Memories of the '80s: Kung Fu Saturdays

One fond memory shared by many of the 1980s was watching old school Kung Fu movies on television. Every town had at least one station that aired these movies, usually on Saturday afternoons. The first to air was Bruce Lee: His Last Days, His Last Nights, a cheap exploitation movie starring Betty Ting Pei, the woman who's apartment ( and bed ) Bruce Lee had died in. Betty played herself while up and coming actor Danny Lee played Bruce in a story that claimed Bruce and Betty had a love affair prior to his death. It was also one of at least five movies shown on Saturday afternoons that depicted Bruce Lee dying at Betty's apartment.

Bruce Lee: His Last Days, His Last Nights was brought to American television thanks to a company called WWNorthal ( better known as World Northal ). WWNorthal was a distributor of foreign movies destine for art-house theaters before they got into distributing Kung Fu movies. In 1979 they decided to have some of their Kung Fu movies edited into broadcast friendly versions that were packaged together under the title Black Belt Theater. At the same time the Metro-Media network decided they wanted to program grind house movies on Saturday afternoons during what they called Drive-In Movie. A deal was quickly hammered out between WWNorthal and Metro-Media to air the Black Belt Theater movies during the Drive-In Movie. Ratings for the Kung Fu movies were so impressive that Metro-Media began airing them every week, and for a while even aired them as a double feature.

Prior to Black Belt Theater no other Kung Fu movies had aired on American television. It was believed that they were too violent, and aside from Bruce Lee did not have any stars that viewers would recognize. WWNorthal changed this perception by finding Asian Kung Fu movies with named stars such as Chuck Norris, Jim Kelly and former James Bond star George Lazenby, as well as notable Asian stars Jimmy Wang Yu, Angela Mao and Sonny Chiba. They also drew heavily from the Shaw Brothers Studios library. Shaw Brothers made big budgeted high quality Kung Fu movies.

Bruce Lee: His Last Days, His Last Nights was soon followed by The Three Avengers, a comedy starring Bruce Lee clone Bruce Li. WWNorthal distributed many Kung Fu comedies, the best which was a film called The Jade Claw, a Billy Chong movie with the late great Simon Yuen. Chong is a rambunctious student at a Kung Fu school who end up working in the kitchen where he meets the school's eccentric old cook played by Yuen. After playing pranks on each other for much of the movie Chong finds out that Yuen is really a Kung Fu master and convinces him to become his teacher. Of course this leads to Chong going around picking fights, inevitably drawing the attention of the evil Kung Fu master that Yuen was hiding from.

On a more serious note there was the Shaw Brothers movies. With the exception to a couple of comedies, including Return of the Master Killer, the Shaw Brothers movies were all strictly dramas. Some were fantastic fantasies, such as The Five Deadly Venoms and The Kid With The Golden Arm. The best of these fantasies was called Mortal Combat. A clan leader returns home to find his wife torn in half and his son's arms chopped off by a rival clan. After taking vengeance he then gives his son iron arms. But both he and his son become embittered and end up turning evil. The clan leader begins crippling anyone he thinks is staring at his son's iron arms. A group of men he crippled including one who had his feet chopped off, another who was blinded, another who was turned deaf and another who was turned into an idiot by having his skull crushed all go off to a Kung Fu master, learn from him, then return to the town to take out the clan leader and his son.

Less fanciful movies had great dramas behind the fighting. The Savage Five was the story of a town taken over by bandits who had just robbed a bank and wanted the safe they stole cracked by the local locksmith. After being abused by the bandits the town finally rises up against them, only for more bandits with guns to show up. Another of my favorite Shaw Brothers dramas was called Street Gangs of Hong Kong where a teenager is inducted into a gang not realizing they only want him because his father is a security guard at a warehouse they want to rob. The robbery goes off as planned and the father is killed, the angry son taking vengeance and wiping the entire gang out.

At one point a rival station got their own Kung Fu movies. They were nowhere as good as the ones that WWNorthal distributed but had some memorable movies, such as Kung Fu Commandos where a group of misfits are trained for a rescue mission to save a Kung Fu master from the bad guys holding him at a fortress. They also aired one of the all time worst Kung Fu movies called True Game of Death where Bruce Lee's wife attempts to poison him at the request of the mob, only to have Bruce come back from the dead and take vengeance. While many of the Kung Fu movies shown on television were cheap biographies of Bruce Lee, in 1983 the actual Bruce Lee movies actually aired. Golden Harvest briefly distributed many of their movies to television which included both Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan which aired on weeknights on Metro-Media. For those who had cable television there was the USA Network's weekly Kung Fu Theater which aired it's own collection of movies every Sunday before wrestling. Some lucky viewers lived in an area where they got both USA Network and Black Belt Theater on one of their local stations.

By the mid '80s every kid spent his Saturdays watching Kung Fu movies. They aired around 3:00 which meant that no one planned anything that would last longer than 2:30 in the afternoon. Gone were Saturday afternoons in the park, trips to the beach, and going to any movies at the theaters. Every now and then one of our parents would get upset that one of us was spending a beautiful Saturday afternoon indoors watching television and order us outside. About two minutes later we would be at our friends house watching the Kung Fu movie on his set. There were the occasional week when for some unexplained reason no Kung Fu movie was programmed. Maybe instead they would air a Hammer horror movie, a biker film, or some other B movie. One week they aired a Chinese version of King Kong called Goliathon. On regular intervals something called the SFN Holiday Network would preempt the regular Drive-In Movie for some G rated movie from the 1940s. There was nothing more depressing that turning the TV on at 2:59, getting all set for yet another Kung Fu flick, and then seeing the SFM Holiday Network opening and realizing there would be no movie that day. About five seconds later you would walk outside and see all your friends and other neighborhood kids just beginning to leave their houses. Everyone in a bad mood and with no plans whatsoever for the rest of the day. This inevitably lead to mischief and perhaps some mild vandalism of one of the cranky neighbors property by at least one of the kids.

In 1997 the Kung Fu movies were preempted for good. Metro-Media was bought by Rupert Murdoch and relaunched as the Fox network. The Kung FU movies were replaced with family friendly movies. Without Metro-Media to buy their movies WWNorthal went out of business. Over on the USA Network programmers got rid of their weekly Kung Fu Theater deciding instead to air the movies randomly during the week. When time came to renew their rights to air the movies USA decided to spend the money on more current box office hits. By 1989 the weekly Kung Fu movie was nothing more than a happy memory.