Kung Fu 1970's TV series with David Carradine

bababardwan
December 13, 2008, 06:35 AM posted in General Discussion

Here's a clip from that great 1970's TV series:

Unfortunately I couldn't find a clip from an earlier episode where young Caine was instructed that when he could snatch the stone from Master Kan's hand then he would be ready to leave the temple.I have read that when they filmed that scene ,they had to keep reshooting it as the young boy actor kept successfully grabbing the stone from the hand.

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bababardwan
December 13, 2008, 06:39 AM

Another classic scene;grasshopper:

Young man.How is it that you do not ? hehe.

I love the wise dialogues in this series.

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RJ
December 13, 2008, 10:57 AM

bababardwan,

I too loved these clips. I had a little trouble with the fact that David does not look Chinese, but the show was great at the time. How is it that I do not hear tones, let alone grasshoppers. Perhaps I should study Chinese with eyes closed.

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bababardwan
December 13, 2008, 07:25 PM

RJ,

"How is it that I do not hear tones, let alone grasshoppers."

....too funny.呵呵

Yeah,I know what you mean by not looking Chinese.I loved watching this series as a kid.It was a whole other world,and I probably didn't question too much at the time about not being Chinese,but did wonder about it later.A few years ago I got the whole collection on DVD as well as a book about the making.This explained how young Caine was the orphaned son of an American man and a Chinese woman.I agree that he doesn't look even half Chinese,but for the purposes of the show,this at least made it somewhat more plausable.I'd be very surprised of course if in reality there was ever a half Chinese person who got admitted to train at the Shaolin temple in the late 19th century [or for that matter ever],but this is a work of fiction,so I still enjoy it for what it is.Glad to see you do too.Cheers.

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excuter
December 14, 2008, 04:30 PM

A classic ^_^

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travesty
January 28, 2009, 09:39 PM

I actually wrote up a long paper on the Shaolin temple for a class I took on warfare in China. Some people claim that it was not that difficult to be allowed to stay at the Shaolin temple to study. Around the late Ming and early Qing it had the reputation of welcoming all forms of travellers, which is why it got a bit of a reputation for harboring bandits. They simply wanted to propagate the dharma to all that would listen, though they protected the juicier secrets of martial practice and buddhist scriptures for those that were accepted as full disciples, which was difficult to accomplish.

Some good books to read on the temple is Meir Shahar's work on the Shaolin Monastery, and Terence Duke's book The Bodhisattva warriors

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excuter
February 01, 2009, 06:10 PM

That´s why those who wanted to become a fighting shaolin right from the start had such a hard time...and most of them didn´t make it...