Sunday, August 20, 2023

The start of American interest in martial movies and TV shows

  



Note all real martial arts publications have Bruce Lee photos sooner or later.

Bruce died before I began Isshinryu,

but I took Maureen on our 2nd date to a Bruce Lee movie.


 

An interesting story is how I found about the martial arts.  When I was young I saw a fewTV shows that featured karate, but that was all. Just prior to going to college my father bought me a Brice Tegner book about katate, and while I attended college I began buying Black Belt magazine , as I  found it interesting.

 

Then in College I joined the dorm memhers watching th in the dorm basement and remember us watching the Green Hornet with Bruce Lee as Kato,   Several years late I recall meeting a graduate student. in the Speech Department. who had trained with Bruce Lee as an undergraduate at the University of Seattle. He demonstrated some of his kung fu training to us. However Iadmidt not knowing what he was doing.

 

I lived out in the Pacific Northwest for a few years and when I returned to Pa. I began to work for my previous employer in NE Phila,  managing a bargain store.  


One night in 1972 I went down to central city Philadelphia to see the midnight show of a new movie, The Five Fingers of Death. The old center city movie theaters were huge. The huge theater was packed, many thousands of viewers. Simply the movie blew all of us away.

 

After that kung fu movie followed kung fu movie. There were oodles of them, many were quite bad, but some were good. On the tv the show Kung Fu was showing. The martial arts were here to stay.

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