also kind of mad at himself because he thought
should have taken less time to beat this guy up.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
He's hard on himself. He's a perfectionist.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
I mean, I think that's the only way to get
to the level that he attained, right, He is extremely
hard on himself. Yeah, and so he kind of gets
really really into training and also into the philosophy of
martial arts. I don't know, have you ever done any
kind of martial arts taken, like a martial arts class
or anything like that.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
No, I haven't really, but you have been right.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Yeah, So I took martial arts for maybe ten years
when I was in high school and college and stuff,
So I have spent a lot of time with it.
And you know, it's not just about how to defend
yourself if somebody tries to beat you up, or how
to beat up your enemies. There is a whole like
philosophy of behind this, and I think we do encounter
this a little bit in ancient Greece, where there's some
(18:37):
kind of combination of philosophy, art and sport. You know,
kind of it's a mindset and there's some really cool
stuff that Bruce Lee comes up with here. So what
he creates in nineteen sixty five is a martial arts
style called g Kundo. Bruce is kind of ahead of
his time in that he's studying anatomy and physics and
philosophy and trying to put all of that into his
(18:57):
fighting style, So g kundo is the the way of
the intercepting fist. Bruce had kind of grown up doing
wing chung and boxing, but what he wanted to do
was he calls it.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
The form of no form.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
He says that quote, I hope to free my followers
from clinging to styles, patterns.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Or molds.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
You have to adapt, right, You have to.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Adapt, And he says, you know, the idea is kind
of One of the ways it's described is that not
everybody can fit into a size forty two coat. So
you can't have this very rigid rules on how the
fighting style works, and here's how you fight, and here's
how you do it, and you do it exactly this
way every single time. You know, you got to get
that coat tailored to fit you. And what Bruce wants
(19:37):
to do is kind of take things from everywhere and
let's see what works, let's see what doesn't work, Let's
see what works for me versus what works for you.
We got to be adaptable and open to new ideas
and open to incorporating things that you know, thinking outside
the box, not just with your fighting style but also
just in life.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
To be adaptable. And I think there's some really cool
stuff with that.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah, sounds like teaching. Actually, yes, you know, you have
ways and philosophies and methods of teaching, but ultimately you
have to find a way that works for the particular
students in front of you in a particular moment.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
It's an it's an eclectic philosophy, and eclectic as in
like capital E eclecticism, which is just like adaptability. Right,
what you know, there is no there is no schematic
for how to do this. Don't You can't do it
exactly like this every time and it will always work.
He gives a great interview, and it's one that you'll
see a lot if you do any kind of research
(20:36):
on him or YouTube being on him or whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
And he says, be formless, shapeless like water. This is
what it is.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
Okay, I said, empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless like water.
Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.
You put water into a bottle would be I'm used
a bottle. You're putting a teapot, It become used a teapot.
(21:03):
Now water can flow, how it can crash? Be water
on my phone?
Speaker 1 (21:11):
And that was kind of the strategy he took towards
fighting and towards training. He was extremely hardcore about working
out and training from the very beginning. As far as
training goes, Bruce Lee is kind of famous for having
all of these crazy, weird, innovative, I guess training regimens.
(21:34):
He would do, you know, we all do push up
sit ups, that kind of thing when we're trying to
work out at home without any tools or anything. But
he would do two finger push ups thumb and four finger,
and he could it was said he could do something
on the order of two hundred of those in a row.
He would do some with like he would do one
hand with his other hand behind his back, so just
off the two fingers, or he could do both thumbs.
(21:57):
He would do push ups like that, you know, one
armed China. He would fill heavy bags with gravel so
that he could punch and kick them and toughen up
his knuckles and his feet and also because regular heavy
bags were too light for him. And if you watch
those videos of him punching these heavy bags and it's
a it's a heavy bag. It's the kind of thing
you see in like a boxing gym, and you watch
(22:18):
you can watch a video of a boxer punching a
punching bag. Then you watch Bruce Lee and the thing
is flying all over the place. He was not a
huge guy. He was super ripped. I mean, as you
can tell because he's always kind of shirtless in his movies.
But it wasn't a very like huge guy like height
and weight wise. But he would generate just unbelievable amounts
of power that are kind of we're kind of unprecedented.
