These videos have been around for years, and many thousands of copies have been sold, but the DVD release will give them a whole new life. When David Nakahara came to me back in the mid-eighties with the idea of making a kung fu instructional video, I figured it wouldn’t amount to much. For one thing, David and his partners, though they were all serious martial artists, didn’t know much of anything about making film. I said “yes” to the project anyway because I figured I owed so much to The Arts. One of the convincers was the presence of Kent Wakeford as the cinematographer. I’d first met him when he was the cameraman for Marty Scorsese’s Mean Streets. I was sure Kent knew what he was doing.

The project, two 55 minute videos, one about kung fu and one on Tai Chi, was well-funded, actually over-budgeted. David had built some colorful sets on a soundstage, designed special costumes, and brought together a half-dozen beautiful young people to act as kung fu students. It was at least going to be pretty. That was for sure. When my own master, Kam Yuen, joined us, that gave it some extra credibility for me. I got together with Kam for a few weeks to tone up my moves. It was starting to look good. We shot for six days, me not taking it all very seriously.

Then I went off to San Francisco to make a TV movie for NBC about an attempted escape from Alcatraz, Six Against The Rock. David sent over a rough-cut to the set, and when I found time to finally get around to looking at it, I was bored silly. The lessons were there, all right, but it was badly cut, slow and repetitive and there weren’t enough different angles to make it interesting. I couldn’t imagine anyone bothering to watch it. I realized, though, that it could actually be a pretty good piece if we did some more work on it.

I thought of the I Ching hexagram, Ku: “Work On What Has Been Spoiled”, which it is said ‘brings supreme success’. I put up some of my own money for three more days of shooting, and brought in the editor of my personal films, David Kern. We did a lot of work on the sound track, narration and music of course, but also, sound effects, stuff like the sound of the silk gee I was wearing snapping, and breathing, lots of breathing. The idea that was percolating in my mind was to make it like a show: interesting enough so that people would get a kick out of just sitting and watching it. Then, if they were moved to get up and dance along with it, that would be great, too.

Well, it all worked. The videos got good reviews and sold well. Then, when the franchise ran out, we sold it again to another company and it did well again. We kept doing that every couple of years or so. Each time a new distributor took it on, they promoted it like a new product and it took off all over again. The tapes became known in the trade as ‘the tapes that wouldn’t die’.

Now, almost twenty years later, it’s starting all over again. a whole new bunch of seekers will discover it as a DVD. The old series will find a new audience as well right along beside it. Both of these efforts were huge the first time around, and today, with superior technology and some added bits, interviews, lost footage, etc., even people who already know the stuff backwards and forwards will find something to interest them. This kung fu stuff just won’t die.

I’m continually amazed that from the small beginning, a humble TV series at ABC, way back in the 1970′s, this idea has grown so large. Even this magazine is a result of that show. But, then, all this is a fulfillment of something that was started centuries ago, when that Shaolin monk took it upon himself to try to spread the knowledge to the world. And that wandering monk passed the teachings down through generation after generation until it finally got to me, through Sifu Kam Yuen, who can trace his lineage back to that very Shaolin monk.

No one was more surprised than I when I took up the mantle. After all, I was just an actor who stumbled on a great part for me to play. When I walked away from the series, I assumed that was it for me and martial arts.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that some things just have to happen. Some ideas seem to have their own life. They prevail. And it took television to make this idea a reality. Strange, isn’t it? I guess we have Thomas Edison to thank, too. Couldn’t have done it without his light bulb.

Bruce Lee had told the story to two of his students, the actor James Coburn, and Sterling Siliphant, a writer, best known as the creator of the TV Series Route 66. Sterling wrote the script, planning to make the movie with James as The Seeker and Bruce as Ah Sahm-The Blind Master, and ‘The Three Trials’: The Monkey King, Changsha-The Earth Force, and Death. They had tried to get it made without success, until Bruce surfaced in the Shaw Brothers movies in Hong Kong. Then, Sterling’s Hollywood agent called up Bruce (in Hong Kong). He said excitedly, “I’ve got a deal to make The Silent Flute! And, guess what! They’re offering you a million bucks!” Bruce, now a big star, answered, “Do you know what time it is here?” And hung up! Then, of course, Bruce died, and the picture was never made.

