Fenrislord [2017-07-15 03:27:12 +0000 UTC]

Hahaha! Great.

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CoreyAMurray [2016-11-20 08:04:08 +0000 UTC]

I certainly do, and I love it! The history behind the film is a bit interesting, too, so I'm going to share it with you.

Now, what I'm going to say may be long and rambling a bit, so I'm going to put a TL;DR version at the end if you don't want to read it all.

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is cobbled together from footage of a 1976 Hong Kong martial arts film, originally in Mandarin Chinese under the title Hǔhè shuāngxíng (which translates to "Twin Styles of the Tiger and Crane"), and later dubbed in English under the titles Savage Killers and Tiger and Crane Fists. The original plot of the film (now, I haven't seen the original, so I'm going by what I've read on the Internet, and even then my memory might be a bit shaky here, so please correct me if I'm wrong), which takes place in the early 1930's, concerns a young man, played by Jimmy Wang Yu of The One-Armed Swordsman fame, facing off against an evil Manchu (Manchukuo had been formed by the Japanese as a puppet state by the time in which the film takes place) whose mission is to test the skills of Chinese martial artists prior to the planned Japanese invasion of the rest of China. Our hero must learn the Tiger and Snake styles (thus explaining the "Tiger and Crane" part of the Chinese and English titles) to defeat the stalwart foe.

Painting the Japanese as villains was common in Hong Kong cinema during this period, as films like Fist of Fury (1972, starring Bruce Lee as a young martial arts student who seeks revenge for the murder of his teacher at the hands of the Japanese; it was later remade in 1994 as Fist of Legend starring Jet Li) and Beach of the War Gods (1973, starring Jimmy Wang Yu), a film set in the Ming Dynasty about Chinese soldiers fighting off an attack by Japanese pirates, will attest. This is, of course, understandable, considering that the Japanese occupied parts of China before and during World War II, and Hong Kong from 1941 to 1945, and even committed horrible atrocities (of which the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 is the most notorious). It wasn't until the 1978 film Heroes of the East (starring Gordon Liu as a Chinese martial artist who marries a Japanese woman who's a martial artist herself) that the Japanese were shown in a more positive light.

Now, to go back to Kung Pow: Enter the Fist: 

What Steve Oedekirk did here was have new scenes be filmed, with poorly-dubbed dialogue of course, and have himself digitally superimposed over Jimmy Wang Yu in the scenes where Wang appeared in the 1976 original (you can tell which scenes are new and which scenes were in the original by the way they look). Oedekirk also did most of the voices himself, an exception being Jennifer Tung as the three-breasted Whoa.

What resulted from this was a mixing of old and new, a tongue-in-cheek send-up of old kung-fu films.

TL;DR: Anti-Japanese kung-fu movie got turned into a cult-classic comedy.

PS: I've you've ever wondered why Master Pain Betty has that wacky hairstyle, it's based on the traditional Manchu men's hairstyle, called the queue, in which the front of the head was shaved, and the rest was grown long and styled into a braid. The hairstyle was imposed on the Han Chinese when the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty came to power in 1644, and abolished in 1912 with the rise of the Republic.

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