What: Kungfu

When: 1972- 1975

Where: Hollywood

With the success of Kungfu in American pop culture, it seems like the next step for America to take after kungfu movies is to make a T.V. show about it and showcase it the people of the United States. When I was first reading about it, I really liked the idea of where the show, Kungfu was going to take. Then I get to the part where they go into details about the cast of the show and that’s where I felt very disappointed. As per usual though, I don’t really like to focus too much on the negative side of things so I’ll give it this much, I am glad that they utilized Bruce Lee as a plot consultation, at least they were trying to keep things in the background as close to authentic as they could get it. What I don’t understand the decisions in choosing someone whose white, with no interest in kungfu or martial arts in general to be the face of this show. It reminds me in of the section in Dave with the discussion of shows based in Hawai’i, why does Hollywood always want to put a white face on a completely different culture from their protagonist? And if it’s not a white face they want to portray, then instead they try to caricaturize a person’s culture or just having no mention of someones background at all.

“Nonetheless, such investment was not to introduce “realism” but rather to refine the “prop” with sophistication so that the paradigm of the kung fu genre can be processed” (95)

I understand that television is a way to escape from reality but there have been plenty of television shows in the past that try and talk about real historical events that have happened in the past and even in this day and age we have a whole genre called “reality T.V.” but even then, that genre is so misleading because it’s not reality in a lot of cases. Why does Hollywood claim that they want to show the realistic aspects of life but constantly show lies?

One thing I learned about Martha Burr was that at one point in her life she was “named the Executive Editor of Kungfu Magazine”
(ITVS.org) and so I was able to better understand why she went on to direct two documentaries about Kungfu in particular.

With Mei-Jun Chen who is a native of Taiwan  founded the Lotus Film Productions and has focused her career on primarily making documentaries. (newvideo.com)

Overall I liked that both documentaries were similar in the ways in which Martha and Mei-Jun obviously wanted to focus on each individuals stories of how they got into Kungfu and the interviewees history with it and what was nice about watching the both of them back to back is that I was able to pick up on some of the similarities in the stories between the films. Even in two different countries and two completely different times, most of these Kungfu masters all at one point in their life saw someone else doing Kungfu and feeling overwhelmed by it, they also wanted to take part in it.