윤

I don’t think the folks at Arrow really did much to improve the picture quality over the early 2000’s Celestial remaster of the abominable HK cut, whose nonsensical editing (like that whole minute of Taiwanese schoolkids to close out the movie) makes me glad that at least with respect to co-existing versions of Chinatown Kid, we grew up in the right timeline. Dedicated commentary, too, but I’m still baffled where the 13 Gigs went… I suppose that’s me being cheap with storage, hung up on an age when you had only 90 minutes for the good recording speed on L-750 tapes. No explanation for that “Yeah, great kungfu” delivery, either, even after reviewing the dubbing in Mandarin. And I wasn’t sure if I had called this out in the past, but the Porsche badges on those San Francisco cops who scare off one of Fu Sheng’s fights ominously foreshadow his own death.

Jumped up surprisingly sprightly for my recent lethargy when a crash woke me at 4am. First thing I checked was the crib, of course, but the sound was more like broken glass, which led me to one of the small windows above us. It’s the second to have cracked, from who knows what, the house settling (or the builders themselves, for cheap materials), space/time anomaly, or as 老婆 was speculating as I fell back to sleep, pressure from the temperature changes. It’s hard to tell, isn’t it, dream from reality, but the immediate daylight was a giveaway, not to mention the ninja peering inside. And as ill-advised as it might’ve been in the one but not the other, I head-butted him through the dangerous pane.

It’s replies like this that have always made me question the tactical value of self-deprecation. (Touché? I think back to fights with others, who’d be like, I guess I’m just not as smart as you. Except in this case, it’s some total stranger who walks in on us and says it.) If it’s the truth, then there was no point in arguing in the first place, was there? And if it was simply meant as sarcasm, then what message is conveyed other than a lack of one of your own, and by backing down like this against an assertion of righteousness, however—no, especially rife for scorn—aren’t you only revealing an inferiority complex? And why have a battle of wills with someone who deep down knows he’s wrong, anyway?

Shih Kien played Mr. Han in Enter the Dragon, and was voiced-over by Keye Luke, Master Po in David Carradine‘s Kung Fu, which of course was conceived by and meant to star Bruce Lee. The last episode: “Full Circle.”

Young Caine: What is the greatest obligation we have?
Master Po: To live, Grasshopper. To live!

…That’s my theory, anyway. I put it together after watching 바람의 파이터 (which come on, wasn’t as nationalistic as they claim) about 在日韓国人の大山倍達, né 최영의, and guessed that the boys at Capcom must’ve had 「空手ばか一代」 on the mind when designing their country’s representative—who was E. Honda; just watch his victory celebration. Although maybe the look came later. Their new movie appears to be further proof that mankind is incapable of learning from its mistakes and moving forward, at least on a scale visible to us with lifespans measured only in decades. So last night I had a dream I was also a bad-ass martial artist taking on all-comers. Me and House teamed up to solve super-crimes. Oh, and Alvin deserves special recognition for getting us the Season 4 DVD’s.

Again, YouTube trumps the product:

Its Wiki warned me that this new print, as pristine as it looks, is missing enough to be considered a new work—”under Chinese law”, it adds—but I guess I can’t see how the original could add any more to the limited premise, unless maybe Lo Meng showed up in those 20 minutes, to categorize this another Chinatown Kid calamity. (Come to think of it, “Iron Face” did disappear at the end. He just didn’t live up to his name, like Brass Head, or even having one.) The final scene, which alas requires too much setup to be included in my tribute video, came back to me from the awful Mandarin-language VHS copy I bought from a collector in New York more than a decade ago; what times we live in now, having the English dub a button away!

Seeing Kuo Chui and Lu Feng go at it again is worth a hundred Jacky Chan-Jet Li first time-togethers, but The Forbidden Kingdom did have a nice opening credit sequence harking back to the good ol’ days, when choreography prevailed over editing, an assembly line statistically guaranteed a gem or two instead of working backwards, and movie poster collections were a bookmark away. Chinese laws, maybe.