I was sure I could get the project done. I called up Sterling’s agent, who said, “Look, we’re in the middle of a deal with Sandy Howard. Don’t you screw it up!” Screw it up? No way! I immediately called Sandy Howard, who said he was about to call me, to play The Seeker. I said, “I’ve been playing The Seeker for four years on TV. I want to play Bruce’s roles. The Seeker will be easy to cast, but where would you find someone to play all of Bruce’s parts?” Sandy said he’d get Lawrence Olivier for Ah Sahm, Oliver Reed or Omar Sharif for Changsha, etc., and use stunt doubles. I told him, “You can’t do that. In a martial arts movie, the audience has to know the actor is really doing the moves.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, “But, how could you play all those parts?” I did a demonstration for him, what Jeff Cooper called ‘My Blowfish routine.’ I puffed out my chest, pulled in my stomach and flexed my biceps for Changsha, scrunched down and distended my stomach, letting it all hang out for The Monkey King, loomed very tall and dark for Death, and just relaxed and magically turned into skin-and-bone for Ah Sahm, accompanying all these manifestations with different voices: an animal growl for The Monkey, an oily Arab for Changsha, a hollow whisper for Death and pretty much myself as Ah Sahm. Sandy started to see the light. Somebody in the room mentioned that I could get an Oscar for this. That got Sandy’s ears pricked up, though I took that one with a grain of salt. The folks at The Academy have to like you, and I’m the eternal Outsider.

I arranged a meeting with Kam Yuen at his Kwoon. There, Jeff and I gave a demonstration, and really got into it. When we parted, I had drawn blood. I think that’s when Sandy went for it. Jeff Cooper as The Seeker and me as everybody else. It was a deal.

I left them all to work it out while I went off to Germany to do The Serpent’s Egg with Ingmar Bergman. When I got back from that ordeal, I visited the Warner Brothers lot, where I had planted a lot of bamboo a few years back. It had become a forest. I dug up three nearly identical saplings, to make the flutes out of them: a little over 5 feet long, useful as The Blind Master’s ‘cane,’ and as a fighting staff.

While the bamboo was curing, I made Deathsport for Roger Corman, a futuristic motorcycle picture. During that shoot, I ruined a ligament in my knee. The doctor called it a permanent injury. Told me I’d have to give up kicking. Not likely. I went to Leo Wang, my Wing Chun Master, and he assembled a group of Chinese healers, who treated me with herbs and meditation. I threw some horse-medicine into the mix, and I was on the mend.

I had another bike flick to do in Oklahoma, where I managed to get Mike Vendrell into The Stuntmen’s Association, being very careful to avoid further injury to my knee, though there were a few life-threatening moments, notably the ‘David as A Ball of Fire’ incident, and getting run over by an airplane.

In the fall of ’77, we all shipped out to Israel to shoot the movie. I tried to get James Coburn to direct, but that never worked out. Instead, we had Richard Moore, an award winning cameraman.

My wife, Linda, came along to help with Ah Sahm’s blind eyes, hard plastic lenses which covered the whole eye-socket, a bitch to get in; and a bitch to wear, especially during a desert sandstorm. I worked out every day with Kam Yuen, learning the fights, one of which I rate as the best I’ve ever done, where Ah Sahm takes on eight attackers, armed only with The silent Flute, in the courtyard of an ancient fort at night, lit by a bonfire. The best of the flutes shattered that night. Without skipping a beat, the prop man threw me another one. Anthony De Longis played the main man in that gang, as well as the designated Seeker, who fails in his first trial, with The Monkey King; to be replaced by Jeff. Jeff got clipped in the cheek during his fight with Tony, leaving a permanent scar and a life-long vendetta between them. Word of advice: stay away from elbows.

The Israeli locations were supreme: Biblical sites, Roman ruins, gorgeous desert vistas, and the shores of The Mediterranean. I swam in the Jordan River and ate a fish I’d caught in The Sea of Galilee. (It was awful) I visited Bethlehem and Nazareth. Saw Peter’s house, and walked the route through Jerusalem which Christ traversed carrying the cross.

In Bethlehem, I was mobbed by three thousand Arabs, almost the entire population of the town. In Golgotha, I got permission from the Abbot to play my flute at the site. In Jerusalem, I watched Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel on television, in the basement of a restaurant with a family of hookah-smoking Arabs.

I would never have strayed out of my hotel to have all these adventures, except for my driver, who told me that a man who eats in a hotel should sleep in a restaurant.

I managed the fights with my funky ligament, employing various braces; although, while executing a flying double-front-kick, I broke the meniscus, adding to my troubles.

We spent Thanksgiving in the Sinai Desert. The Israeli caterers provided us with a whole canned turkey. They stewed it! Well, what did they know? And, it’s the thought that counts. It wasn’t so bad. No cranberry sauce, though. We washed it down with Arak and Turkish coffee.

The movie went off like clockwork, with excellent performances and great photography, though the final fight was disappointing. Richard Moore fixated on his camera and forgot to direct. He spent the whole day shooting mob reactions and scenic vistas, and was left with just two hours for the fight before sun would set. Even so, it’s a great picture.

When we finished, I wanted to visit the pyramids, but couldn’t get into Egypt with an Israeli stamp on my passport, so I made do with a visit to Athens. I played The Silent Flute in The Acropolis. That was cool, though It got me kicked out of The Temple of Theseus by the caretaker.

