TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache
This nOde
last updated March 22nd, 2005 and is permanently morphing...
(7 Muluk (Water) /
12 Kumk'u - 189/260 - 12.19.12.2.9)
kung fu
kung fu (kùng´
f¡´, k¢ng´, g¢ng´) Sports. noun
The Chinese martial
arts, especially those forms that are similar to karate.
noun, attributive
Often used to modify another
noun: kung fu movies; kung fu exercises.
[Chinese (Cantonese) kung fu.]
kung fu (noun)
wrestling: wrestling, jujitsu, judo, aikido, karate, kyokushinkai, tae-kwan-do, kung fu, ninjutsu
Kung Fu - TV series in the mid seventies combining the "fugitive-chase", "western" and martial arts scenarios. set in during the American wild west expansion with immigrant Chinese population helping to build the railroads. most notable for its jump cut editing and quiet fight scenes.
track _The Dusty Pouch_ MP3 by Ozric Tentacles off of _Afterwish_ CDx2 (1991) |
Caine: "may I have some water?"
bartender: "is that all
you want? water?"
bartender: "where did
you come from?"
Caine: "the desert"
bartender: "the desert?
how the hell did you get across?"
Caine: "i walked"
Episode #23
(Prod #166208) "THE TONG"
Teleplay
By:: Robert Schlitt (also #33)
Directed
By:: Robert Totten (also #25)
First Broadcast:
ABC, Nov. 29 or Nov. 15 (Kung Fu Book & Epi-log) 1973
Guest Stars:
Diana Douglas, Richard Loo (also pilot & #3, 35, 48, 50&51)
Caine helps
a missionary woman rescue a Chinese boy from slavery to a member of the Dragon
of Retribution Tong.
Lines:
Information:
This may be the only episode where Caine [Carradine] actually speaks Chinese.
From the script comes the following and it is unknown how much of this was in the broadcast: "There is much evil in the world, Grasshopper. It has always been thus. And so our ancestors built this monastery and developed the art of Kung Fu so they might cultivate virtue and protect themselves from harm. But whatever one man possesses another will covet. The Manchu Emperor heard of our prowess. So he sent an army of soldiers to burn the monastery to the ground. Only five escaped. They made their way to Fukien and founded the Tong to overthrow the Manchus and restore the Ming Emperors to the throne. Violence became their tool and combating violence. Thus the Sage Chuang Tzu has said, 'By ethical argument and moral principle, the greatest crimes are shown to have been necessary and in fact a great benefit for mankind.' Two hundred years have passed. The Manchus still sit upon the throne. The Tongs still kill, no longer for noble cause. Yet they are the children of the five Shaolin priests who went to Fukien long ago.'" - Master Po
Also: "Do rich men hoard their goods? Do great men dispute over small matters?" - Caine
Episode #60 (Prod #166270) "FLIGHT
TO ORION"
Teleplay
By:: Stephen & Elinor Karpf (#59-62)
Directed
By:: Marc Daniels (also #49, 53, 59 & 62)
First Broadcast:
ABC, FEBRUARY 22, 1975 (SATURDAY)
Guest Stars:
Lois Nettleton, John Blyth Barrymore (#59-62 as Zeke Caine) Special Guest Star:
Leslie Nielsen (#59-62)
Caine, Zeke
and Zeke's mother try to find Danny before the search party which plans to find/kill
him for a $10,000 reward
(strange how both
brothers turn out to have the same price on their heads).
Lines:
Information:
Herein Caine gives away the flute he received as a gift in #55 "Battle Hymn"
"when you can snatch the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave."
"time for you to leave."
Forget about the _Mod Squad_—the only field-day the hippies got on TV was _Kung Fu_. Not only was Kwai Chang Caine a dangerous Shaolin freak with bare feet, mystical powers, and a Billy Jack hat, but he was played by David Carradine, a dangerous Hollywood freak with Aquarian babes, prodigious appetites, and a hut in the Hollywood hills. Kung Fu's vibe was scruffy and occult, and its formal effects memorable—all those flashbacks, slo-mo kicks, and overexposed shots of sunlight demonstrated that longhairs saw things differently because they saw things differently. As much a part of early '70s culture as blaxploitation films or really, really wide bell-bottoms, Kung Fu was as simultaneously silly and noble as the counterculture itself.