(22:41):
He had a His diet was generally raw blended hamburger meat,
which just, yeah, sounds awful.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Well, I guess, I guess we could call it steak
tartar or something like that, or carpacciotare fancy names for meat.
He don't sound convinced now, I'm not. But it worked
for him.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yes, it worked for him.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
It worked for him.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
He had an exercise called the Dragon Flag where he
would just lay on his back and like but he
could lift his entire body up from like just his
shoulder in the back of his head would touch the
ground and he'd grab onto something and he could lift
the entire rest of his body up off the mat
and hold it for seconds or minutes at a time.
He liked to train his reflexes and his manual dexterity
(23:28):
by throwing grains of rice up in the air and
catching them with chopsticks. He was apparently extremely talented at
doing this, and that might have been the inspiration for
you know, mister Miyagi catching the fly with chopsticks and
the karate kid. Anyway, So he's off doing all of
these things. He is training really hard, he's creating his
own martial art. He's teaching it to people he's not
supposed to be teaching it too. He's kind of a rebel.
(23:49):
And in nineteen sixty four he gets the opportunity to
demonstrate a lot of this stuff at the World Karate
Championships in Long Beach, California. He goes up on stage
and he demonstrates these two finger pushups and the dragon
flag and his workout style, and Patty demonstrates a couple
of other unique skills that he has.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, including the famous one inch punch. So imagine Bruce
Lee standing in front of you, like very in front
of you, very close in front of you, and you okay,
I say you as if this applies to anyone, but
a general member of the public shouldn't be doing this.
You should be a trained martial arts person because it
takes some stamina to be the recipient of this move
(24:33):
from Bruce Lee. So you're standing there and Bruce Lee
is standing in front of you, and behind you is
a chair, and Bruce Lee extends his arm out and
puts his hand. It's there in the air, very still,
right in front of your apps, right in front of
your stomach, and he's perfectly still, and then something happens.
(24:58):
He curls his fingers into a fist and then just
thrust it one inch into your gut.
Speaker 5 (25:06):
Bam, you go flying back six feet into the chair.
And that's the one inch punch. He's able to generate
the energy from his legs and the way he stands
and channel that into his fingers. It's called fog in
or explosive power, and bam, there you go flying back
(25:27):
into the chair.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
And there's video of this. These guys like they are
martial arts like experts. They're there for the World Karate Championships.
They're wearing their gee's and their black belts. And these
guys get hit and they hit that chair and the
chair slides across the floor or these dudes kind of
hit the chair and bounce out and hit the ground
like they don't land, like if they don't land perfectly
(25:49):
on it, or if they're trying to like fight it
too hard. They hit the ground and brustally gets up
there and he does these demonstrations in front of I
mean a humongous audience of you know, Marshall arts maniacs, right,
people who are super into this stuff. He comes back
in sixty seven and he does it again at a
different World Karate championship. He's got a move called the
Unstoppable Punch where he got the world champion.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Vic Moore, who is also a badass.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
He stands there and Bruce Lee stands six feet away
from him and is like, block me before I punch
you in the face, and he gets He's so fast.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
There's video of this.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
And I absolutely recommend that you watch it. Bruce covers
six feet and gets his fist in this guy's face
and the dude barely moves. The dude doesn't flinch until
Bruce has already stopped with his fist an inch from
this guy's face. And this is a world karate champion
he had just beaten up. Like all of the greatest
fighters in the world. Vic Moore got annoyed and was like,
give me another try, and Bruce gave him six and
(26:46):
he did the same thing every single.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Time, and vic Moore couldn't block it.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
And then he tried it with a bunch of other people's,
any other volunteers, and nobody could stop this.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
It was the unstoppable punch.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And that's a Bruce Lee thing that he was famous for,
just kind of showing up at the World Karate Championships
in sixty four and sixty six, not competing in them,
and then giving a demonstration that was just like I'm
the best one here.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Just so you know, yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
He would do another trick later on, where he would
stand the same thing six feet away from you. He'd
tell you to put a quarter in your palm and
hold your arm out as far as like maximum extension
of your hand and put the coin in the palm
of your hand, and he would say, don't let me
steal his quarter. Close your fist, close your hand before
I take this quarter from you. Lightning flash. You'd get
(27:32):
your hand closed, he'd hold the quarter up and when
you opened your fist, you would see you had a penny.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
In your hand.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Wow wow.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
And so that's kind of what we're dealing with here,
and his demonstrations at these karate tournaments, especially the one
in nineteen sixty four, end up being kind of a
springboard for him to enter Hollywood and enter film because
as stories of this guy up until this point, he's
(28:03):
kind of just basically famous in the martial arts world.
