IMHO I disagree with the ‘utterly wasted’ premise of the OP. While the movies taken as a whole are generally cheap and poorly produced with respect to editing, sets, directing, etc, Bruce Lee himself in those movies and his influence on the fight choreography and fight editing was revolutionary and the rest of HK cinema and mainstream Hollywood didn’t start catching up until the 80s when we started seeing Yuen Woo Ping rewrite the rules tropes of fight choreography.
Bruce was the major reason why the established Shaw-style staccato “punch-pause-kick-pause-scowl-pause-punch-pause” looks so fake and silly in retrospect, and he revolutionized how a fight on film could approach “realism” more accurately and increase audience immersion and tension.
So, yeah, the whole movies are corny, but Bruce changed the cinematic world with those movies and his destruction of the established cinema tropes of the time.
–I was also inspired by Bruce to take up martial arts studies and it has been a wonderful journey. I was a student under one of Bruce’s students for a couple of years as well, huge fun learning experience and got to listen to many Bruce stories passed down to us.
Sorry. Not being discussed in this thread.
I vaguely recall such a scene and suspect it may be one of Jackie Chan’s Condor pieces – and I think he’s really doing that and in the bloopers at the end of the movie there is probably footage of him trying several times and failing. FWIW Chan was an extra in one of the underground fight scenes in EtD but that’s as close as he gets to being part of this thread.
Bumping to say I watched ESPNs 30 for 30 “Be Water”. It really humanized Lee for me and made him real, not some mythical figure. He seemed like someone you could easily be friends with. Whjat a shame he died so young.
Funny factoid that he got the part on GH due to Jay Sebring, the “hairdresser to the stars”, who saw him and recommended him to the producers. They had Lee’s screen test. Man he was fast!
And in case the name isn’t well known, Sebring was one of the victims of the Charles Manson murders, as he was a friend of Sharon Tate who was speaking with her when the killers arrived.
In fact, when the killers ordered Tate to lay down on her stomach, Sebring tried to protect her since she was quite pregnant. This led to to Tex Watson shooting Sebring dead with a handgun.
At the scene, cops would later find a pair of glasses. Bruce Lee mentioned to Roman Polanski (Tate’s widower) a short time later that he had lost his glasses. This led Polanski to initially suspect that Lee was involved with the murder.
Supposedly, Bruce Lee was so fast that film directors actually encouraged him to slow down his punches and kicks because the low frame rate of filming caused too much blurring. Movie viewers, they surmised, wanted to actually see him connect with a villain.
It’s been decades since I saw these movies. I will accept your view that the movies do not optimally portray Lee’s acumen. And that there is some validity to comparing Bruce and Arnold. There are too many variables to say their careers could have been similar.
But maybe one could say what Lee’s movies, though imperfect, did do. They popularized martial arts, made Lee famous outside of the circles where he was already well known, popularized his philosophy, presumably still made money and still made Lee a perpetually cool dude and household name. Not too shabby for “schlock”. How many films from that era featuring Asian actors could the average person name? And how many old films might benefit from modern techniques and technology?
Laughlin was reputed (at least amongst the members and teachers at the first karate’ school I attended) to have studied Tae Kwon Do while stationed in Korea. His problem wasn’t the first Billy Jack; it had an important message that was carried to the audience on the back of the popularity of the 1970’s martial arts movies. Laughlin’s problem was that the important message+ was buried too deep under the ass-kicking and that he tried to ride that overlooked message all the way to Washington to get some changes made. He failed at promoting his cause because his movies buried the cause too deeply behind the ass-kicking, so he really couldn’t win for losing.
Similarly, Chuck Norris claims to have studied Tang Soo Do (a Korean art with the same roots at Tae Kwon Do) directly from Koreans while stationed there. However, the students of my second karate school said he studied alongside them in San Diego, under Jong H. Lee (who helped bring Tang Soo to the USA) – and then Norris stopped coming to class for a few months and was suddenly showing up in the movies.$
But celebrities have the priviledge of cobbling together their own biographies…
–G!
^This is why Saxon was put in the supporting actor role, and Kelly (and that New Zealand guy) were cast. The point was to make it an international cast so it would be less objectionable to have one of them – the Asian guy – happen to be the main protagonist. And, therefore, it had to be another Asian as the antagonist because Hollywood wasn’t about to sell the idea of an Asian emerging victorious over a caucasian (or even an Afro-American).
+The point of the Billy Jack movies was that caucasians in the USA were abusive of Native Americans as well as Afro-Americans. He was trying to champion the Native American rights and sympathies, but most people just missed that because they were only buying tickets to see the ass-kicking part.
$Norris was smart enough to skip championing a cause. He just did his ass-kicking for Canon/Golan-Globus, which was happy to churn out films that were light on plot-and-story but featured whatever was popular at the time – karate, American Nationalism, whatever. And when the fad turned from karate and ninjutsu films to American Pride themes, he was happy to pivot from Good Guys Wear Black, to Delta Force 1 through 6 and keep on cashing checks. Smart actor!
Actor are actors. Being actors means, by definition, that they lie for a living. I don’t care what their beliefs are or what training they’ve received, so long as they look good when the cameras are rolling.
I know it’s late in the day for this thread, but the definitive plot twist for Enter the Dragon would have had Bolo and Bob Wall switch allegiances late in the movie and fight with Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and Ed Parker against hundreds of Han’s fighters. My cameo role would be to sneak off with Ahna Capri for some much-needed R&R.