Back in California, I returned my fee to finance some extra footage with Joe Lewis and a bunch of stuntmen dressed in Chinese armor on horseback. Joe was remarkable. Strong, precise and incredibly fast.

It took over a year, but the film made enough money to pay back my fee, and my ligament healed completely. I still kick ass, as anyone knows who has seen Kill Bill, Volume 2. Both Bruce Lee and James Coburn are gone now. Sterling has retired and moved to Vietnam, where he lives with a harem, who cater to his every whim. Jeff Cooper gave up his harem in Hollywood and moved back to Ontario, Canada, where he was born.

The movie lives on. I hope we did right by Bruce. I know I gave it my best shot.

The distributors changed the name of the film to Circle of Iron; I never understood why. For me, it will always be The Silent Flute.

He was overjoyed.  He, himself, was a flyer.  He set me up with some of the best guys in the field to teach me.  It’s not something you want to get too deeply into, though it’s more fun than anything: they almost all eventually die in their planes, even the best ones: maybe especially them.  They take a lot of chances.

So there I was, a thousand feet up in the clouds, dancing and twirling across the sky in that little toy airplane.  It was very gung fu, actually.  It takes great control to accomplish these maneuvers without getting into a tailspin.  You experience up to eight or nine “G’s”, half the time upside down.  You come very near to passing out from the blood rushing out of your head and into your feet.  That’s what kills a lot of the guys.  They just go to sleep.  Sometimes they wake up to find themselves cruising along a couple of hundred feet up, straight and level.  The plane is so precisely set up that, no matter how much trouble you’ve gotten yourself into, if you take your hands off the stick, it’ll as often as not straighten itself out and fly right all by itself.  Of course, sometimes you don’t wake up.  That’s the chance you take.

I could see how the thrill was worth the risk.  There’s just nothing like it.  And the lessons about balance and power, control and release: they’re all there.  The plane, with its little engine, is actually only capable of about 110 miles per hour.  In order to perform some of the tricks you need to be going 250.  So, you gain a lot of altitude, say 5 or 6000 feet, and then dive straight down.  By the time you reach 1000 feet, you’re up to speed, and that’s where you perform the stunts.  It’s all very Zen.

There’s one spectacular maneuver called a Lumsaveck (Hungarian for ‘headache’ is the joke).  You get the plane in a nearly inverted attitude and throw the stick to the right and the pedals to the left at the same time, and the plane shoots off at a ninety-degree angle in a cartwheel. It’s a gas.  But, you always end up in a ‘flat-inverted-spin’, and you have to get out of that.  It’s a fatal situation if you don’t, and if you don’t know from experience or instruction that that is what’s going on, you won’t even figure it out until it’s too late.  You’re mostly upside down and the sky and the ground are changing places so fast you don’t know where you are, and the earth’s gravity won’t tell you which way is up, because the plane has become a centrifuge.  You’ll spin upside down right into the ground.  The first thing that hits will be your head.  Okay, so you have break out of it, and fast.  You turn that  accursed flat-inverted-spin into a tailspin, which isn’t easy, and then, by pushing the stick all the way forward, which defies all logic, you can convert the tailspin into a straight dive, out of which you can pull the plane, if the wings don’t tear off.  All this while you’re being thrown around the cockpit like a rag doll, probably with your nose bleeding.  This operation requires a minimum of a thousand feet.  If you don’t have that much room when you start, you’re just dead, plowing the nose into the ground at two hundred per.

Rob Moses (Marshal Arts Hall of Fame Founder of The Year for 2002) is now living in Kona, on the island of Hawaii, where the coffee comes from.  His favorite past-time these days is to go up on the high, windy hill behind his house, with one of the most beautiful views on the planet, and work with his inventions, weird, twisted staffs of bamboo, shaped like curlicues, question marks, and parabolic curves.  These things are strange and liberating enough to work with on the flat, and likely to bonk you in the head and such, but he leans into the wind, far enough so he’d fall down if it stopped blowing.  And he dances, twisting, twirling, , almost not connected to the earth, a lot like aerobatic flying.  He says it’s almost as though he had wings.  The mind and the body becoming one, sort of out there, in Space;  all that stuff we talk about playing across his consciousness.

There he is, surfing in the wind, with the very air itself as his opponent.  Yet without that enemy, without the wind fighting against him, he would fall, fall right off the mountain, bouncing off the lava outcroppings into the roaring surf a hundred feet below.  The wind becomes his ally, supporting him.  That’s gotta be something else.

I like that idea, of the enemy as the guardian.  It fits in with the paradoxes of The Sage and The Divine Fool.  Rob is both, I think.  It’s what I strive for, in my own silly fashion.  Well, silly is good, I think, if that’s not too silly for you.

Pretty trippy.  And it’s all part of Rob’s exploration of kung fu as liberating, as healing, as a dance of death, as a way to examine the inner secrets of The Cosmos, and of his quest for eternal youth, not so much, you understand, physically; though that too, of course, but in the heart, like Peter Pan.

