Bruce Lee

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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Episode Transcript:

Hong Kong. 1958. The music plays as Li Jun Fan’s feet deftly move back and forth. The cha cha rhythm carries him and his partner across the dance floor. The small crowd cheers. He’s graceful and elegant. 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 lighting quick maneuvers, and vicious punches that send challengers sprawling. One by one he’ll mercilessly crush his foes, battering them with his fists, feet, wooden sticks, even a pair of nunchucks.

Today, he’s about to be the Cha Cha Champion of Hong Kong. But tomorrow, he’ll be BRUCE. LEE.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson and I am here, as always, with my co-hosts, Dr. Pat Larry Fat. Today we are. We're talking about kung fu movies. Do you have are you a kung fu movie fan or do you have a favorite kung fu movie?

Pat [00:01:16] I don't know if I have a favorite kung fu movie per say. 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 set in the Old West.

Ben [00:01:37] Oh, yeah. Which is great. Yeah. And the Legend continues. Which was from the nineties.

Pat [00:01:42] Yeah. And I was young and I thought that the kung fu movies were kind of funny. But I think I grew an appreciation for them because now, you know, I enjoy seeing Jackie Chan or Michelle Yeoh in a very well choreographed martial arts scene.

Ben [00:01:54] Yeah, like when I was just out of college, they used to have an on when I was living in Boston, actually when I was out on Comm AV in Boston, one of the theaters that was maybe like two or three stops away on the T would do midnight kung Fu movies. And so every Saturday night, I believe, yeah, at 12:00 they'd shoot near I guess it started at like 11. 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 whoa, yeah, there's this little like a robot monster called the Watermelon Monster that, like, shocks you with, like, it's little electric hands. And it it's got like, a it basically looks like a big robot Pac-Man, and it tries to, like, bite you. Okay. Yeah, There was another one I liked. It was called The Return of the Five Deadly Venoms. And it was some Shore 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 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 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 sounds really gruesome, but it's it's honestly, it's like kind of funny when you watch it.

Pat [00:03:27] 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.

Ben [00:03:33] 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 Lakeshore 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 arts now, and you've got John Wick and the Fast and Furious guys all know martial 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.

Pat [00:04:07] Yeah, You've got The Matrix.

Ben [00:04:09] Yeah.

Pat [00:04:09] Even in recent Star Trek series, Star Trek Discovery, which features Michelle Yeoh, you do have her using some martial arts moves to beat up bad guys.

Ben [00:04:19] Yeah, it's a big transition from Captain Kirk's open hand judo chop and double hammer fists to knock guys out. Right. The way that action has been filmed in in recent years is 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.

Pat [00:04:37] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:04:38] Now, you know, I you know, as a historian, there's always kind of and a podcaster and a blogger and all of the things that I that I kind of do. You always kind of looking for significant dates with which to air your things. And I've generally kind of shied away from, 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 to talk about that.

Pat [00:05:03] 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 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach birth. And then some years later, we might be celebrating the 250th anniversary of his death. And it's really an excuse to or a pretext to celebrate their life and work.

Ben [00:05:40] Yeah, And that's that's kind of what we're going to do today. So it has been 50 years since the death of Bruce Lee, and he is a hero of mine. And you know, I am of film in. TV star that I really admire and I enjoy his work. And also it just so happens that he's buried two blocks from my house and I, I walk past his his gravesite. Most most days when I'm either going up to the store or taking the baby out for a walk. So I walk past the graveyard where he where 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 actually. I'd never actually gone to his grave before, even though I live there and I walk past it pretty much every day. It's inside of a cemetery and, you know, I don't.

Pat [00:06:31] Oh, yeah.

Ben [00:06:32] Yeah, yeah. 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.

Pat [00:06:38] So, No, no. You know, you kind of need a reason to do that. Yeah, I guess I am. I'm not as fazed as much by the idea of going into a cemetery. Respectfully, of course.

Ben [00:06:48] Yeah, but I went and I paid respects for you, and thank you.

Pat [00:06:52] Yeah.

Ben [00:06:53] As 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 seem to be little flowers and tributes left behind, which is, which is very cool. So in memory of 50 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 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 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, Blacklight posters of Bruce Lee, but who was he really? And, you know, is there there's a lot more going on here than just the 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 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. in the year of the Dragon, according to the Chinese zodiac set in 1940. He was born in San Francisco, but he grew up in Hong Kong. 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 18, he'd appeared in almost 20 films. I think his first speaking role was at the age of six, in one of one of his father's movies. So growing up in China, Bruce got it. Bruce was 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 you know, he he liked to fight. He always liked to fight. And at some point, he'd 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 and beat him up pretty good. So he ended up studying Wing Chun Kung Fu from a guy named Yip Man, who is a big famous folk hero in China. There's a bunch of movies about him, although none of them are like very historically accurate. But he's like a he's a he's a folk hero in China. I think there's Donnie Yen has done like five different man movies now and and they're great, but they're kind of pretty out.

