Kung Fu Cinema: Good round up of Season One
From the launch of this blog, I noted in my blogroll that Kung Fu Cinema as a great online resource for all things related to kung fu movies. Recently, I came across the site's review of "Kung Fu" Season One. An excellent round-up of the first season. Kung Fu Cinema's Mark Pollard writes:
In 1972, the word “kung fu” didn’t mean anything to most Americans. Bruce Lee had caught on in Asia, but was only beginning to be noticed in the States despite his previous appearance on the GREEN HORNET television series. Apart from a handful of Hong Kong kung fu movies like KING BOXER, released in grindhouse theaters, there wasn’t much to see regarding kung fu action. So for creator Ed Spielman and developer Herman Miller to pitch a network action series for American audiences based on Shaolin kung fu with an emphasis on Buddhist philosophy was quite remarkable.
Labels: carradine, kung fu, season one, tv
posted by Charlie Kondek at 2:09 PM
1 Comments:
Agreed, what Spielman and Miller did with the Kung Fu show is remarkable. As I've mentioned in other comments here, I've always wondered where the Buddhist philosophy in the show came from, considering how ahead of its time the show was. If no-one in the West had heard of kung fu, they sure didn't know much about Buddhism.
Having read this post and watched the interview with David Caradine on the John Kerwin show, my current theory is it came from Ed Spielman.
David reveals Ed was learning kung fu, so I wonder if Ed was picking up Buddhist ideas from his teacher. Now the question is, who was that?
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