How the Shaw Brothers Movies Became Popular in the '80s

Shaw Brothers was, for the longest time, the premiere movie studio of Hong Kong. This the Shaws had achieved through gradual monopolization of movie theaters in Hong Kong. Because they owned most of the movie theaters and made sure those theaters only screened Shaw Brothers Studio productions it was their studio that made the most money. Enough money that eventually they were producing movies of the same quality of the best Hollywood studios. Shaw Brothers had the best sound stage and standing sets in Hong Kong which they frequently leased to other smaller production companies. They had the best writers, the best directors, and the best actors. Even the film stock and cameras were of Hollywood quality. While most of their output was musicals and dramas they had an active unit that specialized in action and martial arts movies. They even had their own school that taught actors how to fight on screen convincingly enough that it looked as if they were expert martial artists, which was not always the case. Because of this Shaw Brothers Studios produced the highest quality martial arts movies of the '60s, '70s and '80s, most which have since been recognized as classics. And yet during the '70s movie distributors on the United States ignored movies from the Shaw Brothers studios and instead released cheap productions from smaller studios, many of them fly by night companies that mass produced several movies of low quality in a few years period before shutting down.

Shaw Brothers only decent rival was Golden Harvest, a studio founded by former Shaw Brothers executives Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho in 1970. It was Golden Harvest who stole the Shaws biggest star Jimmy Wang Yu and later signed Bruce Lee who had been thinking of signing with the Shaw Brothers studio before Raymond Chow offered him way more money. It was with Bruce Lee that Golden Harvest became well known in the United States. Shaw Brothers was not as fortunate. Although it was a Shaw Brothers movie called Five Fingers of Death that was the first hit of the 70's Kung Fu craze in America, other Shaw Brothers movies got little distribution. Only their former star Jimmy Wang Yu was a known name in the United States. The rest of the Shaw Brothers stars remained relatively unknown, so much so that when David Chiang finally left Shaw Brothers studios he had no problem changing his screen name to Garth Lo for his American films.

Shaw Brothers fortune changed in the 1980's. B Movie distributors World Northal realized the superior quality of the Shaw Brothers movies and became their exclusive distributors in North America. They also decided to branch out into television syndication with Black Belt Theater which was the first weekly martial arts movie program.The majority of Black Belt Theater's movies were from Shaw Brothers Studios, at least two out of every three films. Since the same actors were under contract at Shaw Brothers they in turn were featured on a nearly weekly basis. Actors like Ti Lung, David Chiang and Fu Sheng showed up on Black Belt Theater so many times that they finally picked up a following in North America nearly ten years after the movies were originally released. For the first time most of the movies released by a group of martial artists called The Venom Mob got exposure in America. In fact their first movie Five Deadly Venoms was relatively unknown in the States prior to it appearing on Black Belt Theater.

By the end of the 80's the consensus among martial arts fans was that the only good movie came from Shaw Brothers, the rest were most likely crap.Because of the high quality production of the Shaws movies this usually turned out to be the case. World Northal's association with Shaw Brothers Studios came to an end by 1989 as the distributor went into bankruptcy. The North American rights went into limbo as bootleg edited for television copies of the Shaw Brothers movies became popular in stores. Although the Shaws had no big named stars such as Bruce Lee or Angela Mao, bootlegs of their movies became highly sought after, all thanks to Black Belt Theater.