Pat [00:09:51] There Don't take them as historical documentation.

Ben [00:09:53] 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, he they take a lot of creative license. Mm hmm. Anyway, so Bruce starts studying, fighting and kung fu, and he's got an aptitude for it. In 1958, at the age of 17, 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 Cha-Cha Dance competition.

Pat [00:10:31] Which, hey, he's got the moves.

Ben [00:10:32] He's got the moves, and there's a lot of stuff. So is 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.

Pat [00:10:47] Yeah, Yeah.

Ben [00:10:48] 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 pass. Yeah.

Pat [00:11:04] Yeah.

Ben [00:11:05] Anyway, so he is in 1958, 1959. Bruce is kind of this young punk teenager kind of guy. He's, you know, he's doing fighting school and he is is 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, another one saying that like he was fighting against various other street gangs. But in 1959, he gets in trouble because he he beats up the son of like a pretty powerful triad leader in Hong Kong.

Pat [00:11:38] And the Triads are Chinese organized crime syndicates.

Ben [00:11:41] Yeah, basically Chinese mafia. And yeah, beating up the son of a powerful guy in that realm is 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, 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. 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 going to put Bruce down some pretty bad roads.

Pat [00:12:15] Yes. Yeah. So he needs to skip town.

Ben [00:12:17] 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 enrolls in the University of Washington. He's studying philosophy and drama. And I think it's it's funny to mention that he got a C in gymnastics, which seems like really? Yeah. Shows you like his commitment to, like, the school. I guess he was not a great student. I think he had, like, a 1.8 GPA. I read somewhere. Hey. 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. First he was doing it for free. It was just kind of his friends and people nearby that like, might have wanted 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 meet 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, this is the thing you can do. Yeah. He says, Okay, okay. And so he opens a school that's called the Legion. Fang Kung Fu Institute. Yeah. And Legion Fang was his Chinese name.

Pat [00:13:28] And yeah, his family name, which we pronounce as Li, uses the same Chinese character as the last name of Jet Li, who spells it Ally. And even though the Americanized versions of their names are spelled differently, they're still using the same Chinese character, Li, which translates to plum or plum tree. Jet Li chose a different spelling of his name for his Americanized version because he didn't want to be associated with the Bruce Flirtation 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 as their stage name.

Ben [00:14:11] We will we will get to them a little bit later as well. Yeah. 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 in the 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, martial arts, you know, Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, George Lazenby. They all take martial arts lessons from 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.

Pat [00:14:54] Yeah. So he was, among other things, a teacher and clearly a successful one. He opened kung 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. You know, 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 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 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 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.

Ben [00:15:56] MAN Yeah. So this is in 1964. 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 after he starts training with it, man. And then 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 1964, him and Wang Jack, men are going to fight. I'm just going to give you Bruce Lee's personal accounting of what happens in this encounter. So we had talked about, I believe before we had talked about the Chevalier de son George and how the different schools were going to duel and have a battle to see which school was superior. And one young man is 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, 20 something punk kid who wants to 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 got 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 like a fool, kept punching him behind his head and back. Soon my fist began to swell from hitting his hard head. Great. Then I realized Wayne Chang was not too practical and began to alter my way of fighting. So long. Jackman goes on to train people who like MMA fighters who fight on the Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit. Yeah, but not only was Bruce Lee kind of disillusioned with the martial arts style because the Grandmaster he had defeated in like 3 minutes, he was also kind of mad at himself because he thought it should have taken less time to beat this guy up.

Pat [00:17:50] He's hard on himself. He's a perfectionist.

Ben [00:17:52] I mean, I think that's the only way to get to the level that he attained rate. 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. Hmm. Hmm. I don't know. Have you ever done any kind of martial arts taking, like, a martial arts class or anything like that?

Pat [00:18:12] No, I haven't, really. But you have been, right? Yeah.

Ben [00:18:14] 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 and I think we do encounter this a little bit in ancient Greece, where there's some 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 1965 is a martial art style called Jeet Kondo. 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 fighting style. So judo is the the way of the intercepting fist. Bruce had kind of grown up doing Wing Chun and boxing, but what he wanted to do was he calls it the form of no form. He says that quote, I, I hope to free my followers from clinging to styles, patterns or molds.