I’m all for that.

I think the thing that impressed me most when he told me about all this was the joy it seemed to give him.  Is there anything we could gain in our search that’s better than that?  I get the picture of him, with a silly grin on his face, teetering on the edge of the cliff, swinging his quirky staff and having the wind throw it back at what would be his face, if he didn’t shift with the current.  And laughing, tears in his eyes from the laughter and the wind.  Just dancing on the hilltop.  Fun.  That’s it.  Fun.  Like a child.

He says it’s better than anything.  Of course, he’s never tried aerobatic flying.

I know of Karate senseis who beat their students. One method of building strength and character is through ordeal. Sure. Not my thing. The old methods of teaching which seemed so harsh had their definite place. Lao Tzu said, “Those who conquer themselves are strong.” The old masters were not being cruel; they were doing what was necessary to create a new human being.

But, stop and smell those roses once in awhile.

The way we teach now, the concentration is on the moves: the dance. But, Kam Yuen told me very early on of the importance of “stillness.” Lao Tzu says, “Movement overcomes cold, stillness overcomes heat, clear calm is a rectifier of the world.

Effect Emptiness to the extreme, keep stillness ready; as the myriad things act in concert,” he says. I know this rhetoric is hard to follow. The essential point here is in calm stillness; when stillness reaches its climax, it produces motion, and, okay. We’re back to the workout. It’s a circle. Keep it going. Exercise and meditation. Movement and stillness. Dancing and sitting. Don’t forget to stretch.

Scientifically, as well as spiritually (if there really is any difference) this makes sense. As I understand it, acetacolin, the chemical that exists between the individual cells in the nervous system and is responsible for transmitting nerve impulses, is depleted by use, which is to say, activity. It is replenished by stillness: meditation, or “Sitting”, as the Hindus call it: remembering that the origins of kung fu are from India.

The I Ching says, “Faithfulness and trustworthiness are means of developing character.” The deeper purpose of martial-arts training is a matter of character development. I’ve been able to see from contact with fans over the years that when someone studies the arts, they do develop character, depth and some kind of serenity, even if the only reason they took it up was to learn to fight.

In the seventh century AD, not long after the introduction of kung fu to China, two Taoist mathematicians, Li and Yuan, developed a method of reading each other’s physiognomy to predict the course of human history. Yeah, they were able to track the rise and fall of dynasties and choose successors to the masters in this way. Sounds weird. Well, the Taoists are weird. Remember that when Bodhidharma arrived at the Shaolin monastery, there were monks who could levitate. At least, that’s the story.

The series Kung Fu had some wonderful twists to it that had nothing to do with kicking and punching. How about learning how to see from a blind man? If that isn’t a cool one, I don’t know what is. And it has all the sense of the miraculous that we were, most of us, searching for when we started this journey.

The upshot of all this would seem to be that there is magic to be found in the teachings if we look beneath the surface, though levitation is probably not an achievable option for most of us. Still, you never know. Sometimes, during a really good workout, I feel like I could fly.

We’re talking here about the summer of ’75, shortly after I had put an end to the Kung Fu series by just walking away, while it was still high in the ratings: very high. People thought I was crazy to leave. I had a few reasons for ending the show. One: I had always said the third year would be the last. Two: it was starting to become repetitive, and the writing was falling down, the stories were getting kind of lame, all of which I had known would happen if it went on too long. I didn’t want it to become just another TV show. I’d done everything I could with it. It was time to get on with the rest of my life, make some movies. The biggest thing, though, was my own emotional state. I’d broken up with my long-time sweetheart. I was heartbroken, almost suicidal. I simply could not continue with the charade any longer.

The last day I had worked, February 5^th, 1975, she had come to visit with our son in tow. In between takes, I joined them on the grass. She sat there, with our boy on her lap (he was asleep) and we looked sadly at each other, unable to speak. She’d never seemed more beautiful to me. When they called me back to the set, I managed to say, “Goodbye,” my heart breaking, and that was it. She and the kid walked out of my life. We had to cancel my final shot as Kwai Chang Caine as I couldn’t stop crying.

So, now, a few months later, I’m in New York, with Sifu. We had seats at ringside. Kam was there to demonstrate the Double-Sword Form, and I was to make an appearance and give a little speech. There were performers from all over the world and the place was packed. Demonstrations of almost every style were on the bill, and some bizarre competitions between different disciplines were on hand to round it out. A wrestler versus a Judo man, a lightweight boxer against a woman. That was a very unequal contest. I had dinner with the girl the night before, a charming young lady from Oklahoma, and she was really scared. Rightly so. Her opponent, a tough little Latino with a barrel chest, gave her no quarter. As I remember, the fight lasted almost one round. At first the girl held her own pretty well, but then she got mad, and lost control. He decked her. Knocked her out. In the Judo/wrestler fight, the wrestler pinned the Judo man, but I thought the match was not set up right. They had the Judo guy in a gee, and the wrestler in trunks. Well, in Judo, you grab at your opponent’s clothes. A wrestler just grapples. They had it backwards. The result was the Judo man had nothing to get hold of, just skin, slick with sweat, and the wrestler had handles to grab.

