Kung Fu films; cultural impact and 10 things I learned

There was a glorious time in my life when I was paid to watch a lot of Kung Fu flicks as part of my job. I worked for an internet TV company then, and it was one of the best job I ever had because I got to watch a load of kung fu flicks on average most days. Okay, that wasn’t completely from start to end credits, but it did take in all the meaty bits with kung fu heroes and villians kicking the shit out of each other. There was one film from Hong Kong on our fight channel that I saw so much I could repeat the dialogue word for word for the entire film… in English and Mandarin (kind of). You’d think that would impress women, but it really doesn’t. Or at least not the ones that I wished I had a chance with.

Now me, I love kung fu flicks. I grew up with them as a young kid from the time Monkey made it to Australian TV, which was around the early 80′s when it was aired on the ABC in the evening just after dinner. All the kids back then watched Monkey, and I do mean everybody. At school we would do Monkey’s cloud call technique as a pisstake for get-me-the-hell-out-of-here-fast. We’d even make stupid kung fu fight noises at friends when we’d pass each other in hallways and classrooms. There were reruns, and reruns of reruns for years of this show after the first screening, which embedded itself into the very core of popular culture of the day, and gave me an appetite for kung fu that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

At university I was introduced to Japanese anime manga in a big way. I was one of those geeks who suddenly found a place where I was surrounded by other geeks like me and manga brought us all together like iron filings to a magnet. Big groups of us would make the pilgrimage from our student housing to an art house cinema in Brisbane’s Valley suburb when they would have all night manga events; 12 hours of manga from 6pm to 6am. Boy, don’t those memories make me nostalgic.

Through a process of cultural absorption all of these kung fu flicks have had a profound influence on my personality over the years. At the most superficial level there is the cheesy lines which have become part of my working language. These phrases are almost like secret handshakes among devotees; because all gen-X’ers know that - the nature of Monkey was irrepressible! At its deepest level, there was the introduction to eastern philosophy that put me on a path of exploration which has become a long journey that still continues.

Kung fu and eastern philosophy have gone together in western culture since the time of Kung Fu the TV show. That’s pretty much the time when generation X were just youths getting into TV, so from an early age we were learning Kung Fu philosophy. Each decade has shown that kung fu movies continue to have huge appeal, and film productions are only getting better with age. Still for me I’m most of fond of the flicks that hit town around the late 70′s to late 80′s. I really like the new stuff for sure, but these older flicks were where the real cult classics can be found. At the top of that pile is still the grand daddy kung fu flick of them all, Enter the Dragon. Oh man, that fight that Bruce has with Bob Wall still gives me shivers down my spine.

So after at least a thousand hours of kung fu films over the last 30 years, I’d thought I’d share my top 10 lessons learned from the old masters.

1. When you have only seconds to act, it’s still possible to have a flashback that will go several minutes, and still have time to do something. Kung fu training includes time dilation technique that will slow time down around you and give you all the time you need to first playback a significant moment with your teacher, and then formulate a plan.

2. The more cryptic the saying, the more valuable the lesson. Grand masters only ever speak in riddles. The more gibberishly cryptic they are, the more grand master-ish they are, the more awesome the lessons they give. Of course it might take you your whole life to work out what he was trying to get across, but that’s fine. You’ll get it right when you need to, which takes us to lesson number 3.

3. Kung fu masters sayings will be understood right at the time when you most need it. You won’t know why your grand master tells you half that shit that he does, but he does, trust him. And one day, just when all seems lost, you’ll have that deep insight into his message which will give you great power to defeat evil and win the day with a big music score in the background.

4. Don’t pick on the quiet guy in the corner, because he’s a kung fu badass. The louder someone is, the more rubbish their kung fu. But that kinda big guy in the corner just drinking tea who doesn’t say a word, well that guy is the guy pondering his master’s last cryptic gibberish lesson after which he’ll be bestowed ultimate power and when that happens all the bad guys within a 10 kilometre area are toast.

5. Any good kung fu move will have a really long name. Of course all kung fu guys learn how to punch, and they all learn a punch-kick combination. But the really awesome moves have long names you normally call out during the battle, like; flying dragon double fist strike from the clouds, and floating crane going downstream with claws out front. I think my personal favourite move name was, the ten thousand fists of Buddha strike from the heavens. That was end move that won the fight.

6. You can tell a kung fu grand master by the luxuriously full head of long flowing white hair and accompanying long flowing beard. Under no circumstances say anything even slightly offensive to this guy for any reason. He may look 300 years old and more frail than a blown glass ornament, but he can kill you with a ripple of his robe and merely thinking your name.

7. Grand masters do live under rocks. For some reason this seems to be their preferred place of residence. They wait for unsuspecting heroes to fall next to their rock and then they pop out to start speaking gibberish to them, to give them the wisdom they will need to be bestowed ultimate power and win. To the unsuspecting hero, this can really be disorienting and give you more than a few WTF-ARE-YOU-DOING-HERE minor heartache moments.

8. There are no women kung fu masters. I never thought about it before until now, but it does seem slightly sexist. Maybe kung fu women masters give it up to become home-makers after they fall in love with some hero. Either way, I haven’t seen a film yet where the grand master imparting wisdom was a woman.

9. Once you start a kung fu fight, it will more than likely last an hour. During this time several cafes and bars will be reduced to rubble, and you’ll piss off a whole bunch of business owners. However everyone else will thank you and respect you in the end because you will have saved the day. It’s rare that once a kung fu fight starts it takes less than 5 minutes to end. If you have to get up, you may as well make it worthwhile for everybody.

10. The love interest will be completely incapable of doing anything to help themselves. Doesn’t matter how competent she appears before things go belly up, once the shit hits the fan, she’ll completely fall to pieces and you’ll have to do all the work when it comes to saving her. If it’s any consolation, she will love you for it in the end, and be good for a few hot nights of passion once you can be touched again without screaming in pain.

In the end, as the final credits roll up, Bruce Lee will never die and never be forgotten because of the legacy of wisdom and philosophy that he brought to a bunch of impressionable kids, who made it a part of them, and took that legacy wherever they went.

In some small way, we were made all the better for it.

Andy.

The Kung Fu films; cultural impact and 10 things I learned by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.