Pat [00:19:15] You have to adapt, right?

Ben [00:19:16] You have to 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 42 coat. So you can't have this very rigid rules on how to 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've got to get that coat tailored to fit you. And what Bruce wants to do is kind of take things from everywhere and let's see what works and 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 you, you're fighting style, but also just in life to be adaptable. And and I think there's some really cool stuff with that.

Pat [00:20:01] 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.

Ben [00:20:14] Yeah, exactly. 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 on him or YouTubing on him or whatever. And he says, Be formless, shapeless, like water.

Speaker 3 [00:20:42] This is what it is. 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, it becomes the bottle. You put in the teapot, it becomes the teapot. The water can flow. It can crash the water, my friend.

Ben [00:21:11] And that was kind of the strategy he took towards fighting and towards training. He was extremely hardcore about working out in 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 he would do. You know, we all do pushups, 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 forefinger. And he could it was said he could do something on the order of 200 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. He would do pushups like that, you know, one arm chin ups. 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 the videos of him punching these heavy bags and it's it gets a heavy bag, it's the kind of thing you see in like a boxing gym. And you watch you can watch a video of 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 were kind of unprecedented. He had a his diet was generally raw blended hamburger meat which just yum. Yeah. Sounds awful.

Pat [00:22:49] Well, I guess I guess we can call it steak tartare or something like that or carpaccio.

Ben [00:22:54] They are.

Pat [00:22:55] Fans. There are fancy names for raw meat.

Ben [00:23:00] You don't sound convinced.

Pat [00:23:02] No, I'm not. But. But it worked for him.

Ben [00:23:05] Yes, it worked for him.

Pat [00:23:06] It worked for him.

Ben [00:23:07] He had an exercise called the Dragon Flag, where he would just lay on his back and like, he could lift his entire body up from, like, just his shoulder. And the back of his head would touch the ground and he'd grab on to something and he could lift the entire rest of his body up off, off the mat and hold it for seconds or minutes at a time. He liked to train his reflexes and his manual dexterity 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, Mr. Miyagi catching the fly with chopsticks in The Karate Kid. Anyway, so he's off doing all of these things. He is training really hard. He is creating his own martial art. He's teaching it to people he's not supposed to be teaching it to. He's kind of a rebel. And in 1964, 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 he demonstrates a couple of other unique skills that he has.

Pat [00:24:08] 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 see 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 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 there in the air very still right in front of your abs, right in front of your stomach. And he's perfectly still. And then something happens. He curls his fingers into a fist and then just thrusts it one inch into your gut. 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 fudge in or explosive power. And back there you go, flying back into the chair.

Ben [00:25:28] And there's video of this. These guys like their martial arts, like experts. They're there for the World Karate championships. They're wearing their their G'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 on it or if they're trying to, like, fight it too hard, they they hit the ground in. Yeah. And Bruce Lee gets up there and he does these demonstrations in front of a humongous audience of martial arts maniacs or people who are super into this stuff. He comes back in 67 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 Vic Moore, who is also a badass. 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. There's video of this, 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 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 he did the same thing every single time. And Vic Moore couldn't couldn't block it. Wow. And then he tried it with a bunch of other people's any other volunteers, and nobody could stop this. It was the unstoppable punch. And that's a Bruce Lee thing that he was famous for, just kind of showing up at the World Karate Championships in 64 and 66, not competing in them and then giving a demonstration that was just like, I'm the best one here, just so you know.

Pat [00:27:09] Yes.

Ben [00:27:10] Yes. He would do another trick later on where he would stand at 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 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 this quarter. Close your fist, close your hand before I take this quarter from you. Oh, lightning flash, you get your hand closed. He'd hold the quarter up and when you opened your fist you would see you had a penny in your hand.

Pat [00:27:39] Wow. Wow.

Ben [00:27:42] And so that's that's kind of what we're dealing with here. And his demonstrations at these karate tournaments, especially the one in 1964, end up being kind of a springboard for him to enter Hollywood and enter film because stories of this guy. Yeah, up until this point, he's 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 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. 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 a international film and TV celebrity. So in 1966, season one of the Green Hornet comes out. 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 Green Hornet, kind of like the Robin to the Green Hornet's 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 bit where Kato, there's a light hanging from the ceiling and Bruce Lee as Kato 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 bad ass martial arts in movies. We've seen Jason Statham movies, we've seen The Matrix, we've seen stuff like that. But at the time, 1966, this show was on prime time TV back to back with Adam West's Batman. So if you think about the fights in that series, the the POW thwack zap, you know, guys wrestling around, You mentioned Star Trek. 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 been maybe the train fight from From Russia With Love, where Sean Connery fights that guy in the train compartment. But that's nothing like jumping front kick flying sidekick or any of that kind of stuff.