But you know, he's in California, things are going well,
like he's kind of a celebrity. He's, you know, the
best of the best at this and Hollywood starts calling
for him. And when we get back, we are going
to get into the beginnings of Bruce Lee's film career. Okay,
(28:34):
and welcome back. We are talking about Bruce Lee, who
up until this point in the story has been kind
of a martial arts celebrity and he is about to
become an international film and TV celebrity. So in nineteen
sixty six, Season one of The Green Hornet comes out.
(28:55):
The Green Hornet is a kind of a superhero type
of show. The Green Hornet is a detective and Bruce Lee,
all of his success with the demonstrations he's put on
at these Long Beach International karate tournaments, they get him
a role as Kato, who is the chauffeur for the
(29:15):
Green Hornet, kind of like the Robin to the Green
Hornets Batman, and I use that analogy because it's by
the same producers. So the guys who created Green Hornet
were also the guys who created the Adam West Batman show.
So kind of the iconic moment from this that kind
of introduced Bruce Lee to the world is there's a
(29:36):
bit where Kato there's a light hanging from the ceiling
and Bruce Lee as Cato, enters and he does a
jumping front kick and breaks the light with his foot
that at the time was pretty mind blowing. We're a
little bit desensitized to seeing really badass martial arts in movies.
We've seen Jason Stathan movies, We've seen The Matrix, We've
(29:56):
seen stuff like that. But at the time nineteen sixty
this show was on primetime TV back to back with
Adam West's Batman. So if you think about the fights
in that series, the pow thwock zapp you know, guys
wrestling around.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
You mentioned Star Trek.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
This is like Captain Kirk time period, with the double
hand hammer fists and the open hand Karate Chop and
you know what's in the movies right now, Thunderball, Goldfinger,
like that time period, the James Bond stuff, which he
wasn't doing a whole lot of martial arts. I mean,
I'd wager that probably the most badass fight sequence in
television or film history up until this point might have
(30:33):
been maybe the train fight from Russia with Love, where
Sean Connery fights that guy in the train compartment. But
that's nothing like jumping front kick, flying sidekick, any of
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
No, Yeah, it's good stage fighting, but it's not this
next level stuff that all of a sudden Bruce Lee
is putting on the scene.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
And you know, we had action movies, but there's a
lot of cowboy movies and war movies, a lot of shooting.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Most of the fighting was punching and stuff. You didn't
see a lot of kicks.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
He didn't see a lot of the speed that Bruce
Lee brings to the table. And we've talked about the
unstoppable punch and the stealing the quarter.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
He was fast.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
He was extremely fast, and that actually caused a problem
on the set of Green Hornet because in nineteen sixty six,
right now we can do whatever, sixty frames per second,
we can do HD, you know all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
But movie camera in nineteen.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Sixty six it was lucky if it could hit twenty
four frames per second, and according to legend, Bruce Lee
could punch nine times in one second. So they said
that there was footage from Seizon one of The Green
Hornet where it looks like Bruce Lee is standing perfectly
still and everybody around him is falling down because the
camera couldn't catch him. He was moving too fast and
(31:45):
it looked funny on camera. So what they ended up
having to do was to make him slow down, and
he still looks fast. If you watch reruns from the show,
he still looks really fast, but he had to slow
down to like fifty percent speed so that the camera
could catch him doing the things that he was doing,
which is just awesome. Yeah, So The Green Hornet only
runs for one season and it just doesn't catch on
(32:06):
and it gets canceled. And Bruce Lee is in Hollywood
now and he's doing some bit roles here and there,
and you know, one of these American producers says, you know,
you kind of have this cred of being an American
film and TV star. Now, why don't you go back
to Hong Kong make a couple of movies there. Hong
(32:27):
Kong has You know, It's a thing worth talking about
with Bruce Lee is that he didn't invent martial arts movies.
