Kung fu fighter chinese movie
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It came back in a new form in the 1980s as a ninja craze, again driven by cinema, with Enter the Ninja an early contender in 1981. While the kung fu craze died down, it didn't go away completely. Karate and other Asian martial arts moved from being an often rather rough hobby for adults into much more of a youth activity, eventually leading to modern strip-mall karate/TKD where 3/4 of the students are young children. Martial arts schools grew, and some trained to sometimes dubious levels of skill and went off and started their own schools. Following WW2, there had been growth in the teaching of Asian martial arts in the US, with ex-servicemen who had learned karate and judo in Japan starting to teach and immigrants from Asia starting to teach. Many young people looked for martial arts training, and found it. It persisted longer in popular culture, crossing over into comics, toys, etc., and drove the popularity of kickboxing. Imitation followed success, and many more kung fu movies hit the cinemas, many of low quality, many Brucesploitation movies (starring Bruce Li, Bruce Le, etc.), and with the genre no longer fresh and new compared to what had come before, the craze faded in the box office. For Bruce Lee, this was a posthumous hit, with the US release about 1 month after his sudden death. Warner Brothers co-produced Enter the Dragon with Golden Harvest, for an even bigger hit.
#Kung fu fighter chinese movie movie
Box office success and popular visibility grew with successive movies, with Bruce Lee's US movie debut, Fists of Fury followed by his even more successful The Chinese Connection (AKA Fist of Fury), which was a major hit in Hong Kong, Europe, and Japan as well as in the US. The kung fu craze was not just a product of marketing - clearly, people liked the movies. Warner managed three simultaneous hits, with Five Fingers of Death still in the top 5 after 2 months, Deep Thrust (AKA Deep Thrust: The Hand of Death AKA Lady Whirlwind) from Golden Harvest at number 2, and their most recent release, Fists of Fury (AKA The Big Boss), also Golden Harvest and Bruce Lee's first Hong Kong movie, at number 1.įive Fingers of Death wasn't widely advertised, and word-of-mouth played a big role in its success. The Shaw Brothers had competitors: Golden Harvest was providing stiff competition for them, and Warner Brothers distributed Golden Harvest product, too, also with success. Five Fingers of Death stayed in the top ten box office hits for months - Warner Brothers' gamble had worked. They were the first major studio to distribute such movies in the US, beginning with Five Fingers of Death (AKA King Boxer) in 1973 (first releasing it in Europe, and then in the US). Next, Warner Brothers, in some financial difficulty, gambled on distributing some of these Hong Kong movies in the US - a cheaper gamble than making new movies. Shaw Brothers saw they were onto a good thing, and continued in the genre. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers revitalised the kung fu film in the late '60s, starting with the hugely successful and sequel-spawning One-Armed Swordsman.
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For example, judo in The Avengers (the British TV series), karate in The Manchurian Candidate and Goldfinger and ninjas in You Only Live Twice.
Bruce Lee rode the crest of the craze, and helped drive it to its peak, but the craze began before him.Īsian martial arts had started appearing in cinema and television already in the 1960s.
#Kung fu fighter chinese movie full
The full story is a little more complicated. Many would summarise it in two words: Bruce Lee.