Kam was awesome with the sword form, leaping higher than I thought a human could, and seeming to hover in the air, in defiance of natural law.

Ed Spielman, the writer of the original Kung Fu script, was there, I think the only time I was ever face to face with him.

One of the highlights for me was meeting Ed Parker for the first time. He showed me some techniques for taking out an attacker with a ring of keys. I was not impressed. That’s just not my kind of kung fu. And I had always thought Ed Parker was just a fat friend of Elvis. How could a guy that wide be a master of an athletic discipline? At the end of the event, though, Ed changed my mind for me. When the final bell rang, we looked up from ringside toward the only exits at the rear of the stadium, the aisles packed with people, and realized that we were going to have to walk a gamut of five thousand or so over-stimulated martial arts fans, looking for action.

I would have just gone for it, but Ed suddenly became protective of me. “You can’t go through that,” he said. He saw that though the aisles were full, the seats were now empty. “Come on.” he said. And the two of us jumped onto the nearest seatbacks and we ran across them, all the way up probably fifty or more rows to the back of the house, Ed right there beside me, running interference, like a linebacker. This was easy for me, at a hundred-seventy pounds, but Ed, at three hundred or more, should have broken the back of every seat. He didn’t. His feet touched down as lightly as a deer, and he ran like one. How he did that, I don’t know. The only answer I can come up with is he defied gravity. I had to start rethinking my opinion of him.

Perseverance seems to be the main tool for success in any endeavor. If you look at love and friendship though, probably the two most important things there are in life, you need understanding, self-control, and a host of other qualities. care, compassion, delicacy. In martial arts as well, it seems. In Agni Yoga, a form of meditation which I was studying at the time, the sacral chakra is defined as ‘Love’, which, they add, is what gravity is. It’s love, these Hindus say, that holds the solar system together and keeps us from falling off the planet. The color of the chakra is pink.

While we were in New York, Sifu and I took a run every day, through the streets, not on a track. I could never get into going around in circles. All I could think about on these runs was my broken heart. On this one morning, we ran all the way uptown along Broadway, past the theater district, past the Trump Tower at Columbus Circle to Needle Park at 72^nd Street, where all the retired folks sat around on benches, next to the coke heads. We stopped for a minute at a souvenir shop, to catch our breaths a little.

“What am I gonna do,” I said to Sifu. All he said was, “Patience, strength, fortitude.”

Okay. You fall down, or you get knocked down, and you get up again, and do whatever it takes to feel good about yourself, and go on. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘If Ed Parker, at three hundred pounds, could defy gravity, and Kam Yuen can fly, and if gravity is love, then I could cheer up and make it out of this funk alive.’

There’s been a lot of water since then, under the bridge and over the dam, and I should be in my rocking chair by this time. But right now, I’m in my prime and on my game, with a lot left to do, and I’ve got at shot at happiness. And that’s the essence of kung fu. If you ain’t got that, you ain’t got fu, I don’t care what color your belt is.

Another thing about Ed Parker: he loved The Art. And, Hey, Love is where it’s at! That’s what Ali would say, and he’s The Greatest.

Yes, I’m always explaining that the real purpose of kung fu is the betterment of oneself, and the pursuit of that goal certainly shouldn’t be limited to knowing how to knock someone down. Angry opponents are not the only obstacles in the way of personal happiness. We all really do need to get along for it to work out well. The oneness of mind and body, good health, spiritual enlightenment are the goals to seek, definitely. Aggression as a means of getting through the day is more likely to land one in jail than anywhere else.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the kung fu fighters, boxers and Samurai swordsman of my acquaintance are all really nice people when they’re not “in the ring”. And my series is not responsible for them being like that. Since time immemorial that’s been true. Someone who knows how to take care of himself doesn’t have to prove anything. (People who like to bite off their opponents ears are the rare exception)

There’s a movement in martial arts these days, though, that disturbs me. Grapplers, fighters who like to get hold of you and twist and gouge. People obsessed with squeezing people’s heads. These bozos are forgetting that this is a Monk Art. It’s about bettering yourself, seeking spiritual enlightenment. How does that turn into hurting people? Wrong perceptions lead you astray don’t they? Learning to understand your own space, and how you can occupy it in a good way, helpful to the world in general as well as to yourself, is the higher goal. Standing tall and having some dignity about you feels good, and inspires people around you. Gaining respect certainly doesn’t require knowing a lot of painful finger holds that make your fellow men say “Uncle”. Yet, that’s what many of our colleagues are striving for.