He wasn't the first ever kung fu movie star. Hong
Kong has been doing these films for a while, but
they just didn't have an American audience at the time.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Yeah, So his producer in the States says, why don't
you go back to Hong Kong make a couple of
movies there, and then I can leverage that if you
make a movie in Hong Kong, I can leverage it
into something that I can sell in the States. Okay,
why not? Bruce goes back to Hong Kong. He talks
a little bit with the Shaw brothers and ends up
signing with a company called Golden Harvest, and he makes
a movie called The Big Boss and it blows up.
(33:05):
It makes him a huge celebrity in China and eventually
in the US as well, and it's the first of
like kind of the five main Bruce Lee movies that
everybody talks about when they think about this guy so
he did Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Return of the Dragon,
Enter the Dragon, in Game of Death. Those are the
five big ones. And I had talked about Midnight kung Fu,
(33:27):
but like, they wouldn't show any of these movies at
midnight kung Fu because it's not cheesy enough and it's
too mainstream or whatever.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
You know.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, And I don't know, Pat, have you seen any
of these? You watched a lot of movies, not really
a few clips here and there. Yeah, they hold up okay,
especially Enter the Dragon. They hold up fine. But it's
you know, it's it's hard to if you hadn't seen, say,
for instance, The Big Boss, and you've watched a lot
of Avengers and The Matrix, it's it's kind of hard
(33:57):
to go back and watch some of the older stuff.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Put it in historical perspective. Nothing comes out of a vacuum.
And one of the reasons we have these moves in
the Matrix and the Avengers movies is because we've had
Bruce Lee and other martial artists on screen paving the way.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Right, you know, before Enter the Dragon, Sean Connery is
kind of punching a guy in a train compartment after
Bruce Lee, Daniel Craig is doing judo throws and yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
And that sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
So, you know, this is an interesting thing when you're
studying history of any kind, right, even you know, say
sports history. You have Steph Curry who does all of these,
you know, amazing dribbling, amazing ball control dribbling techniques.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
But he grew up watching Doctor J. And Doctor J's
stuff doesn't.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Look as good now, but it's because when he did it,
nobody had ever seen it before. And then Steph Curry
grew up learning like watching Doctor J and trying to
emulate that and build upon that. So everything kind of
builds and grows based on what came before.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
And in addition to the martial arts moves, we also
have nunchucks being introduced to American audiences. Yes, people in
the States hadn't really seen nun chucks.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah, that was a pretty new thing. That was a
pretty new thing here, and it's awesome. I love nunchucks. Yeah, yeah,
I suck at them, but I like them. And well,
we see the influence of a lot of these movies today.
So Mortal Kombat came out of Enterre the Dragon, the
old kung Fu Master game, came from Game of Death.
You know, fighting game heroes to this day always kind
(35:34):
of seemed to make some Bruce Lee noises. So Bruce
Cosney makes these movies and they end up, you know,
getting big in in Hong Kong and China, but also
in the US. And it's how he kind of introduces
the Western world to martial arts and like you said,
nun chucks and fighting movies and even some like Jackie
Chan's first movie was as a stuntman. He gets punched
(35:56):
in the head during Enter the Dragon, Samuel Hung is
introduced to the Western audiences. I have a personal love
of Jim Kelly as black Belt Jones, which was from
Enter the Dragon as well, but then he ended up
getting a couple of action movies of his own, and
even it's even how the world was introduced to Chuck Norris.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Yeah, and Chuck Norris in a way is the canonical badass.
I say this because there have been Chuck Norris memes
going around the Internet for I don't know, a decade
and a half at least, and maybe they existed even
before the Internet. You know, there's a picture of Chuck
Norris on a landline and it says Chuck Norris catches
(36:34):
all the Pokemon from a landline, and you know, and
then there's a picture of Chuck Norris with thumbs up.
Chuck Norris hit eleven out of ten targets with nine
bullets and you know it's supposed to be goofy. But
I'm saying this to say, this is the reputation Chuck
Norris has in a way. He's the canonical badass and
(37:00):
comes along.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah, and Bruce Lee kind of introduced him to the world.
