Biddu Appaiah, usually just known as Biddu, was an Indian-born record producer. Or that’s the impression that I get from “Kung Fu Fighting,” a huge hit that’s both a celebration and mockery of a whole global-cinema phenomenon.Ĭarl Douglas was a Jamaican-born session singer. But for the Western audiences who first saw this stuff, I can’t imagine how it would’ve felt.īut Western audiences liked these movies, anyway. By then point, I had at least some context for them, but they still seemed beguilingly strange - a whole world of action cinema with its own traditions and rhythms, its own sense of internal logic.

I used to inhale those movies when they aired on UHF stations when I was a kid in the ’80s and ’90s.

Someone at Variety coined the racist-ass term “chopsocky” to describe them, which at least indicates that they were a big enough deal for Variety to make up a genre name. Grindhouses and drive-in theaters needed content, and plenty of them bought up these kung-fu movies. (Kung-fu movies were an outgrowth of wuxia movies, and they were also a reaction against them.) Studios like Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest cranked these films out quickly and cheaply, and they arrived in English-language countries with hasty and ridiculous dubbing jobs. So did wuxia movies - mythic martial-arts period pieces that were part of an older Hong Kong cinematic tradition. Throughout the ’70s, Hong Kong kung-fu movies flooded theaters around the world. By the time Enter The Dragon hit, the gates were open. He only had time to make four movies before his sudden death in 1973 the last of them, Enter The Dragon, was his only English-language film. Lee very quickly became a global movie star. It went supernova a year later when The Big Boss became Bruce Lee’s first starring vehicle. The kung-fu movie tradition arguably started around 1970, with the release of the Shaw Brothers joint The Chinese Boxer. It’s hard to imagine what it must’ve been like to wander into a cheap second-run theater in the ’70s and to get a first glance of kung-fu cinema. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

Kung fu fighter #2