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![]() 'Enter The Dragon' Was Bruce Lee's Last And Biggest Movie In 1972, the television series Kung Fu launched about a monk traveling through the wild west with only his karate skills to protect himself. The first of those starred Lee, as did The Way of the Dragon (1972), and Enter the Dragon (1973), and all were among the favorites of Americans and inspired a worldwide interest in martial arts. In May 1973, the top three box office spots were also held by the kung-fu movies Fist of Fury (1972), Deep Thrust (1972), and Five Fingers of Death (1972). Beloved martial arts master and actor Bruce Lee can be credited for bringing Hong Kong action to the west with his entertainingly impressive karate skills he demonstrated on screen. ![]() The movies were cheap and easy to make, by Hollywood standards, and many were released quickly over a short period of time. The term “chopsocky” was coined to describe these films that often included exaggerated special effects, violence, and hilariously inaccurate dubbing. Bruce Lee Ignited The Kung Fu Crazeīetween the late ‘60s and early ‘80s, Hong Kong and Hollywood blended together as karate-themed films flooded American movie theaters. Instead it topped UK and US charts amplifying kung fu’s popularity into an even greater level. But "Kung Fu Fighting" was expected to be a forgotten dud by both Douglas and his producer Biddu. Today, it's a strand of the fabric of '70s culture, and it just might be impossible for listeners to resist the urge to break out their finest karate punches and grunts when they hear it. The song has sold an estimated 11 million copies to date. Disco would go on to saturate the American radio airwaves (eventually prompting fierce backlash) but in late 1974, it was a hot new trend. There's also the disco factor - in summer 1974, disco had broken through to the pop charts when The Hues Corporation's "Rock The Boat" and George McRae's "Rock Me Gently" topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in consecutive weeks. It was a novelty song that caught a wave of enthusiasm for martial arts films, including Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon, which had shown in theaters the previous year. So playwrights and writers had to come up with a shorthand way of saying, "This is Chinese this is Asian.Carl Douglas' 1974 #1 hit "Kung Fu Fighting" is one of the biggest-selling singles of all time, for a few reasons. Think about it: Most people back then had limited interactions with people from China and other Asian countries. It took until 1968 for such restrictions to be lifted. banned Chinese immigration with the Chinese Exclusion Act. By 1880, there were 300,000 Chinese in the States - and there was a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment. In the 1800s, men from China were coming to the U.S. One of the first instances of the cliche Nilsson found was in a show in 1847 called The Grand Chinese Spectacle of Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp.Īnd to understand the evolution of this riff, we need to look at the backdrop against which this tune emerged. The latter inspired composers like Claude Debussy, whose work often used the pentatonic scale.īut the "Far East Proto Cliche," Nilsson found, went back even further than that World's Fair. It was home to a range of exhibits, like the human zoo (also known as the Negro Village) and a Javanese gamelan showcase. The French exhibition - along with other world exhibitions that were popular in that time - was where folks exchanged ideas and learned about other cultures. ![]() The pentatonic scale gained global popularity in 1889, during the Paris World's Fair. "It's worth thinking about the fact that the scale isn't necessarily something we would've been listening to in the United States in a significant way before the end of the 19th century, early 20th." "We get the sense of another culture when we hear the scale," says Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, an ethnomusicologist at Arizona State University. ![]() This nine-note tune and its cousins rely heavily on the pentatonic scale, which music from many East Asian and West African countries used. (Some melodies that fit this pattern make no reference to Asia whatsoever - you might recognize it in Peter, Bjorn and John's song " Young Folks.") The definition: "Any melody with this particular rhythmical pattern and whose first four tones are identical" that usually uses a pentatonic scale, Nilsson wrote on his website. So he dubbed the similar riffs the "Far East Proto Cliche," based on specific musical characteristics. While digging through American sheet music archives, Nilsson reached a point where the line between references to the riff and very similar ones got blurry. This is how Martin Nilsson defines his "Far East Proto Cliche" - the earlier form of the nine-note riff. |
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