At the time, Chuck Norris was just. He was just,
but he was a world karate champion, but he wasn't
an actor. Bruce and him had been training together a
little bit. He got Chuck Norris his first acting role
in Return of the Dragon. It's also known as The
Way of the Dragon. It's the only movie that Bruce
Lee wrote and directed. He wrote, directed, and stars in
(37:23):
it and got Chuck Norris to be the bad guy
in it. Chuck Norris begrudgingly was like, do I have
to get beat up? And Bruce is like, yeah, you
got to get beat up. And Chuck was like, all right,
well I'm going to give you a good fight though, Okay,
we can do that, and it's it's really like, you know,
the most Bruce Lee gets beat up in any of
his movies is in this like fantastic martial arts sequence
at the end of Return of the Dragon. Yeah, Chuck
(37:46):
of course goes on to be one of America's first,
like you know, American born martial arts heroes and kind
of the iconic one as you mentioned, but it's just
a it's a cool story.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Yeah, and he in a way got his start through
Bruce Lee.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Yeah, exactly, and a lot of people did, right, So, yeah,
Bruce is not just groundbreaking in the fact that he was,
you know, bringing martial arts to American audiences, but he's
also inspirational to a lot of He's an Asian American lead.
He's an Asian man leading a movie right that is
successful in the US, And he's the first real Asian
(38:20):
movie star, first real martial arts hero, and he's inspirational
to a lot of people who kind of came after him.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:27):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
He kind of paved the way for basically a non
white person to be the lead in a movie, which
he got a lot of blowback.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
On of course. Yeah, that's how things work.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Yeah, But after this, like you have. Like I said,
Hong Kong's been making martial arts movies for a long time,
and so maybe not even just in front of the camera.
But what you end up with after this is Hollywood
directors and producers are like, we need to do martial
arts in our movies. We need to step up the
fighting in our movies. And so they bring over Hong
(38:58):
Kong action here, choreographers, stunt directors, and you start to
see an influx of, you know, diversity in Hollywood cinema,
of people coming over and getting into positions they that
were closed to them before.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah, totally. And Bruce Lee is playing an action hero.
He's not playing a stereotypical villain, yes, which was one
of the stereotypes for roles that Asian American actors were
kind of steered into playing before this.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Yeah, And like as we saw with Christopher Lee playing
Fu Manchu a lot of times, like they cast a
white actor in that Asian role right as the bad guy, which.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Is just bad all around.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, you know, so this is kind of groundbreaking and
it opens a lot of doors for people to come
past it. The most successful movie that Bruce Lee had
in the States and the first real American major release
of a martial arts movie was Enter the Dragon in
nineteen seventy three. Sadly, Bruce Lee wasn't able to attend
(40:04):
the premiere. He passed away six days before its release.
He had a cerebral edema and died at age thirty two,
just kind of right in the prime of his life.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, and there were a lot of theories circulating his
untimely death. We're not going to deal with them here.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Yeah, Yeah, I really don't want to get into any
of the conspiracy theory stuff that circulates around Bruce Lee's
death there is, except to say that maybe there's like
a fascination with that sort of thing of people who
were taken out of the world in their prime, right,
the James Dean's, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, keep Ledger, you know,
(40:43):
even a JFK. Right, somebody who was kind of at
the height of their like just huge rising star and
then it's over. He left behind a wife and two kids,
one of them was Brandon Lee, who played the Crow
before his own untimely death on the set of of
that movie. Enter the Dragon goes on to gross four
(41:03):
hundred million dollars worldwide, becomes a huge hit, and it
kind of creates a whole new genre of like copycat
you know, martial arts movies. And that's kind of what
you were alluding to before when you were talking about
Bruce sploitation, right, placitation.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And some of these Bruce sploitators or
Bruce Lee imitators actually would use variations on the name
Bruce Lee as their stage name, misspelling it creatively. Kind
of reminds me of Annie Oakley and Annie Oakley's.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Pploitation arrested for cocaine possession.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Well yeah, yeah, And even before people were getting arrested
for cocaine, there were people using there were other women
using kind of versions of her name as their stage names,
and they just wanted to ride the crust of popularity.
