I’m thinking chiefly of the neck snap in making this thread. As far as I know this is physically impossible. Due to a high coolness factor it has made is way into many movies and is easily a cliche nowadays, appearing in almost every movie or video game that has ninjas and/or spies.
And then there’s the little brother: the judo chop to the shoulder or head that sends an adult man to the ground – out cold. This is laughable but it serves the purpose of making sure the good guy doesn’t kill anyone, so it stays around.
Since we’re in CS, I’ll say they probably came about because american servicemen in Asian in the 40’s and 50’s encountered martial arts, brought back what they saw and put it in movies without necessarily knowing anything about it.
Also bear in mind that in the vast majority of cases, the fight scenes you see on screen were shot the way they were because they look good that way, not because it’s good fighting technique.
For the breaking somebody’s neck by twisting it deal, I’ve never done it myself, but the ex-ranger sergeant I used to train with seemed pretty convinced that it worked…
I’m pretty sure it is possible to break a human neck with arm strength alone. As for the chop to the neck, I have been hit with a ‘gentle’ practice blow similar to that and been left rubber kneed for a few seconds by its effect.
The way both are shown in movies is different though to anything I have been taught as an effective attack.
For neck braking you can get an idea how it works, bend your head forward until your chin touches your chest, next tilt your head to the side until your ear touches your shoulder. At this point your neck bones will be locked up. With your ear still on your shoulder gently try raising your chin off your chest, you will feel your neck very tight on the side opposite the ear touching your shoulder. This I am informed is one of the directions in which damage can be easily caused to someones neck if pressure is applied to force the chin away from the chest whilst the neck bones and muscles are locked in that position.
Neck breaking by hand is indeed possible, but you’d have to be the Incredible freaking Hulk to do it as casually as some of the action heroes in the movies do…the little twist they give looks more like a damned chiropractic adjustment. I half expect their victim to pop up smiling and say “Thanks a lot, my neck feels much better now.”
As for the karate chop, it’s all in the placement. If you nail the carotid artery, you can definitely put someone out.
Yeah, it is possible to knock someone out with one blow. But it isn’t possible to knock someone out safely…a blow to the head or neck could have no effect, just make the guy woozy for a minute, knock him out, give him a concussion, fracture his skull, crush his trachea, leave him with permanent brain damage, or kill him. It all depends on exactly where you hit the guy, exactly how hard you hit the guy, and his exactly anatomy.
So you can knock someone out, but it isn’t an “off” switch. Hit someone hard enough to knock them out and you’re risking doing someone permanent damage or death.
If the OP was asking where they first showed up in film…IIRC the neck-twist was in Bruce Lee movies, although I remember it first from the end of Above The Law, the first Steven Seagal movie.
Emphasis mine. I just tried that. I wasn’t gentle enough. Ow.
Most of the time, when I’ve seen the neck breaking thing in movies, it was by someone supernaturally strong. Having just tried that, though, I’d think that even my dad could do it.
Did I mention, ow? ::childlike curiosity > common sense::
As for the neck-chop thing, I’m pretty sure I recall it from the Roger Moore “Saint” tv series, so look there or the early Bond movies it was imitating.
I think I remember reading that Gene Rodenberry originally wanted Spock to knock people out with a karate-chop style blow, but decided it looked too agressive. He also may have been concerned that it was already sort of a cliché. I don’t remember the title, but James Cagney was in a WWII movie that had the first use of martial arts in American Cinema, AFAIK. He was in hand-to-hand combat with a Japanes soldier and was getting his ass kicked, but then applied Good Old American Gumption[sup]®[/sup] and the old Hell’s Kitchen Boxing Technique , and beat him.
Blood on the Sun, maybe? Supposedly Bruce Lee had a high regard for that film. Although I’ve heard that Cagney was actually a black belt in Judo. Sadly there’s no belt system for Gumption. Jesus, make me James Cagney.
That’s the one, all right. It is a cool fight scene, and it goes on longer than most of fight scenes did back then. I always loved Cagney fighting in movies because his scenes always looked like real fights. Three or four punches and then a lot of grappling. It doesn’t look “cool,” like a Bogart fight or a western.
One guy, who is also our trainer and choreographer, is very serious about his technique. (Or ‘non-technique’, as he says.) We tried to make the fight as realistic as possible. The characters have different backgrounds, and different fighting styles. That alone will make it more realistic than, say, a martial arts scene where the combatants are using the same style. It’s a dirty fight, and goes on longer than most fight scenes to. I saw a (very) rough cut of it yesterday, and it looks good. That the trainer was mostly satisfied indicates that the fight should be fairly true-to-life. (I say ‘mostly satisfied’. There’s room for improvement, but we have lots of footage to make it better.)