More importantly, Kung Fu interjected its transmuted hippie code into TV's most sacred and conservative space: the western. While it essentially capped the western's domination of TV dramas (Gunsmoke and Kung Fu were both canceled in '75) and portrayed many stock western characters as racist and arrogant thugs, the show praised the genre as much as burying it. Caine refigured the cowboy's solitude, reticence, and spiritual homelessness into a nomadic wisdom, while his special-effects feet punctuated the fact that the violence of the western approaches, at its allegorical extreme, total hallucination.
After years of I Ching addiction and T'ai Chi dabbling, I can still trace everything I love about the Taoto the pearls blind Master Po dropped on the puzzled Grasshopper in those priceless flashbacks to Caine's Shaolin temple. But the Tao that Kung Fu emulated was not Lao Tzu's Way but the American Way, a flux of hobos and beatniks, of Captain Ahab and Clint Eastwood and Kesey's merry pranksters. What unites all these wandering figures is violence: violence against the self, against convention, against other bodies. Caine's reason for fleeing China for America—his impulsive murder of a member of royalty—made him American. And in the early '70s, he briefly unified the counterculture's split desires, both their cultic quest for inner peace and their lingering urge to put a foot up the Man's ass.
Kung Fu's "contradiction" between meditation and bone-crunching melees—besides already existing to some degree in the martial arts themselves—served up a freak form of an old American dream: violence at once spiritual and righteous. Caine fights without rancor or sweat, not producing violence as much as reflecting it back to its source. And since he's in America, the flow is endless.
- Erik Davis - _Now And Zen Kung Fu: The Legend Continues_
Caine: "I've come to celebrate your life ambition... the full moon of May, 13th day, of the 5th month, of the year of the dog"
JULES - "That's what I've been sitting here contemplating. First, I'm gonna deliver this case to Marsellus. Then, basically, I'm gonna walk the earth."
VINCENT - "What do you mean, walk the earth?"
JULES - "You know,
like Caine in _KUNG FU_. Just walk from town to town, meet people,
get in adventures."
dub release _Kung Fu Meets The Dragon_ by Lee Scratch Perry
Chinese and Japanese martial arts hav appealed particularly to the young and/or dispossessed of Western countries since the 1960s, when judo and, to a lesser extent, karate were popular youth-club hobbies (karate also enjoyed a brief vogue around 1970 among both skinheads and members of the counterculture). In the early 1970s, however, attention shifted to kung fu. The name is from the Mandarin Chinese and denotes a balletic and acrobatic form of unarmed combat said to have been developed in the 6th century at Shaolin Temple in the Hunan Province of southern China. Kung Fu movies exported from Hong Kong created a worlwide craze for the activity, particularly among ethnic minority communities, and made an international superstar of the act and instructure Bruce Lee. From about 1972 there was a crossover: the Hong Kong films used black American soul and funk music in their soundtracks, while American film-makers created a new genre, the so-called 'blaxploitation' movies, which featured black heroes punishing enemies using martial-arts techniques as well as weapons. Both types of film were regularly shown on double bills to young audiences, and martial arts continued to form aprt of ghetto subculture until the 1990s, by which time the musical accompaniment was rap and hip hop. A passing interest in kung fu among middle-class hippies and self-improvers led to other disciplines such as Kendo, Tai Chi and Thai boxing being tkane up.
first mention of Kung Fu in Usenet:
From: G:cnrdean (G:cnrdean)
Subject: Keye Luke Answers
Newsgroups: net.trivia
Date: 1982-11-02 00:08:26
PST
Keye Luke (you had the name spelled wrong. (excuse me for being TRIVIAL))
1. Master Po in 'Kung
Fu'
2. Charlie Chan's
#1 son