In the simplest form of Chin Na, the study of joint manipulation: you figure out which way your arm won’t bend and then do that to someone else. I guess there’s a place for everything, and when you think about it, it’s kind of a funny image: a guy twisting his own limbs around ‘till he says, “Ow. That hurts! I’ve got to try that on someone.”

Having strength and endurance, being limber, being able to stand up and fight for what’s right are all noble achievements. I revel in them. At the highest, though, kung fu is a healing art. We should all be striving for that: making the world a better place for everyone. When I asked Sifu, “What about the Dim Mak?” He said, “Well, David, that’s supposed to be for healing.” And Sifu is no wimp. He can become a real tiger when someone tries to push him around. But few people do try that. Just like it says, when you’re that good, you radiate a confidence that dissolves hostility. Fights end before they start. A true master never needs to show what he knows, because one of the biggest things he knows is how not to need to show it. And, as I’ve said many times, When the universe is unfolding before one’s eyes, dazzling in its splendor, there are better ways to spend one’s energy than beating people up.

And, anyway, who wants to be a bully? Nobody likes them.

When the show proved so popular, Fred said to himself, “Was I dumb, or what?” He traveled to Hong Kong, where Bruce Lee had migrated in a fit of pique over being passed over for the series, and hired him for Enter the Dragon, in which Bruce had a big fight with Chuck Norris, convincing Chuck that he should try his hand at an acting career, and motivating him to market a line of martial arts equipment, for the first time making gees, swords, numchucks,, etc., readily available in the U.S.

Meanwhile, while the world was watching this story of East-meets-West, Richard Nixon was establishing détente with red China. (The second showing of the pilot movie was pre-empted to show Dick shaking hands with Mao, to welcome China into the UN ) Chinese philosophy and “barefoot” medicine were sweeping America, inspired no doubt by Quai Chang Caine’s Taoist tidbits and his little bag of herbs, with which he routinely healed people in his travels, and kung fu schools were springing up on every street corner.  Curtis Wong came on the show in the first season as a fighter, and got the idea of launching a magazine called Inside Kung Fu.

At first, the show was banned in England, for its “violence”; in Mexico, because of its “revolutionary content”. In Israel and other places for various reasons, Eventually all those markets joined in. In Mexico, a few years back, they elected a new president who loved the show and ordered it put on TV. Israel fell in line just last year. Meanwhile, in the U.S., it was admired for its peaceful message, and was required watching by some school teachers, with reports due. Girls wouldn’t accept dates on the night the show was on.

By 1985, the news had penetrated all the way to Hunan province in China. I received a personal invitation from the abbot of the Shaolin Monastery to visit with him. It took me thirteen years to respond, when, by then, the old abbot had left us. The new one, however, told me to keep up the work, and even went so far as to tell me, after viewing some of the pilot movie, that he thought it would be a good idea to admit a Caucasian into the monastery. “Just once”, he said. A full circle.

An interesting sidelight to all this is the influence the show had on Chinese cinema. Bey Logan, an old friend of mine, whom I met at The Cannes film Festival over a quarter of a century ago, when he was introducing his new star Jackie Chan, recently told me about this one. He actually asked me to tell about it in the column; so here goes.

There was a Chinese film made in 1975 entitled ‘The Monk’, which was evidently inspired by the Kung Fu series. The show played on TV there, the main character’s name being ‘Cho Man Jai’, (“Grasshopper Boy”! ) The title character of the renegade Shaolin was played by an actor named Yam Sai-kwoon (whose Mandarin name, in case you want to know, is Yen Shi-kwan). He would later play the villains in Once Upon a Time in China and Iron Monkey. I’m trying to track down a decent copy of the whole film. However, you can see a clip on a DVD entitled The Story of The Drunken Master (bear with me here…) which I’m told was released in the US under the Wu Tang Clan label. The bonus features on the disc include a clip from The Monk, and the influence of the original Kung Fu TV series is pretty clear, even in this short excerpt.

The show also provided the premise for a Spaghetti Western entitled The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe!

All this, because, back in 1971, Western movies were out for the moment, and the bean counters at Warner Brothers Studios were looking for some way to make use of their Western Street sets on the backlot in Burbank. A big bonus being that they could also use the Camelot Castle, which had been going slowly to seed for several years, all overgrown and crumbling. We stripped off the gargoyles and angels, and brought in some giant Chi Chi Dogs and statues of Buddha, and turned it into the Shaolin Temple.

Yes, the Tao works in mysterious ways.

I think what these folks are seeing are the shifting sands. The beach is eaten away in one spot. Sand dunes disappear with the changing weather, but all you have to do is look around, and you’ll find that new sand dunes and wide beaches have appeared down the coast somewhere.

The truth was, schools sprang up on every block in every town, all over the world: kung fu, Tai Kwan Doh and even dojos advertising “Karate/Kung Fu”. That process has never slowed down. Most young people these days who are not on drugs are studying some martial art, at least casually.