Pat [00:30:46] Yeah. 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.

Ben [00:30:51] Yeah. And you know, we had action movies. There's a lot of cowboy movies and war movies, a lot of shooting. Most of the fighting was punching and stuff. You didn't see a lot of kicks. You didn't see a lot of the speed that Bruce Lee brings to the table. And we've talked about the the the unstoppable punch and the stealing, the quarter.

Pat [00:31:07] He was fast.

Ben [00:31:09] He was extremely fast. And that actually caused the problem on the set of Green Hornet, because in 1966, right now we can do whatever 60 frames per second we can do HD, you know, all that stuff. But movie camera in 1966, it was lucky if it could hit 24 frames per second. And according to legend, Bruce Lee could punch nine times in one second. So, yeah, they said that there was footage from season 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 it looked funny on camera. So what they ended up having to do was to make him slow down. He still looks fast. If you watch reruns from the show, he still looks really fast, but he had to slow down to like 50% 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 just doesn't catch on and it 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 the 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 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 but they just didn't have an American audience at the time.

Pat [00:32:41] Exactly.

Ben [00:32:42] 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. It makes him a huge celebrity in China and eventually in the U.S. 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 and Game of Death. Those are the five big ones. And I had talked about Midnight Kung Fu, 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.

Pat [00:33:34] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:33:36] And I don't know. Have you seen any of these? You watch.

Pat [00:33:39] The movies? Not really. A few clips here and there. Yeah, they hold up.

Ben [00:33:43] Okay. Especially into the dragon. They hold up fine. But it's, you know, it's. It's hard to. If you hadn't seen see, for instance, the big boss and you've watched a lot of Avengers and the Matrix, it's. It's kind of hard to go back and watch some of the older stuff.

Pat [00:33:59] But 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.

Ben [00:34:16] 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.

Pat [00:34:29] Yeah, yeah.

Ben [00:34:31] And that sort of thing. So, you know, this is an interesting thing when you're studying history of of any kind or even, you know, say, sports history, you have Steph Curry who does all of these, you know, amazing dribbling, amazing ball control, dribbling techniques. But he grew up watching Dr. Dre and Dr. Jason doesn't 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 Dr. J and trying to emulate that and build upon that. So everything kind of builds and grows based on what came before.

Pat [00:35:02] 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 nunchucks.

Ben [00:35:12] Yeah, that was a pretty new thing. That was a pretty unique thing here. And it's awesome. I love nunchucks.

Pat [00:35:17] Yeah, yeah.

Ben [00:35:18] I suck at them, but I like them. And we see the influence of a lot of these movies today, so. Mortal Kombat came out of Enter the Dragon. The old Kung fu master game came from Game of Death. You know, fighting game heroes to this day always kind of seemed to make some Bruce Lee noises. So Bruce goes and he makes these movies and they end up, you know, getting big in in Hong Kong and China, but also in the U.S. And it's how he kind of introduces the Western world to martial arts. And like you said, nunchucks and fighting movies. And even some like Jackie Chan's first movie was as a stuntman. He gets punched in the head during Enter the Dragon, Small Hung is introduced to the Western audiences. I have a personal love of Jim Kelly, his 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 now the world was introduced to Chuck Norris.

Pat [00:36:14] Yeah, and Chuck Norris, in a way, is the canonical badass. I say this because there have been Chuck Norris means 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 all the Pokemon from a landline. And, you know, and then there's a picture of Chuck Norris with thumbs up. Chuck Norris hit 11 out of ten targets with nine bullets. And you know, it's supposed to be goofy. Yeah, but but I'm saying this to say this is the reputation Chuck Norris has. In a way, he's the canonical badass. And Bruce Lee comes along.

Ben [00:37:01] 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 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, 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.

Pat [00:37:45] Yeah.

Ben [00:37:45] Chuck, of course, goes on to be one of America's firsts. 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.

Pat [00:37:55] Yeah. And he, in a way, got his start through. Bruce Lee.

Ben [00:37:58] Yeah, exactly. And a lot of people did. Right? So so yeah, Bruce's 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 U.S. And he's the first real Asian movie star, first of all, martial arts hero. And he's inspirational to a lot of people who kind of came after him. Yeah, right. He kind of paved the way for basically a nonwhite person to be the lead in a movie. He got a lot of blowback on, of course.