So but we're here to talk about actual Bruce Lee,
not his imitators.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Yes, but he was such a cultural phenomenon that it
inspired imitators, which is kind of worth mentioning. Yes, the
final movie of his career, Game of Death, is basically
it's a Bruce Lee movie, but it's also bruce'sploitation. He
had filmed parts of it before he left to go
do enter the dragon and the film company was trying
(42:19):
to capitalize on his success, and they finished the movie
with only fifteen minutes of Bruce Lee in the movie.
Only fifteen minutes of him make the final cut. They
used body doubles, and they used stock footage. They used
clips from other movies to try to finish this thing. Nowadays,
they just like cg it.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah, like with Star Wars.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
One of the only bits that exists exists from that
is that fight with Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who was one
of Bruce's students in real life.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Yeah, and that's that's iconic.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
That's iconic. Yeah, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar is a badass
in his own right, but that's the story for another day.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Absolutely absolutely great, like big time sports badass.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Kareem's awesome.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, this is the you know, the yellow jumpsuit and
he fights Kareem and Bruce's maybe five eight and Kareem
is like seven to two, so the fight is really impressive.
But yeah, that movie was kind of has a place
in the Bruce Lee library, and it's not necessarily a
really positive one because of how much the studio manipulated
(43:17):
his likeness to try it I think at one point
in it, he gets plastic surgery to look different, and
that's how they get like the Bruce Lee impersonator to
you know, if they have to show his face, it's
not great, but that scene is great. It sounds like
it was slapped together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about
Star Wars where they put the CGI faces DH people
(43:39):
and all that stuff. That's how they do it now,
which I argue is not that much more tasteful than
what they were doing back then. But you know, bringing
Peter Kushing back from the dead to play grand mof
Tarking again, I don't know how I feel about that.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
But yeah, but it's a thing that Hollywood does, however
we may feel about it.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Yes, everybody wants to capitalize. I mean even Quentin Tarantino.
Quentin Tarantino did him extremely dirty and once upon a
time in Hollywood, but he also like ripped off the
yellow tracksuit and the one inch punch for kill Bill,
So who knows what's happening there.
Speaker 4 (44:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
So anyway, Bruce was a pioneer for Asian actors, for
stunt coordinators, choreographers, for martial arts in general. I think
Dana White of the UFC once referred to him as
the father of mixed martial arts. The Gracie family, who
are very influential in Brazilian jiu jitsu, they talk about
him as one of the greats, and not just because
he was doing some martial arts movie stuff, but he
(44:33):
was also doing you know, leglocks, he does an arm
bar and enter the Dragon. He was doing groundwork. He
was really into the science of fighting and adapting a
little bit of everything from the different styles, and that
is kind of how mma works today. And he was also,
you know, in addition to all of that, he was
a philosopher and a writer. He wrote and directed Way
(44:54):
of the Dragon, as I said, and he also pitched
a show called Warrior when he was towards the end
of his life. It was a show that was going
to be about a traveling monk who was going around
during the Old West and having adventures. You had mentioned
earlier that your dad was a big Kung Fu fan,
and Bruce's pitch was rejected because they didn't want any
(45:15):
Asian leads in a TV show. They didn't think that
was going to sell. But then the next year they
came out with a show called Kung Fu starring David
Carodine and it was a hugely successful series.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
Yep, that's what I grew up with in the background.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, and they actually made a show called Warrior now
it's on HBO and they do credit him as the
creator of it, and it does have Asian American lead actors,
which I think is cool.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
So that's the story of Bruce Lee. He was more
than just an actor. He was a martial artist. He
was kind of a groundbreaking person and a really fascinating
badass character and broke down a lot more doors than
just like the physical ones.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Indeed, all right, well, I think that is all we
have for today.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
We really hope that you guys liked the show, and
please don't forget to subscribe and share this with your
friends because that really helps us out a lot. Thank
you guys so much as always for listening, and we're
looking forward to seeing you on the next one.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
Stay Badass, but be water, I said mt.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
Your mind before this, Share this be water on my friend.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, me Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by Me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.
(46:55):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart that Is of
the Week based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.
(47:16):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as. We'll
be back next week with another one. For more podcasts
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