The first rush of martial arts movies played itself out, after the death of Bruce Lee, and years of exploitation with Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme and Stephen Seagal leading the parade, and numerous Bruce Lee clones bringing up the rear. These films, as glad as we all were to see them, were genre things, appealing mainly to martial arts fans. These movies slipped out of style because of several factors: a glut of them for one thing, poor stories for another, repeating the same themes over and over for yet another. Plus, I think maybe audiences grew tired of the stolid performances and poor production quality.

The Karate Kid series was an exception to this wasteland: high quality production, story, and acting, and a fairly benign philosophical message. Pat Morita was actually recognized by The Motion Picture Academy for his work. This was unique for a martial arts film. But, The Karate Kid had a mystique and philosophy reminiscent of the old Kung Fu series, while all the rest were pretty much fight pictures, focused on crime and revenge, and didn’t have much about them to engage the mind.

Even so, these movies were building awareness of the arts. All this time, the martial arts were becoming integrated into mainstream media, simply because so many people were studying some form of them, and it just doesn’t make sense in a film about modern times for a cop or any other kind of action hero not to be using them.

I remember in Lethal Weapon 4, when Jet Li showed up, the game was newly afoot. That movie came out simultaneously with Godzilla, and Jet Li seemed infinitely harder to kill than the big lizard. All the computer graphics and the destruction of New York City paled next to Jet’s moves. That final fight, with Mel and Danny, with no weapons except a couple of pieces of pipe, was a battle of The Titans. What we needed, it seems, was fresh blood. Real Chinese gung fu. And we got it. Then Jackie Chan finally broke through in the U.S., after 30 years of trying, with Rush Hour; captivating everyone not just with his moves, stupendous though they are, but with his cheerfulness and comedy as well, something that had always been missing from the stuff which preceded him, ever since we lost Bruce Lee, who had the same flair (and of course, Pat Morita, with his “wax on wax off” in The Karate kid). That’s definitely one of the factors that holds our interest. Making it fun.

The generation that grew up on the Kung Fu series and Bruce Lee’s films is still out there, and a great many of them became martial artists themselves. I can’t tell you how often people stop me on the street to tell me that I changed their lives; sometimes it’s saved their lives.

Now, with these new, high-tech movies, video games, even aerobic workouts derived from martial arts, a whole new generation of followers is appearing. And don’t forget the cartoons. Every Saturday morning, my kids are glued to the set watching superheroes battle the forces of evil with martial arts.

And among the Black communities the martial arts are huge. Have always been. Blaxploitation movies are full of it. The boys in the hood have to know it just to stay in one piece.

A great factor in the wide interest in martial arts today has to do with the theme being applied to modern situations and contemporary thought. Another is, paradoxically, its use of fantasy.

With The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, we got martial arts as magic. The balletic quality of Wu Shu helps that effect along. How long audiences will be fascinated by this extreme fantasy applied to martial arts we don’t know. As I’ve said, everything cycles.

Nevertheless, it’s for certain; the martial arts are here to stay, in movies and in popular culture. When kung fu fighting rides a wagon as provocative as the ideas presented in The Matrix, we pay attention. Then there is the ineffable beauty that was Crouching Tiger, the silly, madcap fun of Charlie’s Angels. And I guess DareDevil (one of my favorites) somehow brought it back home. I almost believe that those two can really jump that high.

Kill Bill may put a period to the genre as we know it now, because the film is so exclusive and yet so inclusive, so far beyond anything I’ve seen before, and with only very light use of special effects, and not much stunt doubling. We just fight. And, in Quentin Tarantino’s hands, less is definitely more. It’s an act that will be difficult to follow.

Another vital element is the women. For the first time in American movie history, we’re seeing female characters who not only kick butt, but who are Masters, extreme athletes beyond any male heroes we saw in the old days. Starting out, I think, with Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return, we began to see women who could lick their weight in NFL fullbacks. And what’s more, we saw them, or their stunt-doubles, doing remarkable physical feats. Think of the high-flying rope work by Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. And take a look at Jennifer Garner, one tough lady, both in her Alias series and in Daredevil.

There have never been any great martial arts directors in America, until these new guys came over from China. Ang Lee, John Wu, those guys. And Yuen Wu Ping, with whom I worked on Kill Bill, has made all these directors look better than they are. He’s really responsible, almost single-handedly, for the current explosion.

Even so, old-style Western bare-knuckle fighting will always be with us. Take a look at the punch Sir Sean Connery throws in the trailer for his new movie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Mark Wahlberg decking Edward Norton in The Italian Job. But, in modern day street-fighting, the martial arts is here to stay, and a movie that skips over it is going to be irrelevant to what’s really going on out there.

I’ve been supporting and evangelizing the arts with books, instructional tapes, seminars and such for all these intervening years.

I have to love it.