Pat [00:38:35] Yeah, that's how things worked. Yeah.

Ben [00:38:37] But after this, like you have, like I said, Hong Kong has 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 Kong action heroes, 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 close to them before.

Pat [00:39:13] Yeah, totally. And Bruce Lee is playing an action hero. He's not playing a stereotypical villain.

Ben [00:39:22] Yes.

Pat [00:39:23] Which was one of the stereotypes for roles that Asian-American actors were kind of steered into playing before this.

Ben [00:39:31] Yeah. And like, as we saw with Christopher Lee playing Fu Manchu, a lot of times, like, they cast the white actor in that Asian role, right, as the bad guy, which is bad all around.

Pat [00:39:41] Yeah.

Ben [00:39:42] You know, so this is kind of groundbreaking and it it opens a lot of doors for people to come come past it. The the most successful movie that Bruce Lee had and in the States and the first real American major release of a martial arts movie was Enter the Dragon in 1973. Sadly, Bruce Lee wasn't able to attend the the premiere. He passed away six days before its release. He had a cerebral edema and died at age 32, just kind of right in the prime of his life.

Pat [00:40:14] Yeah. And there were a lot of theories circulating his untimely death. We're not going to deal with them here.

Ben [00:40:22] 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. Of people who were taken out of the world in their prime. Right. The James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison. Heath Ledger. Yeah. You know, even in JFK, right. Somebody who was kind of at the height of their like just huge rising star. And then 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 $400 million 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 Exploitation.

Pat [00:41:19] Exploitation. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. And some of these Bruce Floyd haters 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, flotation.

Ben [00:41:35] Of the Annie Oakley being arrested for cocaine possession.

Pat [00:41:39] Well, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, 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 crest of popularity. So but we're here to talk about actual Bruce Lee, not his imitators.

Ben [00:41:57] 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 is basically it's a Bruce Lee movie, but it's also Bruce exploitation. He he had filmed parts of it before he left to go do enter the Dragon. And the film company was trying to capitalize on his success. And they finished the movie with only 15 minutes of Bruce Lee in the movie, only 15 minutes of him make the final cut. They used body doubles and they used stock footage. They use clips from other movies to try to finish this thing. Nowadays, they just like CG it.

Pat [00:42:35] Yeah, like with Star Wars.

Ben [00:42:37] 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.

Pat [00:42:43] Yeah, And.

Ben [00:42:43] That's like that's iconic.

Pat [00:42:45] That's iconic. Yeah. And Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a badass in his own right. But that's a story for another day. Absolutely.

Ben [00:42:50] Absolutely. Great. Big time sports badass Kareem is awesome. Yeah. This is the, you know, the yellow jumpsuit. And he fights Kareem and Bruce is maybe five eight, and Kareem is like, seven two. So the fight is really impressive. But yeah, that movie was kind of has, has a place in the Bruce Lee library and it's not necessarily a really positive one because of how much the studio manipulated his likeness to try it. I think at one point in it he, 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.

Pat [00:43:30] It's it was sounds like it was slapped together.

Ben [00:43:33] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about Star Wars where they put the CGI faces, age people and all that stuff. That's how they do it now.

Pat [00:43:40] Yeah.

Ben [00:43:41] Which I'd argue is not that much more tasteful than what they were doing back then. But, you know, bringing Peter Cushing back from the dead to play Grand Moff Tarkin Again, I don't know how I feel about that, but yeah.

Pat [00:43:52] But it's a thing that Hollywood does however we may feel about it.

Ben [00:43:56] 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? Yeah. So anyway, Bruce was a pioneer for 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 was also doing, you know, leg locks. He does an armbar and into the dragon. He was doing groundwork. He was really into the science of fighting and and adapting a little bit of everything from the different styles. And that is kind of how AMA works today. And he was a he was also, you know, in addition to all of that, he was a philosopher and a writer. He wrote and directed Way of the Dragon, as I said. And he also pitched a show called Warrior when he was towards the end of his 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 here. Pat, 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 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 Carradine, and it was a hugely successful series.

Pat [00:45:26] Yep, that's what I grew up with on in the background. Yeah.

Ben [00:45:29] 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.

Pat [00:45:40] Yeah.

Ben [00:45:40] 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 ground breaking person and and a really fascinating, badass character.

Pat [00:45:52] And yeah.

Ben [00:45:53] Broke down a lot more doors than just like, the physical ones.

Pat [00:45:57] Indeed.

Ben [00:45:58] All right. Well, I think that is all we have for today. 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.

Pat [00:46:14] Stay badass, be water. Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. 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 from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.