This only happened once a week or so. There wasn’t actually a lot of fighting in the show. The FCC made it a rule that we could only have two minutes of kung fu fighting in each hour segment. They had a thing about violence. For example, an edict came down in the second year that I couldn’t kick people in the head anymore. So, after that, I kicked them in the shoulder or the chest, though later on, we discovered I could get away with kicking them in the neck. You got that? Kicking someone in the head was too violent, but kicking them in the throat was okay. And then, of course, I spent a lot of time kicking guns out of people’s hands. I broke a few toes doing that.

Once, when I was directing DEATH ON COLD MOUNTAIN, or CANNON AT THE GATES (I can’t remember which), I changed the process. I’d always thought there must be an easier way. I mean, why couldn’t we just throw a fight in whenever we felt like it. The reason, of course, was the company’s obsession for structure and proceeding in an orderly fashion.

This particular day, Barbara Hershey, as the student of a renegade kung fu master played by Victor Sen Young, was supposed to escape from capture. So I set five guards on her, all armed, one with a halberd, one with a spear, a couple of swordsmen, and I think, maybe, a guy with an axe. I shot the scene up to the point where they were surrounding her with their weapons raised and pointed at her, one sword at her neck, another poking her in the stomach, etc. Then I turned to Kam and said, “Get her out of it,” and went off to get a cup of coffee.

When I came back, Kam had solved it, like a puzzle. I learned a lot from watching how he’d done it. Parry the first, while slipping the second. Interpose the third to block the fourth, while you hurt him a little, and take out the fifth, while dodging the first, who is now coming back at you. Keep up the pattern, hurting one or two when you can, to slow them down, while you seriously take out one every once in awhile, gradually eliminating them until they’re all down. Just don’t let one of them stick you. A fighter once told me that an armed opponent is at a disadvantage in a way, because he’s fixated on his weapon. An interesting theory which I don’t really care to test.

We shot it all in one camera angle. The whole fight took about thirty seconds. And Barbara did it all herself. I hadn’t used up much of our shooting time, so we still got the day’s schedule, plus an extra fight. We even slipped it past the censors.

Much later, in KUNG FU, THE LEGEND CONTINUES, we had a lot more latitude. We would have as many as eight fights in one show. Of course, I knew more by then, much more. The way we’d customarily do it was Mike Vendrell, and later Al Leong, would show up with Rob Moses, Mike Dawson and a few fighters and we’d start shooting it. I’d pick up the moves as we went along, sometimes adding a few of my own, particularly my signature flying double-front kick.

One memorable night, I was slated to be attacked in a parking lot by four or five members of The Black Dragon Cult. The only thing was I had a date for dinner with my granddaughter, Mariah. By the time we were ready to shoot, I was already late. If we went through the whole process, it would take an extra two hours at least. I could see they had two cameras already set up. So I said, “Look, you guys know what you’re supposed to do, right?” They all nodded yes. “Okay. Why don’t you just come at me with whatever you’re supposed to do, and I’ll just do what comes naturally. We’ll be done in two minutes.” They all looked a little doubtful. So I added, “Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle. I really don’t want to disappoint my granddaughter, you know?”

So that’s what we did. They rolled the cameras, and the guys attacked me from all sides. I turned them all aside, pushing instead of punching, flipped one of them over a parked car, took out the last guy with my double-front kick (being careful to miss, of course), then gave the camera my obligatory signature shrug (which I had borrowed years ago for Caine from Toshiro Mifune) and we were done. I said goodnight and trotted off for my date with Mariah, leaving the guys to clean up the details without me. I hadn’t even worked up a sweat.

Let’s not skip over the big ‘Battle of The Titans’ with Chuck Norris in LONE WOLF McQUADE, which we rehearsed for three weeks and shot for three days. That was the greatest fun. Chuck wanted very much to beat the fight he’d had with Bruce in the Coliseum in RETURN of THE DRAGON. We came close.

Then there was CIRCLE OF IRON (THE SILENT FLUTE), my favorite I think of all my films, for which Kam Yuen and I worked on my six fights every morning for more than two months all over Israel. The night fight where I, as the blind master, take out eight attackers with just the flute is some of my best work. Then, after the picture was finished, Joe Lewis spent another couple of weeks with us in California, while we extemporaneously created little fun altercations with warriors on horseback to juice up the story. Watching Joe coming at me with a flying sidekick felt very much like being in the path of a runaway 18-wheeler.

On KILL BILL, I had the fight with Michael Jai White and his four henchmen down cold two months before we shot it. And then we performed it for five days in Beijing in ninety-degree weather. Several months later, back in Manhattan Beach, I learned the final swordfight to the death with Uma Thurman the morning we were scheduled to shoot it, in about twenty minutes. We shot that one for four days, or maybe more. It all runs together.

I’m not sure which method is more fun, but it doesn’t seem to matter how you do it, it always ends up in a good fight.